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I think Alison's is an excellent post, and would echo her question: why is it that the -frequency- of women's posts to this list is discussed (at least) as much as their content? I wish Fiona Templeton were still here. Alison what I meant by -neutral-, was to try to subvert the account you give of 'career' as something which describes what accountants do and what poets don't. The car analogy is a pertinent one, and I see that 'careering' is another way of describing what poets may do, and a forceful one. But I hold certain things to be true: As Thorstein Veblen (the American political economist) once said, changing habits of thought create institutions. Poetry does seem to be largely about thinking, at least in the first instance (despite my desire for an executive to match Shelley's legislative body), and does seem also to be taken up nationally, as a constituent of a national cultural institution. I think it's appropriate to reflect upon this in advance. How might Wordsworth have written differently, had he foreseen that Dove Cottage would become a micro tourist industry, that his ice skates would become curios for troupes of fascinated consumers? Might not our own poetry possess latently the symbolic capital to later appear as such a grand commodity? Perhaps in 50 years your own poetry will be most popular as the Alison Croggon industry. The more demonstrably relevant the poetry is to national and cultural history, or to the history of a region or locale, the likelier this would seem. For this reason I think it's apt to consider what we are doing as a career, even if this is violently tendentious and could only make proper sense at a point when we're all dead and buried. What we are doing is creating symbolic capital for future States (not ALL we're doing, of course). Perhaps we only become properly careerist in retrospect, when we finish up, and suddenly what we have done is a career. To this I'd add my earlier reasons, addressed to Doug -- that a career could be simply a quality of commitment and focus. On this head, it's a matter of choosing whether to use the word or not. The less I wish to use it to describe myself, the more I feel uneasy and self-gratifying by default. But your own post seems to me more forceful, and I should hesitate to extend the use of this term to others who might not suffer so inevitably from a reflex fear of 'aggrandizement', other than to reiterate that -eventually- what we've made can be made into a career. At the very least, it can create a batch of careers for typesetters, editors, scholars, reviewers, teachers etc. Let's hope. k %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%