>>the fact that a poet might work as an academic tells you precious little about his or her work. I would have thought that should be obvious. I can't see much in common between Housman, Empson, Geoffrey Hill and Anne Carson, and the list could proliferate geometrically in the contemporary scene...
Yes, that's true. In principle and even in practice, much of the time. And some poets enter academia late, and that doesn't retrospectively change their earlier poetry. And further, a good many of my favourite poets of today are career academics. (nb, I'm not naming any names in this post, nor am I intending hidden allusions to people present.)
Nevertheless, institutional blindness is a reality. I love to hear poets from outside, there are things out there in the world that are not registered within a common room or study or among bright and enlightened students who anticipate personal success.
And there is plenty of poetry around that rather intertly repeats the moves of other poets and this may not be down to academia specifically but it makes me think that those poets "know how to write poetry" without ever having faced up to what they are doing -- and then I wonder if some of the positive rhetoric about collaborative praxis and eliminating personal identity serves to disguise the deadening uniformity of the coterie.
So I think I am precious about and perhaps over-value those writers who have never worked in academia and who bring a different perspective. I think what they say matters. Which is obvious and over-Romantic and hippieish but I'm saying it anyway.
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