I always liked the idea of Zukofsky teaching tech writing at Brooklyn. I think he was a more interesting poet than he would have been if his poetry had to pass muster with "a committee of his peers" in order to get tenure in an MFA program to then teach other young poets to write just like him.
Poets should be peerless.
David Latane
--- On Mon, 12/13/10, David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: David Lace <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: "MFA vs.NYC: America now has two distinct literary cultures. Which one will last?"
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Monday, December 13, 2010, 6:37 AM
> http://www.slate.com/id/2275733/
>
>
> "The model for the MFA fiction writer is her program
> counterpart, the poet. Poets have long been professionally
> bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the
> country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets
> took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and
> other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation.
> Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The po! et
> earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of
> professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at
> an even higher level, from appearance fees at other
> colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing
> books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that
> anyone outside a university library will read them. The
> consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of
> American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular,
> arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood.
> Of more interest here is the economic arrangement proper,
> and the ways in which it has become that of a large number
> of fiction writers as well."
>
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