I wonder, in academic settings, whether the people judging their younger colleagues for tenure know how to evaluate an electronic journal as a venue for publication. Much is made of submitting work and getting it accepted to REFEREED journals, the oldest and most respected ones especially. So many people who don't know much about one's area of expertise must judge your intellectual worth, and they don't often do it by actually reading what you've written. You have to justify justify justify all the time.

I've learned to be very good at writing narratives, explaining why what I'm doing is important, why I must publish it in this particular place, why it is PRESTIGIOUS to have it published there, why it is of immense importance (not to mention so encouraging) to have someone like a poet & editor of an important print journal, now on-line, value your critical writing and know who you are!!!

"Space and freedom" "the book/poems that interest them"–you probably know how enticing that sounds and how dangerous. I do think that I took a big risk in doing my pre-tenure work on Barbara Guest–my first article about her is painful for me to read because it was so so so fraught with anxiety in the writing–all in her work that was enticing in its experimentalism and peculiarity I felt like I had to shove through a grid.

Fortunately (my goodness, HOW FORTUNATE!), I gave a paper about Guest at a University of Maine conference, and met three highly-regarded scholars of contemporary poetry—all of whom wrote generously and knowledgeably for my tenure case, in ways that no one here was in a position to gainsay.