yes yes
that's what i meant. same thing ;-)
> Chris: you guess that the rise in applications to writing programs
> may be because people see the recession as an opportunity for a time
> out for education. A possible alternative: absent job possibilities,
> a couple of funded years may seem attractive.
>
> Mark
>
> At 12:37 PM 8/18/2009, you wrote:
>> Yeah, it's strange -- I don't actually teach in a writing program
>> and I think some of my positive comments refer to the disadvantages
>> I perceive, for writing teacher and students, when there is no
>> writing program in an institution. For example, I'd love to see a
>> program in material poetics at RISD, where the sporadic work I do
>> with individuals and departments could accumulate, and build on all
>> past achievements. Without a program, I have a lot of freedom, in a
>> nomadic way. But it is exhausting, not simply carrying your heavy
>> laptop to innumerable destinations and solving the logistics problem
>> again and again, but because of the lack of the very thing which
>> also can threaten: institutional reputation and memory. Also
>> company.
>> In the United States, writing programs grew, for the most part,
>> within English Departments, and there are a lot of advantages and
>> disadvantages to that. All sorts of configurations have emerged,
>> but the creative writing program within the English Department is
>> still the norm, and usually such programs have to argue vigorously
>> for themselves, and faculty have to assert the value of the MFA in a
>> PhD economy. So my allegiance is with my MFA comrades, although I
>> don't have an MFA and don't teach in a creative writing program. I
>> have a lot of freedom where I am, and it's exciting, but I also have
>> enormous respect for structures, and appreciate the difficulty of
>> their achievement; which is not to say I deem them perfect: just an
>> invaluable piece of opportunity.
>> Mairead
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Mark Weiss
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I am the beneficiary of a great many things that are devastatingly
>> bad for human society at large. If I didn't have those things I'd
>> fight like hell to have them, but I'd nonetheless experience all
>> manner of anxiety about their consequences, as I do now. I'm also
>> aware that if I made the choice to avoid those anxieties by becoming
>> blameless I'd be having very little effect on the long-term health
>> of my community. I don't think awareness of what I've received needs
>> to come at the cost of being unaware of the social consequences.
>>
>> Re: conditions of work. for many years I was a more-than-full-time
>> psychiatric social worker while raising a child. My role in
>> childrearing was rather more like the traditional mother's role than
>> the father's. Because I needed to write I wrote late into the night
>> and caught up on sleep on weekends. I don't recommend this as a way
>> of life, and I understand why writers have fled to the academy. I
>> also know that what my life in those years was like pales in
>> comparison to what it must have been like in pre-Celtic Tiger
>> Ireland. I respect your choice (not that my respect should matter to
>> you), probably would have made a similar choice myself, but I don't
>> think you can accurately extrapolate from your experience to the
>> entire field of MFA candidates, most of whom are far more privileged.
>>
>> Specifically, you continue to argue in polarities. The alternative
>> to bureaucratic structures for the teaching and practice of poetry
>> isn't, as you point out, total isolation. Nor is it the pub (it may
>> be the pub in Ireland, for all I know, tho I doubt that Catherine
>> Walsh has spent a lot of time there): even an isolata like Lorine
>> Niedecker managed to maintain a supportive correspondence.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> At 10:45 AM 8/18/2009, you wrote:
>> Obviously I believe that, like the other arts, poets benefit from
>> peer critique and a learning community where there is exchange of
>> ideas and references, and that workshops in universities and
>> colleges, and writing programs, provide useful environments for such
>> exchange, particularly for women, who benefit from an environment
>> structured more explicitly on egalitarian grounds than more informal
>> peer groupings available in my culture at least, which were centered
>> around males in the pub. "Self-tuition" demands an abrasive
>> discussion, just as "writing programs" are getting. Audience,
>> ideas, challenge, performance, collaboration: these are some of the
>> concepts quick to materialize in group situation.s "Self-tuition"
>> sounds like the pedagogical equivalent of "the lyric voice," but
>> even the Romantics came together in groups to work and learn. Let's
>> have a discussion on the benefits of "self-tuition" in contemporary
>> arts and education. I think all learning is self-tuition, in a
>> sense, but programs have supplied useful structures for me and
>> enabled me to qualify to teach, and thus support myself and
>> family. When I was running the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick,
>> in the late 1990s, I worked 7 days a week, 364 days a years, 24/7,
>> as it seemed the arts centre was open that much! There was no time
>> for children, let alone poetry or self-tuition. I returned to
>> college, also in my thirties, in order to have time to write and to
>> prepare for the possibility of a career which would allow me to both
>> write and spend some time with my children. I identified with
>> Michael's post yesterday. More than anything else, it was sheer
>> bliss to have structured time to write, to read, and to articulate
>> ideas which I had been developing for years through practice, some
>> of which were due for retirement, some of which for a leap
>> forward. I've never had the sort of anxieties about writing
>> programs which have manifested in this discussion. I've 15 or so
>> years' experience with them at this point, and know the pros and
>> cons. Just as in everything, structure both facilitates and
>> limits. I'd love to see writing programs situated in the art school
>> rather than the university but that's my thing. As I say, I don't
>> buy into the anxiety here. I had no training as a journalist,
>> learned it all from the streets, the school of hard knocks,
>> self-tuition, blah-blah-blah. But actually there were few, if any,
>> journalism programs available in Ireland then. If I wanted to be a
>> journalist now, yes, I'd find the best, most challenging, most
>> sophisticated program I could.
>> Mairead
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Jeffrey Side
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>argotist@fsm
>> ail.net>
>> wrote:
>> Mairead, the points you raise are, no doubt, true in and of
>> themselves,
>> but I don't see how they are relevant, to the specific point I was
>> making about whether MFA creative writing courses (or any other such
>> institutionalised programme) are more necessary to teach poetic
>> writing
>> than methods requiring self-tuition. I think this specific point
>> has little
>> to do with culture, ethnicity or gender.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:18:24 -0400, mairead byrne
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>mair
>> [log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I think there's a very wide range of ways poets across cultures have
>> been
>>> formally educated.
>>> I think there's always been control in poetry: who is allowed to
>>> write/publish. Poetry, in English, has been much more tightly
>> controlled
>>> than prose, in this respect. Obviously, as colleges are
>>> explicitly equal
>>> rights type organizations, someone like me (peasant / woman /
>> mother) has
>>> more to gain than in the ostensibly deregulated poetry world which
>> was, in
>>> my experience in Ireland, pretty much as Eavan Boland has described:
>> woman
>>> is the possible subject but not the possible author of poems.
>>> One problem about our discussion is the narrowness of the cultural
>>> experience upon which each argument is based, e.g., you may be
>> speaking
>>> about poetry in English in England since the mid-20th century,
>>> from the
>>> position of an English-born white male, while I may be speaking
>>> about
>> poetic
>>> traditions and education in Irish before the Plantations, and
>>> also in
>>> English, in Ireland, in more recent centuries; and diverse American
>>> traditions since Whitman, from the position of an Irish
>> emigrant/American
>>> immigrant/white/female. Our positions are extremely close, even
>>> overlapping, yet there is little clarity. And our discussion
>>> does not
>> even
>>> attempt to address wider cultural histories of poetry, e.g., in
>>> Asia,
>>> Africa, or even in a range of languages, although we use the
>> word "poetry"
>>> as if it were not intensely specific not only to our personal
>>> histories
>> but
>>> also to our personal taste.
>>> In a sense, there is little "authority" in this discussion, which
>>> does
>>> actually make me appreciate works of research and scholarship, which
>> attempt
>>> a broader or deeper exploration.
>>> Mairead
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Jeffrey Side
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>argotist@fsm
>> ail.net>
>>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On those terms he probably would be. The point is, not so much that
>>>> poets don't need some sort of learning, but rather how they should
>> get
>>>> it.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:06:51 -0400, mairead byrne
>>>>
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>mair
>> [log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, and I wonder was Shakespeare's "small Latin & less Greek"
>> the
>>>> 16th
>>>>> century equivalent of "the guy doesn't even have an MFA."
>>>>> Actually though, I do believe the stakes are real, and very
>>>>> high, for
>>>>> poetry. The law, more than creative writing programs, maintains
>> its
>>>>> mediocracy (I love PBS but find the conjunction
>> of "unacknowledged"
>>>> and
>>>>> "legislators" to be neutralizing.
>>>>> Old druid that I am, I believe implicitly in the power of
>>>>> words. But
>> I
>>>>> don't think I'm romantic.
>>>>> Mairead
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Jeffrey Side
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>argotist@fsm
>> ail.net>
>>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I can see David's point when he observes that the stakes are
>> low
>>>> when
>>>>>> it comes to the practical ramifications of failed artistic
>>>>>> practices.
>>>>>> Certainly, no reader has been injured physically from reading a
>> bad
>>>>>> poem. Nevertheless, many degree-level disciplines in the
>> humanities
>>>>>> and wider arts subjects are similarly risk-free. Does this, then,
>> mean
>>>>>> that they should not be catered for at degree-level?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Poetry does have certain skill-sets required in its writing, as
>> anyone
>>>>>> who has had to sit through endless lectures on prosody will tell
>> you.
>>>>>> True, prosody is, perhaps, now a defunct skill in poetic writing
>> but it
>>>> is
>>>>>> a skill all the same, as much as that of any involved in musical
>>>>>> composition. To the extent that creative writing degree-level
>> courses
>>>>>> teach this (along with, hopefully, the historical and theoretical
>>>>>> components in the study of literature) then an analogy with
>> degree-
>>>>>> level courses in music can apply.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:27:20 -0700, David Latane
>>>>>>
>> <<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>delatane@YAHOO
>> .COM>
>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Here are a few more probably pompous observations. I wasn't
>>>> making
>>>>>> an analogy, per se, between jazz and the totality of poetry--but
>>>> trying
>>>>>> to answer Mairead's query about whether there was any
>> meaningful
>>>>>> distinction between "creative writing" in the academy and
>> training in
>>>>>> music, architecture and other fields. One of the distinctions for
>> me is
>>>>>> that formal training (apprenticeship, guild, academy) in many
>>>>>> artistic/craft fields came long before the granting of degrees
>>>>>> for
>>>> writing
>>>>>> poetry for practical reasons. There were skills and techniques in
>>>> working
>>>>>> with materials that required practice and training--whether
>> playing
>>>> the
>>>>>> piano, or engraving a copperplate, or cutting a dovetail. And
>> there
>>>> was
>>>>>> a market for certified practitioners. Poetry writing was
>>>>>> different.
>>>>>>> I think there are big differences between slam poetry (or any
>>>> language
>>>>>> creation) and jazz. People with a certain hutzpa and no practice
>> at
>>>> all
>>>>>> can stand up at a slam and make an impact. People with a
>> certain
>>>>>> hutzpa introduced to the piano or saxophone a few days before
>> can't
>>>>>> even begin to rip through a few Charlie Parker tunes (with
>> significant
>>>>>> variations) without having hard glassy objects thrown at them.
>>>>>>> Architecture that gets built requires certain trained skills.
>>>>>> When "things fall apart" (Yeats) in poetry "nothing happens"
>>>> (Auden).
>>>>>> When things fall apart on a construction site people are killed
>> and
>>>>>> money is lost. Poets' imaginations are free--no telos. Writing
>> for an
>>>>>> MFA degree or any other degree requires the end of getting the
>>>> degree
>>>>>> to qualify (hopefully temporarily) this freedom. Architects can
>>>> imagine
>>>>>> freely too -- but the vast majority of them sit a tables in big
>> firms
>>>>>> figuring out how to decorate a box more cheaply. They pay for
>> Pei to
>>>>>> play. So I wasn't dismissing any architects--but commenting on a
>>>> fact,
>>>>>> based on a goodly acquaintance with what their actually working
>>>>>> conditions are like. Only a few are ever given a pile of money
>> and
>>>> told
>>>>>> to make something beautiful.
>>>>>>> "But poets, or those who imagine and express this
>> indestructible
>>>>>> order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the
>>>>>> dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the
>>>>>> institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the
>>>>>> inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a
>>>>>> certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial
>>>>>> apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is
>>>>>> called religion." Shelley--Defence
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> David Latane
>>>>>>>
>> <<http://www.standmagazine.org>http://www.standmagazine.org>http://
>> www.standmagazine.org
>> (Stand Magazine, Leeds)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
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