I think you’re right on both counts, Luke - that things can be taught on these courses and that it’s difficult for the reasons you give and for other complexities to do with individual sympathy for whatever goals as well as adjustment and flexibility of perspective required by both student and teacher. For which reason, I usually prefer teaching literature to CW. It might be more reassuring if ‘many important 20th poets’ had profited from being students of writing rather than having ‘had writing students’?

J

Sent from my iPad

On 24 Dec 2017, at 17:36, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I'm sitting a CW course, and my impression is that it's a myth that writing can't be taught, but that it's especially difficult, due to the different starting points and goals of students, compared to something like chem or physics. It's also reassuring that it seems many important 20th century poets have had writing students.

Luke

On 24 December 2017 at 17:32, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Jeff,
  Only a minor complaint, probably worse because I’m tired, and I see it’s not worth the labour of reformatting.
  Others here would be better positioned than me to comment on the distribution of poetry from and coverage of it within the academy. With creative writing courses, as Peter noted, the whole area has changed, but I was referring more to critical reception within literature depts that naturally are more focussed on the past. The different presses, whether favouring one or other kinds of poetry, would all work against what you call a ‘centralised’ effect, and poetry manages to be both central and marginal in ways that can both be good...
Jamie

Sent from my iPad

> On 24 Dec 2017, at 16:17, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Jamie, yes, the white on black format is hard to read for some people — I’ve had a few complaints about it over the years. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for me to change it to something more universally “readable” due to my lack of anything more than rudimentary web designing knowledge, and having created the site using a now obsolete web-building program.
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> It has been suggested that I migrate the site to a modern web-building program, but after looking into the technicalities of this, it would mean the text-size, font choice, line spacing and paragraph breaks that exist now would be lost due to the “translation” problems between the old web-building program and a new one. This would mean I would have to manually correct each page—and there are nearly a thousand pages.
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> I have found, though, that if one uses the zoom function or text size facility on most modern browsers, then the white on black format is less problematical. I do sympathise with you about it, though.
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> Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding of academia as it operates within avant-garde poetry is that it has no real counterpart in mainstream poetry. It seems to me, that mainstream poetry is less centralised — in the sense that it seems more disparately organised and disseminated (almost hobbyist-like — I mean that respectfully) than is the case with academic avant-garde poetry, which seems to me to have become something of a production line in recent years.
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> On 24 Dec 2017 Jamie McKendrick wrote:
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> I find the argotist format of white on black so hard to read and headache-inducing that I couldn’t give the article the attention it deserves. I know it’s a feature, Jeff, but it might be worth rethinking?
>  I did read the list’s exchange about the new magazine - what happened to it by the way? - which Jeff had helpfully compiled. I thought it lively and engaged and noticed how many women used to write on this site and the vitality on both sides of the argument had a great deal to do with that.
>   The debate became a bit bogged down in what I’d consider the (legitimate but very) subsidiary question of peer-reviewing but the range of perspectives made me feel uneasy about my throw-away couple of comments earlier in the present thread. Peter’s right that there are a few university depts which engage with contemporary poetry, almost all (leaving aside a couple of big names) with what we call the ‘innovative’ side of things. I’m curious about the reasons for this, which I suspect are many. It’s crossed my mind that the prohibitive costs charged by the commercial presses even to quote poems would further discourage academics, already de-incentivised, to enter this inglorious field.
>   A glittery xmas (if that’s a good thing) and not so indigent new year to all,
> Jamie
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>> On 24 Dec 2017, at 14:27, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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>> Tim, I think your article was ignored (as was the wider feature it was relating to) because most, if not all, of the people supportive of (and professionally involved with) the “academic avant-garde poetry project” don’t want to give any dissenting voices of the project the oxygen of publicity. Even to such an extremely balanced assessment of it that your article proved to be. One can’t blame them, I suppose, as no one likes criticism. But that not a single “member” of that “body” came forward to comment, is beyond explanation. For a while, I thought that whoever is in charge of the “movement” told them not to. That last sentence is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, by the way—unless, of course, it is, indeed, some kind of coordinated movement. Will we ever know?
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>> On 24 Dec 2017 Tim Allen wrote:
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>> Hi Luke - thanks for reading the article. I haven't got in on this thread because I've been away and a bit busy.
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>> I tried to do too much in that article while not spending enough time on the different issues - so I think some of the issues get lost in the mix. I also tried to be fair - too fair maybe, even though some of the stuff I say in there could be taken badly by some in academia. But very few people have contacted or spoken to me about it so I doubt if many have actually read it to the end. It's really a sociological essay, but one based on my own experience and intuition.
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>> Cheers
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>> Tim
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>>> On 22 Dec 2017, at 13:51, Luke wrote:
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>>> Well maybe it's unhelpful, and all I mean is that institutions ought not be super hermetic.
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>> Here I was just repeating myself.
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>>>>> As I reader I could appreciate both, just as at times I did not; the worst of the smooth and glossy seemed to offer little but that smoothness and glossiness just as the worst of the other stuff seemed to offer little more than its wild jaggedness and aggression—both could be as boring as hell.
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>> Another quote from Tim's article.
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>>> Analogously to what Peter said about academies (plural)
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>> I am referring to Peter Riley's last email to the list
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>>> non academics aren't a single entity, even in their relation to the academy.
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>> And suggesting it's true of anything.
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