 |
 |
>Perhaps it depends how it's approached. What David Bro lays out is >poor fodder and Keith T's ammendments make me blush all the worse. > >I've been teaching on the Performance Writing courses at Dartington >College of Arts for the past 6 years. I admit to having the >advantage of being a visiting as distinct from a core member of >staff. The context is of an interdisciplinary arts college, rather >than a niche between more formal academic disciplines or somehow >attached to an English Literature Department. cris cheek will know that the Dartington model is of interest to me for its interdisciplinarity, engagement with cross artform and new media practices, incorporation of theory, performance, and so on. But institutional inertia and much else will make it look like pipe dreaming to university-based cw programs in the US. Or so I fear--one can try of course. Bro, he of the fine baritone or was it a tenor, will know that I know he's done a bangup job as a teacher--Cole Swensen! jeez he must be old--and moreover never neglected performance, as how could he, performer that he is. Bro and Buffalo and Bard and a few other places with a B and maybe now Maine, odd individuals here and there refusing to subscribe to the same old not so bold and papering their bird cages with the AWP Chronicle. But *typically* cw courses beyond the "intro to creative writing" course are strictly and conservatively organized by genre and mostly only two genres count--fiction and poetry. Workshop discourse is watered down New Criticism heavy in affect and interpersonal dynamics. I cannot think of more than a few universities, not to say cw programs, in the US able officially to support work such as that cris detailed earlier. Geez at some institutions the fiction writers don't even talk to the poets, etc. Little boxes everywhere. Little boxes for sale! And then there are other problems. CW poetry students in the US naturally like to read the books produced by their hero-mentors even when they aren't required to do so, or the books produced by poets who have moved beyond the zones of AWP and university-based series like U Pittsburgh to Farrar Straus Giroux etc.--Jorie Graham, Mark Doty, Louis Gluck. This not only means that sometimes they don't even know small press stuff exists, it also means they are reading almost entirely American poetry say 1970-2000. Now that makes them a lively bunch but, yes, it's true, one finds the odd student here and there whose mind will be fired by a taste of something more or different, and what else would that student do, where go? He or she's mostly not going to do any better at the Slam or in English department courses proper. (In those little boxes for sale is every 65 year-old Miltonist in the US, and none of them will be replaced.) I'd hate to discourage folks in the UK from setting up cw programs but it seems to me that you might now have an opportunity to think them through and avoid some of the problems we know here. I have the impression that cw programs here grew a little like Houston, without a whole lot of planning, not that planning always helps. I've seen or heard just a little of what Tim describes as workshops sited or existing as middle-class hobby chat-groups when I've been over and if the option is that or the straight- down-the-center pontificate around the egg-beater in the seminar room--hm. . .fix that line break David--well but it can't be that those are the options. We DO have a few other models in the making. Off to eat one of those burritos now. Keith %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%