I’m delivering a keynote at 'Edge
Poetics: A Symposium on Innovative and Speculative Creative Writing Practices
in Higher Education' on 04/11/2017. (See
here.) I’ve turned the Kylie Calendar over to
October (gold boxing gloves, if you’re interested) and I realise it’s time to
get down to this. Of course, I will tidy this up, refine discriminations, hone the language, en-wave its rhythms and perhaps sharpen its arguments,but I'm going to use serial postings as the way to assemble it. I’ve seen the list of speakers and it’s very impressive. But
my keynote is at 10.00 and it kicks the whole thing off, so I thought I’d
better be setting the right tone for everybody else. I certainly think I could
write about the state of Innovative Poetry Education (no caps needed) today. I
like the call for papers and the quote from Deleuze (I leave him to Patricia
these days, because I don’t think non-philosophers can read him accurately); it
says:
In the late
essay, ‘Literature and Life’, Gilles Deleuze expands on ideas from his earlier
work about the ways literary writing can open up ‘a kind of foreign language
within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois,
but a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a
delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.
We are asked: ‘Is there a value
in teaching students to find the kind of delirium Deleuze writes of?’ It’s a
tall order for second year Poetry at 9.00 on a Thursday morning after the
student drinking night the day before. They have their own delirium, clearly.
But seriously: it IS difficult to entrain anybody in that kind of state of mind.
It’s a bit like telling them they need ‘duende’. Read Lorca's essay and develop it: you
can’t. How can you teach that? But there is a material practice suggested in Deleuze’s
words here: a ‘becoming-other of language’ might be possible to engender in
terms of a defamiliarisation of language through certain teaching strategies,
collagist practice, for one. The cfp continues:
Till
relatively recently, Creative Writing in Higher Education has been dominated by
a set of techniques and tropes derived from realism, and also by the
expectations of mainstream literary fiction. Increasingly, however, aspects of
innovative and speculative poetics are finding their way into the classroom.
An interesting assertion, and
true, I think, on the whole. One thing I might do, is become historical on this,
autobiographically. About how alone I felt in the creative writing world 21
years ago. How the paradigms were certainly not those I shared (having
developed my OWN poetry and poetics (another issue) outside the academy: some
of the delegates will remember that, I think). I talk about that in my
inaugural lecture and I might re-visit that. (See the link below.) Apart from
some sense that Dartington was ahead of the game, there was nobody to consult,
hence the reason for NEWT – the Network of Experimental Writing Tutors I set up
briefly. (See
https://newtwork.blogspot.co.uk/
) A self-help organisation that was made immediately redundant because about
that time (worth checking when that was) people seemed to popping up
everywhere, doing the linguistic innovative thing… But before that it was a
lonely course. Interestingly I didn’t face the hostility I’d assumed existed
(and that probably made me cautious): from students, other staff members, from
the profession generally. That they’d close this stuff down! In fact I found
that the profession was itself not hostile, and that the self-expressive
paradigm was not pervasive. (Indeed, in my work on Supplementary Discourses in
2003, with Scott Thurston, I found a willingness among very different writers
to myself to engage with reflection on the act of MAKING.) The Poetry Wars
didn’t break out! But I must admit I did my biggest professional push in the
area of POETICS. (See
here, but also the links below)
Was this an avoidance of radical practice? I hope not, though it might
have been an (unconscious) attempt to make an institutional cover for it, somewhere
for it to develop, in the sense that while I advocated (and still do!) poetics
as a necessary act for creative writers (of all kinds), it is also true that
poetics operates centrally in innovative circles. So I was fostering an
activity that would allow innovation to occur while supporting its use for ‘the
expectations of mainstream literary fiction’, which seems to me to be
absolutely clear.
There is something to be said
(still) about poetics. And I will, I think, and perhaps use Atlantic Drift as a (new) vehicle for
that.
There are other questions: The
symposium asks: ‘What does it mean to be a writer interested in such traditions
who also teaches Creative Writing in academe?’ I’m not sure I understand this
question, but there certainly are questions about how one is positioned. Perhaps
somewhere I need to say I’ve retired and that means some of what I say is truly
reflective. And perhaps I might air some of the questions I have about what we
do: what are we doing if we create lots and lots of linguistically innovative
poets? There ARE a lot these days, and there are questions to be asked about
the ‘poetry scene’ that develops out of this, in the way it didn’t in my day. Did
we win the Poetry Wars? Probably not; there are still a lot of mainstream poets
about, dully doing their thing. But they are not the concern of this paper.
I was one of the only poets I
knew in say 1980 who had studied Creative Writing. But now, it’s almost a given
and there are problems I think; are they building careers rather than
communities of writers? Do they only read each other? Does the workshop method
close down innovation, by creating unconscious paradigms? Writers in their 30s
complain to me that writers in their 20s seem inhumanly ambitious. (This is not
just in the innovative camp.) Is Ken Edwards right when he says innovation has
lost its edge as ‘poetry’ becomes just another career? Is this the result of
the spurious employability agenda. Do the CW-produced writers have a sense of
history? (Something I’m aware of the lack of) Is Kenneth Goldsmith’s
‘uncreative writing’ a reaction to the uniformity of CW practices? He says so,
but then he is ignoring (wilfully) the widely varied innovative poetry that has been nurtured
(some of it conceptual, some of it not) under the banner ‘Creative Writing’… But it is
interesting he identifies it as analogous to the gallery system in art.
Conversely, does too much of the published work look like creative writing exercises?
Does that carry over into practice? (It is certainly easier to teach conceptual
writing than it is the new lyric, and perhaps easier to write it.)
These are some of the questions I
have, though I’m not sure I have answers.
But this might get me going in a
personal and reflective way. I’m not sure I can be academic about it. In fact,
it might be my last pot-shot at this before I launch out into new areas.
I have another question which I
want to think about one day, but it might not be in this talk: what is the
relationship of my critical work to my creative work (probably outside the
area) and (not outside it) to my pedagogy.
Practice as Research is
interesting in at least three ways. The development of the Creative Writing PhD
is an interesting hybrid phenomenon. The categorisation of creative work there
(research questions and methodology) and also in the REF documentation by
teachers in the academy. Does that create an ennobling but not an enabling language?
Practice as research presentations too, such as there will be later in the day:
are they bigging up work instead of merely presenting it? Is there really
anything to teach and to learn by that method?
I want to avoid the academy vs.
the real world rhetoric, but questions about the effect of the massive
expansion of creative writing are vital. As ever, I suspect there are positive
and negative aspects to this.
1st October 2017
Links to Works on Poetics
Below are four very condensed accounts of poetics through the ages:
Part One: Poetics and
Proto-Poetics
Part Two: Through and
after Modernism
Part Three: North American
Poetics
Part Four: Some British
Poetics
And my Inaugural Lecture here:
Read all parts of this draft of a keynote (or is it a Key
Chord?):
Keynote Part one here:
Keynote Part two here:
Keynote Part three:
Keynote Part four:
Keynote Part five:
