It sounds from what you say, Doug, that Canada lies between the US and the 
UK when it comes to rating the actual practice of writing.

And of course there are all kinds of provisos to be made, not just country 
but time and discipline.

The bottom-line proviso, which I paid through highschool and even beyond 
retirement from university teaching was simply time -- time spent writing 
poetry was tiime not spent writing or researching an essay or article.

That was pretty much fair when everyone knew the rules, and you simply 
accepted that you'd probably get a degree at least a class lower than if you 
didn't write poetry.  Poets rarely got first-class degrees, though the two 
exceptions I can think of were Stephen Mulrine, and of all unlikely people, 
James Kelman.

I was, in many ways, lucky at Glasgow -- I graduated in 1969, two years 
before the night of the long knives, when the six best undergraduate writers 
were expelled from university in one fell swoop.  Among other unnerving 
things, I was surprised at just how *accurate the literary judgement was --  
someone somewhere in the establishment managed to get it exactly right in 
identifying the writers who would in the course of the next five or ten 
years become establisment figures themselves.

So when I'm tempted to compalain, I remind myself that I was never actually 
expelled from a course or a post because I wrote poetry.

> And they are 'peer-reviewed', really, when you figure that it other
> poets who usually edit these mags, online or off.

But they don't *count as such.  Two major  -- well, at least long -- pieces 
I published on Edwin Morgan and D.M.Black orginally appeared in _Akros_, 
which as a poetry magazine counted for diddly squat.

Equally, when I finished my PhD (on John Donne and the Tradtion of Platonic 
Philosophy), I knew there were only three people in the world who had a 
spread of expertise to realise what I was doing, and as I'd managed to 
pretty comprehensively insult two of them in the course of my work, they 
were ruled out as possible external examiners, and the only one I had any 
time for, Joe Mazzeo, was in the States and too expensive to fly over for a 
viva.

This later returned to haunt me when I tried to publish my PhD and was 
(quite unofficially) shown a six-page long reader's report not just 
rejecting me but denouncing the work as a tawdry disgrace to scholarship.

I was puzzled as to why the anonymous reader kept on harping about how I was 
nasty to (later, Dame) Helen Gardner without mentioning the pretty-much 
continous attack I'd levelled at A.J.Smith.

My boss at the time happened to be John Lucas, who was tight with Harvester, 
so I asked him if he happened to know who was the reader at Harvester for 
Renaissance works, and he said, "Oh, it's Joe Smith at the moment."

On the other hand, I'm still rather proud that a review I wrote of James 
Kinsley's editon of Dunbar had Kinsley promply insist that Nottingham 
University unsubscribe from any journal that featured me on its pages.

End Rodent Rant