erm,
the conflation . . . as the point of conflation
rather more the point of contention, once more apologies
On 6 Feb 2005, at 13:18, cris cheek wrote:
> 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
>
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