Poetry seems to be one of those things that may make you famous (probably after you're dead) but will never make you rich, especially now. Even in the '50s and '60s when a lot of important poetry was being written (and, not for nothing, read), Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were still freelancing radio programs and writing book reviews to make money. Plath kept trying to break in women's magazines with short stories.

And then we marveled at a time when poetry mattered enough to people to draw those kind of battle lines.

There are still battles within academia about poetry, though it's the sort of the narrative poets and the new formalists vs. the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The problem is that the battle is primarily an academic one.

The problem is that the battle is primarily an academic one.

What is the alternative and preferable sort of battle? Unless you're using academic in the dismissive sense, isn't it that by default?

What is the alternative and preferable sort of battle?

An academic battle is going to be sort of closed and internecine. Whereas the battle between Beats and Universities played out within the larger culture. Robert Creeley (a major poet from that era) had a book of poetry that sold well beyond university bookstores.

Lots of people who never went to college bought the anthology I mentioned, The New American Poetry. So the terms of the debate/battle are not going to be proscribed by academia and criticism and journals. The Beats and San Francisco poets (not exactly coeval) taught their own poetics away from the universities. Created a...counterculture.

So, a current cultural war is, like, Team Aniston v. Team Jolie, right??

Hmm, I'm just speculating here, but wouldn't the debate between "Genre" Fiction vs "Literary" Fiction be considered a cultural war?

Oooh ooh! And the recently emerging issue of multimedia literacy and which university department gets dibs, is it the English dept? Film? Comp Lit? Comp Sci? Or do they get their own new shiny dept?

Heh, this game is kinda fun.

What about the issues of emerging artforms. Video games are coming into their own as cinematic/interactive environments that far exceed many motion pictures, yet there are conflicting opinions that want to lump GTAIV in the same category as Dig Dug.

I guess it's just that most of the stuff you said, Hec, has a foot planted in academia. I can like whatever poetry I want--I have no reason to war with anyone else over what they like to read or write. Academia is what ups the stakes, primarily.

Where the hell is Victor when you need him?

yet there are conflicting opinions that want to lump GTAIV in the same category as Dig Dug.

Fair point. Video games are where comics were in the fifties, or rock was in the sixties. A popular media finding new sophistication and complexity, but still way off the radar of what is considered worthwhile by (most) schools or the populace at large.

It's worth remembering that the word "novel" is rooted in "novelty" - and that novels were not considered serious literature, but mere women's entertainment. (Though I'm treading on Burrell's territory here, and I'm pretty sure she's going to correct me.)

Video games are precisely one of the fields that I see academics tussling over in their turf wars, ND. I have one friend who wrote her Comp Lit dissertation on video games, and another who thinks only computer programers and animators should be allowed to teach MML courses.

I have one friend who wrote her Comp Lit dissertation on video games, and another who thinks only computer programers and animators should be allowed to teach MML courses.

I see things like this in the marketplace. Many HR departments for video game companies put up ads for things like Sound Designers but want them to have computer science degrees and be C++ programmers and the like. While those are nice skills, they are pretty ancillary to doing sound design for video games and disqualify a large quantity of brilliant artists who should be working in the market.