Thank you for that article, Oliver.
I don't know why, but every other link on GT lately has had a goad in it for my pet "black beast" - the pomo academy.
O.k., so I might be obsessed with this issue, but I am comforted to know that I am in good company:
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I only ever saw Donaghy lose his temper once, when I tried to dismiss his worries over the lack of genuine academic engagement with emergent and contemporary verse.
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As the article goes on to say, "Literary taste vanished, or was banished, from the curriculum when he was a student."
But of course it makes a difference what is being taught in our universities, and Donaghy knew that.
So the next time someone berates me for my obsessive rants on this subject, realise you are also berating the ghost of Michael Donaghy.
And why is there this "lack of genuine academic engagement with emergent and contemporary verse"?
Because most of our English departments have been taken over by Marxist (or closely related) theorists who want to destroy or at least enervate the system (the "patriarchy") and all the cultural works which support it. This includes "traditional" or "mainstream" modes of poetry, which it sees as merely tools of cultural hegemony.
"Mainstream" to the present academy means "derivitive (and thus supportive) of the patriarchy."
So if a poem scans and is accessible to everday readers, it is obviously reactionary, and needs to be ignored.
The saying goes, that it is an ill wind that blows no good. And while I would prefer that we didn't have the rising gale of world troubles building daily, I think the time is coming when the citizens of the West will start to question why so many of the English departments in our universities are in apparent league with those who also want our culture expunged.
[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 19, 2006).]