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Nothing more old hat than the old know-it-all shrug. What new insight every came from that attitude, eh Wystan? Gabriel, you think I'm being naive, reiterating very simple ideas about individual literary reception. But I think it worthwhile to take those positions further. It IS something of a distortion to picture reading & judgement as a completely isolated, a-social phenomenon. But rather than assume "the community" is an existing network of writers, as you seem to do, I would argue that the community, the matrix of literature, is the world of readers at large, fostered by good schooling, which encourages generous, sustained, individual and communal encounters with classic and current works. It is that active reading culture which should be the productive background of new work, its context and measure. Writing which emerges from a heightened awareness of that context will be less subject to the mechanical workings of CW careerism, or the cliches & manufactured melodrama of "rebel to classic" scenarios, etc. It will be evaluated within a broader social context, both for how i! t reflects on past efforts, and for how it responds to current universal & immediate social realities, demands. It's interesting to hear so many people scoff at the most basic notions of creative or critical reading/response. It's as if the individual reader automatically surrenders authority to the mechanisms of literary "professionalism". It's a surrender of the whole joy and purpose of responding to poetry - the surrender of individual judgement and encounter. Henry > > From: "Wystan Curnow (FOA ENG)" <[log in to unmask]> > Date: 2002/09/06 Fri AM 10:52:10 EDT > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: academic poetry (& thanks to Mairead Byrne) > > Welcome to the living archive! The Kent/Henry/Gabe twitch action. > Trigger words include 'Silliman', which instantly change the subject > that old archive-chesnut-thread :ACADEMIC POETRY. What I don't know > are the trigger words to shut it off. > Wystan (PhD)