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Doug Barbour said, >Kent... >Hank, you, I, and many others, even Bernstein, ARE academics, >(as well)... Weell, Doug, I don't know. I teach at a decidedly rural community college. I am an "Instructor" of remedial composition and Beginning Spanish. That is what I teach. Research and publication is not only not a priority, it is frowned upon. Frankly, I think one could say that I am an Academic in the sense that a bricklayer is an Architect. I don't dislike academics. Some of my best friends are academics... And OK, OK, so I am, *in part* an academic, even if I am of lower race. The point I was pointing to in that epigram (and I've made this point more conventionally and expansively elsewhere) is that it is foolish --as well as disingenuous-- to continue to frame Language poetry as non or anti-academic. Language poetry is academic poetry through and through and has been becoming such with increasing insistence (that word is on purpose) for the past number of years. Many of its old leading figures have been building careers in academia; literary theorists and journals are widely ga-ga over Language poetry; and creative writing programs are increasingly staffed and studented by writers whose poetics orbit the original = = = center. This last is a complex phenomenon, of course, but undeniable-- the MacPoem or I-centered poem is still rampant, obviously, and always will be, but the "cool" creative writing students, of which there are legions, now write "Language-like" poems. Again, this is not a bad thing. But the poetry Silliman advocates is no longer outside the academy, nor is its "poetics" marginalized, in any fair sense of the word, inside the academy. This fact, as I said, is not ipso facto bad. But it has certain implications, some of which may not be good for the fullest possible health of poetic experiment. Kent