Breaking the Self-Affirmation Barrier
From Reginald Shepherd's latest post:
We live in a culture which robs people of social, political, and economic agency, making them feel as if their experience counts for nothing, while simultaneously insisting that everyone's every passing notion and experience is of supreme importance because it happened to them. These two aspects are concomitant with one another, the second offering an imaginary (that is, an ideological) compensation for the first.
This is an astute analysis of the impoverishing ethos of empty "self-affirmation" that too often characterizes the teaching of creative writing as a cultural industry. Reginald's comments throughout the post resonate with much of my own experience, in particular his observation that one of the major pedagogical hurdles for any teacher of poetry is the popular belief "that poetry is too subjective to judge, because it's all opinion and personal preference."
I want only to add that I think the problem is yet more difficult than getting students to realize "that specificity, particularity of image and language, precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché are aspects of all good poetry." In the first place, I'm not sure if that's entirely true, or if it's always true that "vagueness is not a style." I will probably concede if forced, however, that it's generally beneficial for students to engage at great length with the kinds of poetry for which these statements do hold true before they go on to other, vaguer terrain. I want them to come to terms both with the standards of specificity, concision, and so on, and with the particular values that have historically informed those standards. I know, I want a lot. In the second place, even when a teacher is successful in instilling a diligent respect for such standards, I would maintain that this is not enough on its own to lift the pedagogical scene out of the "self-affirmation" level. It may serve to generate an impressive bank of professional "output" that students can use to establish and enhance their artisanal status, just as painting and music students can be taught certain techniques that mark them as "accomplished." This also--or most importantly--provides a way for the program to advertise its success: it has produced subjects who function as living testimonials of its efficacy in instilling recognizable, marketable aesthetic skills. A context for institutional competitiveness is manufactured thereby. The only difference between this and the carefree "express yourself" model of less competitive pedagogical situations is that the self being affirmed extends beyond the individual and into the corporate body of the institution. The program, institution, industry, all affirm themselves along with the student--whose affirmation remains largely at the level of imaginary compensation, except for those fortunate few who are actually able to ride that affirmation all the way to a paying career (and who then, likely as not, perpetuate the whole predatory pedagogical system via their own students).
What else, then, is needed to break all the way past the "self-affirmation" model to a truly substantive poetic education? In addition to the aspects of craft addressed above, I would suggest that the following are minimal requisites:
1. Some degree of grounding in various historical and intellectual contexts for the production and reception of poetry
2. Some degree of immersion in contemporary poetic theory, as well as relevant political and philosophical studies
3. Some degree of engagement with the social and communal aspects of the poetic life, especially insofar as this involves stepping out of the institutional framework and looking critically at what it means to be within it in the first place, and what it means for other writers to be outside it
4. Some degree of consideration of what lies beyond "craft" as defined above: under what conditions might vagueness be considered a "style" worth taking seriously? when do the protocols of "precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché" fall short, and what might be the value of deliberate unwieldiness, ugliness, or banality in certain contexts? and what else is out there?
5 comments:
Beauty, originality, innovation. Hard to teach these things - but the only way they can be achieved is, as Eliot wrote, through the "great labor" of assimilating what has already been done. The old pedagogy of conscious imitation was an antidote to unconscious repetition.
Are your proposed points the requirements for those attempting to reconfigure the model of teaching, or things that beginning poets should be first instructed in ? If the latter, points 1–3 strike me as pretty onerous for beginning poets, and in all likeliness probably less helpful than simply (as Gould says) simply reading an awful lot. (For writers about poetry, rather than of it, I think these make a lot more sense as a starting place.) Point four seems like, indeed, just a further take on craft and therefore neatly fitting with the very idea of "workshop". But it is, anyway, potentially a much more powerful instruction in craft than say, learning the pattern of a villanelle.
Zachary, yes, reading a lot is always the best place to start. I had long-term goals in mind, esp. for students in an advanced degree program like an MFA.
But even at the beginning level, I like to get my students to think about things like "the role of the poet in society," "cultural capital," etc. If nothing else, I try to be honest with them and point out that poetry by itself will probably not make them rich and famous, and the best reason for doing it is out of a strange obsessive love.
Hey Kasey -- I was totally following your discussion here right up until the end, where the connection between the "points" and the earlier ideas seem entirely disjoint. (Except point four, which seems entirely sensible.)
I'm going to take your points "seriously" here in as much as I'll take them to have some direct relevance to the practice of poetry, and are not just good intellectual exercises to make you smarter, enrich your experience, replaceable by "study mathematics" or "work in a psychiatric ward."
Indeed, I think that what your points one through three amount to in the end is simply the legislation of a different institutional style: theory-driven and "socially responsive".
Just as the bog-standard creative writing program trains students to produce a "good" poem with a synthesis of content (nature, epiphany, etc.) and style (specificity, "originality", etc.) -- so it seems here we have style (disjunction, rhetorical abstraction, etc.) and content (a "community aware" subject.)
I guess what I'm saying is that I can't see how there can be "scripts" like this for the production of true self-expressive originality. Of course, you may have meant these points less "seriously" -- in which case I would suggest that a study of mathematics and an internship in a psychiatric ward are far better ideas!
a peculiar combination of passeism & futurism.
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