Nick Bruno mentioned being socialized by books, about that disconnect between local language and custom and what we read growing up, to raise ourselves in effectively another idiom of life. Interesting framework. We all have the many dialects of language, one for dealing with professionals or school or business, one a home language. In some areas they are different official languages, in some areas different pidgins, or dialects or registers. The extra piece of the framing for me is that they are also, within the distinct schemas, rules, different sets of socializations. The pluralism that we integrate automatically in our head, the parallel ways of being.
[That I suppose sounds and is abstract paraknowledge. For concrete, there’s the springboard post by Reginald Shepherd that Bruno sprang from on where he came from and where people assume one comes from if one is a poet, with privilege embedded as if poetry were something elitist and non-core.
Elsewhere, poet as specialist, a notion that is a by-product of our times. Renaissance would have da Vinci as a thinker, not known as an anatomist or engineer but a poet, even though, when they are career poets, tend to wed all arts and thinking, dabbling in paints and social criticism, political protest, non-fiction and design, can be thought of in a smaller frame
The poet’s identity will be even more different from those of the scholars and critics, who occupy an entirely different wing of the English department. And the institution defines the poet as even more different from that utterly alien creature with her strange ways, the playwright, who is housed in an entirely different department (theater) and exiled to an awkward corner of campus near the parking lots.
Cross-pollination is natural but in a large group, simplifying down to artificial distinctions for clarity is natural. We have to remember that our categories are our own creations not some platonic reality. That is, so far as social constraints allow and enforce reality. As Robert Archambeau, there’s a matter of territorial niches drawn. There are boundaries, if for no other reason, than to fill out the forms for funding, or throw a sales pitch in whatever form. After that, we can get real again.