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I doubt if there is any answer to this question. All I wanted to do was to put right people’s notions about Charles Olson’s career as an academic, and its implications. Olson’s only substantial period of teaching in a college was at Black Mountain College 1951-1957. Other posts were sporadic, the longest the University of Buffalo 1963-1965. Black Mountain was an independent institution specifically designed to get away from the State educational structure. It had been running since 1933 mainly as an art college; Olson was in charge of it in its last years and in some opinions shipwrecked it through monomania. All the academic (meaning learnéd) work that Olson did in those places and through his life were unorthodox, conceived in his own terms, mostly in his house in a small port town in Massachusetts. He was not aiming at a Ph.D. He certainly gained no advantages in publication or readership from any academic posts or repute. Black Mountain’s reputation was as a practical training-ground in art, music and latterly writing, and most people interested in poetry would never have heard of it. If he is thought of now as an "academic”poet it can only be because of the demanding nature of language-use in his poetry and the elaborate way it uses historical and anthropological documentation. I’m sure Drew’s right about his virtuosic research abilities, though I don’t always feel very comfortable with the results. I don’t see that the division of poets into academic and non-academic has any validity, not here and now. Many poets before and since have been in the same kind of position that Olson was. Pr On 31 Dec 2017, at 5:49 pm, David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Peter, I’m not as knowledgeable about Olson’s academic status as you are, so can’t really comment on what you say. But I do think that Drew’s response to you is more a statement of the case. The way I see it, it’s not so much that Olson was a “proper” academic but that that “title” helped give him some academic credibility so that his poetic ideas would be taken seriously. I doubt very much if someone who had not been so lucky to have had academic status conferred upon them, would have made as much impact poetically as he did. To that extent, academia does matter, whether one is a “proper” academic or just “playing at it”—though I don’t think Olson was really playing at it, as you seem to be saying.