Not to speak ill of my own alma (pia, dura) mater or of its MFA
Program in Creative Writing, where I did time in the mid-1970s,
or of Jim Tate, from whom I learned a great deal--but not (alas)
how to spell "millennium," which I picked up on my own--Candice
This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com)
>From the issue dated August 4, 2000
(Story by Jeff Sharlet)
CONS OF PROSE: A more innocent literary impersonation is to be
found in the premiere issue of Jubilat, a poetry journal based
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Published in June,
the first number of the biannual review features "The Lost Epic
of Arthur Davidson Ficke: The Author's Annotations, Commentary,
and Notes of Reference for A Millenium's Teardrop," "rescued"
by James Tate and Dara Wier, two poets who teach in the
university's creative-writing program.
All that survives of Ficke's great work are his notes, but
they alone suggest what a wide-ranging epic it was. Lines 572
to 577, for instance, "appeared to me verbatim written in
Estee Lauder's Sunset Creme in a shattered mirror's face in
Bruges, Belgium, in a dream." Meanwhile, for further
elaboration on Lines 412 to 414, Ficke suggested, "see B.C.
Parker's intriguing essay, 'Rain as a Source for Vitamin B12,'
Nature, 219:617-18, 1968."
If only such a poem had ever been written. Alas, says
Christian Hawkey, one of the journal's four editors (all
graduates of the university's M.F.A. program), Mr. Tate and
Ms. Wier together are Arthur Davidson Ficke.
"That's the kind of thing we want to publish," Mr. Hawkey
says. What--hoaxes?
No, he explains, "poets writing about anything but poetry."
But since Mr. Tate and Ms. Wier are writing about poetry, even
if it is imaginary, he adds: "You know, prose."
Poets writing prose has lately meant cash on the barrel for
writers such as Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club: A Memoir
(Viking, 1995), and Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking:
Life Studies From the Dismal Trade (W.W. Norton, 1997).
Jubilat is not an attempt to follow the trend, Mr. Hawkey
says, but "we're certainly not averse to making money."
For now, they'll settle for making a safehouse for poets who
want to write outside poetry's many warring factions--
language poets vs. rebel angels vs. spoken word vs.
second-wave language poets, and so on.
In Jubilat, which takes its name from Jubilate Agno, a
genre-blurring work by the 18th-century poet Christopher
Smart, everybody's just a poet, says Mr. Hawkey. Which means
they're all free to write prose.
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Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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