With the making of poetry, or not-thinking represents a real, an ironic, choice. At the heart of the continuing controversy over the value of the university a life devoted to poetry is the anti-institutional, even anti-intellectual role that poets in their work and personal styles have taken up h9recent years. In the study and practice of any art other than poetry we find less conflict and confusion, fewer outright attacks on the university-or on any other institution-as a helpful ally. But poetry as a living art particularly commits itself to the personal above all else-to personal survival-which with us often goes along with an anti-institutional stance. Richard Hugo, a fine poet and teacher from Montana, talks about our loss of crucial life-supports in a new book about the teaching of poetry-writing, Triggering Town (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). The accelerated rate of loss . . . accounts, he claims, for the increasing number of people writing poems (p. 73). He points to the essential appeal of such activity on campus when he says, A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters (p. 65). What's irreplaceable in poetry is its personal quality: the intimate, unique gesture, the private, even quirky, perception of people and place, idea and language. Perhaps it is simply economic determinism, but since more and more often poets do work at universities, the open romantic gesture of entire disdain the academy as a stultifying place an artist is encountered much these days. Such resistance takes more covert forms: inner exile, clownishness, views favoring severe primitivism . . . and various honorable forms of not thinking such as Zen Buddhism espouses. social critic Martin Green made a title a provocative book out of Auden's

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