Saturday, October 14, 2017

Robert Sheppard: more (or less) of the Keynote about Creative Writing for Edge Poetics part 5 (end?)

Blogpost 5

I’m not as stupid I look. I know that many will have to re-visit what I’ve just spoken but, at least, these demonstrably written words are on my blog, Pages. But I find I can’t say it any other way. (I may leave it out: it's too much, probably.) It isn’t poetics exactly, but it’s a teasing document for my poetics which has an important question for myself: what is the relationship between my critical writing, which provoked it, and the poetics which provokes my own creative practice? It’s not one I know how to answer, but there is a ‘bleed’ between the two, quite interesting for myself alone, I’d guess, but it opens up a general question for the subject of Creative Writing: what is the relationship between literary criticism and poetics? For our undergraduate students this becomes: what is the relationship between their ‘reading as a writer’ exercises and their ‘commentaries’ or ‘reflection’? To this (since I am going to conclude not with answers, but questions) I’ll add: How much of a literary critical perspective do we expect postgraduate candidates to have, when they sometimes find themselves examined with the intellectual instruments of a subject they haven’t sometimes studied, i.e. English Literature? Can poetics suffice? 

I interrupted Blogpost 1 some minutes back, because I wanted to delay its transmission until the end, because it transpired to become a list of similar questions. Ones which have washed around my head for some time and in the busy-ness of modern academic life (I am no ‘slow professor’, to be sure) I had no time to ask. I have time to ask them now, at least.

Blogpost 1 resumed: 

Please find the post here and the second part of it where it begins: ‘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 individual careers rather than communities of writers? Do they only read each other?’ Etc. See what I mean: it’s a barrage of questions!

Of course, I will tidy this up, refine discriminations, hone the language, en-wave its rhythms and perhaps sharpen its arguments... Or dump the lot and start again. As I've said before.



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: