“No One to Witness and Adjust”: The Academy Still in Peril

This article is a response to Charles Bernstein’s “The Academy in Peril,” the essay in which he first uses the term “official verse culture.” Using Williams’s convoluted history with leftist magazines in the 1930s and 1940s as an example, it both agrees with Bernstein about their being an official verse and also points to how verse that is often unofficial is also official. It concludes with the author reflecting on poetry’s embeddedness in higher education and what that means for the future.