Hi Tim,

sorry. I didn't think it defensiveness on my part. More an offering of
a conundrum, which sought to muddy the waters so that actual work could
enter the frame of discussion by example. I did want to get to names to
try to understand who was actually being referred to. Although I'll
fully accept the charge of tired listing. I was, obviously wrongly,
wondering if a conflation of working in academia and teaching criteria
developed through personal practice might not be the point of
conflation. Clearly, as in my own example, the majority of those on
that list had lengthy histories of practice before teaching, although
many also studied as undergraduates when young. The lists were quite
deliberately intended to include some 'ringers' and deploy
inconsistencies in order to find out to whom the mesh between academic
verse and avant &c was referring. Also to include for example two
generations of those broadly considered lang-po in the US context and
whatever (linguistically innovative if that works) likewise in the
British ones.

I do agree that the grounds from which many newer, younger (whatever)
poets are emerging are creative writing courses and their orbital
activities in further education. Many of the latter are now in
universities (on both sides of the pond) - and they are nothing if not
quick to spot financial opportunities (the universities i mean).
Creative Writing courses have become a cash cow and increased in number
over the past few years dramatically. I'm not saying this is a good
thing per se either, but it is undeniably so. Generally, which of
course i use advisedly, many of those who are graduating from these
courses are going on into MA and even PhD pursuits.

It *does mean that poets have been acculturated to producing critical
materials and reflexive writing in close relation to or even as part of
their emergent writing practice. So critical tools, vocabularies,
perspectives, strategies (from philosophy, literature, cultural
studies, performance studies, media studies, bio-informatics . . .) are
becoming integral to a poet's experience of language. Reading and
Writing both are certainly changing and with the growing number going
on into further education the readership is changing also.

One reason, perhaps, why taste tzars such as Don Patterson are getting
publicly jittery is that the texts available for further education are
becoming increasingly numerous from those kinds of poets whose
practices and critical perspectives are lang-po and ling-inno-po (among
the many variant po in evidence) grounded, partly since it is those
poetries whose poetics most form an energisiing mesh with other
critical discourses as listed in brackets above. You know, it's pretty
simple. To whom is one going to refer to and to differ from (classic
avant-garde strategies). That does accept the existence of quite
differing readerships, but that's surely nothing new. What might be
warranted is a kind of new punk poetry to counter too much of the
dominance from today's scriptoria.

Being on such courses do allow for reading of poetries that offer more
resistance and are less easily absorbed (PERHAPS, perhaps). Many
readers, not allowed such luxury of shared interpretations (outside of
the experience of belonging to a book group) cannot give over their
waking hours to such sustained mulling (perhaps, perhaps).

The flavor of a particular program is strongly inflected by its key
poet(s). It'll be interesting, to take one obvious example, to see how
writing emerging from Buffalo change over to the coming years, between
Charles Bernsein's and Steve McCaffery's authored climates of research
and umbrellas of enthusiasm. Another example is the shift from Burt
Kimmelman and Sylvester Pollet to Ben Friedlander and Steve Evans at
Orono (even though Burt and Sylvester remain, Ben and Steve are
bringing other energies and enthusiasms into play). It isn't exactly
big thinking to point this out I realise that. One might take the
current clutch of young poets active around Birkbeck as another example
over here or the past decade of fierce enquiry at Dartington. I do
think this is going on in the UK as much as in the US now. The scale
and intensity differ for sure but with Dartington, Exeter, Edge Hill,
Warwick, Bangor, Southampton, Roehampton, Royal Holloway, UEA,
Manchester Metropolitan, Salford . . . and many others the burgeoning
US model of the Writer's House is likely to follow on.

Staying in education, living off small research studentships and so on
has (perhaps perhaps) supplanted the dole as one way to develop a
writing practice in the largely commercially non-viable worlds of
contemporary poetry (given rare exceptions). There are real problems
too. One is that writing can become too pedagogically inclined, writing
what students might usefully study as example. Another is that of
getting sucked into teaching without ever having much experience of
outside, in other words skipping that vital phase of resistance and
struggle, developing a practice outside the institutions. I've
certainly witnessed examples like that in the US in recent months and
maybe that produces the efficient and yet smug poetry that you might be
trying to get at?

love and love
cris