>
>My dream for years was to live inside Academe, not because I'm madly in
>love with most academics I've met, but because I might have some space
>in the day to do my own work, teach it if I'm lucky, connect with and
>maybe even "inspirit" a group of students, and get tolerably paid for
>it. It beats working for most corporations...unless I'm being
>unbearably naive again.
Well, and as your paragraph about Stephen Dunn among others, nor are writers
who live 'inside Academe' necessarily "in love with most academics" either. It's
like the conversation with a dean that I had once, in which he had said he had
decided to go the serious academic route by getting a MA in English, with all
that pedagogy and scholarly and critical work, rather than the fluff stuff of a
MFA; that was partly his route to dean. And it is weird to be a poet at academic
readings, weird to be a fiction writer too, or so it would seem from the time a
fiction writer and I upon leaving a departmental meeting shook our heads,
feeling like visitors from Mars. But, no, I don't think you're being unbearably
naive. Basically no one can make a living writing poetry, so one has always has
to do something else, work for a corporation or bind books or milk goats or
teach English composition or apply for funding or translate or edit or write in
other modes or several of these, and while there are advantages and
disadvantages to each, what they all have in common is exhaustion, that there's
no time left for writing, and what in what time remains one is brain dead or
exhausted. Of all the things I've done, this residency that I'm doing at the
present is the easiest, it's all cream and butter, plenty of time for my own work,
a more than decent wage, and great students, and after spending three hours
with them talking about and reading poetry, I was humming with happy energy,
and thinking how lucky I am to have this chance and time, a perception not
unmarked by an awareness of previous modes of making a living and how
exhausting,
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:22:11 -0500
>From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: down with the down with poetry crowd
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>
>> out of university could be the best thing that could happen to it. He was
>>
>>>only half joking.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>Neoconservatives like
>>Bob Novak talk about the 'fringe element' of 'some academic, intellectual,
>>artistic types at some universities," and I suppose it bothers me to hear the
ease
>>with which poets adopt certain rhetorics so that one group may denigrate the
>>other by calling them "academic' poets.
>>
>Novak is suspect if only because he "gave up the anonymity" of a CIA
>operative as a way to get at her husband, who was perceived as disloyal
>to Bush. Novak is a journalistic prostitute. Academic poetry when was
>in college was considered an expression of praise--I have no idea who
>was being talked about. Actually I don't much care.
>
>>On the other hand, I am and
>>know a number of poets who teach at universities or colleges and yet while
they
>>are 'academics' in the sense of working at an institution, none of this
pertains.
>>
>The late Milton Kessler, our visitor Basil Bunting, another visitor
>Philip Dow (whatever became of him?), Bob Kroetsch (though he wrote
>fiction back then). Most recently, talking with Stephen Dunn, who is on
>the faculty of Stockton State College in South Jersey: he's learned the
>art of the staged temper tantrum to get the department higher-ups to do
>what he wants. Stephen, Pulitzer winner, Famous Man, has twisted the
>REAL academics around his little finger to get his own way. It may not
>be nice but it works. I suspect he plays these games to make Academe a
>tolerable way to make a living.
>
>My dream for years was to live inside Academe, not because I'm madly in
>love with most academics I've met, but because I might have some space
>in the day to do my own work, teach it if I'm lucky, connect with and
>maybe even "inspirit" a group of students, and get tolerably paid for
>it. It beats working for most corporations...unless I'm being
>unbearably naive again.
>
>Ken
>
>--
>Kenneth Wolman
>Proposal Development Department
>Room SW334
>Sarnoff Corporation
>609-734-2538
|