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a minor adjustment... Olson did some of the most serious scholarly literary work ever done on Melville, and although his book on Melville, Call Me Ishmael, is written in a mode that isn't expressed conventionally, he had done lots of academic research. I think of Olson as a poet who understood a good deal more about scholarship and academic literary criticism than his later work suggests.... Even if aspects of Olson's work were knowingly anti-academic, or at least opposed to some of the conformities and ideology he perceived, he was nevertheless a scholar who had real academic skills. All of which means that Olson's work doesn't so much sit or stand in relation to academia, but rather dances the dance of the intellect... Drew On 31/12/2017 14:47, Jamie McKendrick wrote: > Increasingly, even for part time teachers, working for universities means being bogged down in long hours of administrative work, so research is only likely to be possible with grants that ensure time off...but there’ll be people here who know far more about that than I do. > Jamie > > Sent from my iPad > >> On 31 Dec 2017, at 14:39, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> >> Apologies to the list for labouring this point. I now see why David construed my two posts as he did. I don’t think it was worth pursuing so relentlessly, but there is a logical deduction he was making. It would have been better for both of us, and for everyone else, simply to ask, as I sort of meant to, by my “(?)” : was Olson an academic, and what do we understand by the term. Perhaps behind my question about Olson there did lie a sense that poets or writers who come in to universities to give the odd class (like I do) aren’t really primarily academics but essentially writers who are earning money doing (what I consider) a sometimes quite exacting job. >> So in a way David is right. For example I don’t actually consider myself an academic, rather a part time teacher, even though I do teach undergraduates literature. What literature academics do as well as teaching is ‘serious’ research - articles, books etc. That I certainly don’t do, and I suspect Olson didn’t, though I might write the odd essay or prose piece. Prynne, just to chose arbitrarily among poet-academics, by contrast, has written long meditated critical books on Shakespeare and Wordsworth. This is a shifting border. Poets often write introductions which are quite scholarly, and scholars write more general essays that could easily have been written by poets. Eliot’s essays, though he was not an academic, have had an immense (perhaps too immense) influence on the directions and judgments of subsequent scholarship. >> But I am close enough to several academics to know that although the teaching I do is just as challenging, if much fewer hours, their research work is of a different order to anything I do. >> Jamie