In 1999 Jeffrey Di Leo, the editor of Symploke, was putting together a volume
of essays on the subject of affiliations, those complex relationships between
individuals and the institutions for which they work or the disciplines in
which they perform. In response I wrote the following essay, which first ap-
peared in Symploke and then in Di Leo’s expanded book version, published
by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003. The following essay is more
personal than the others here. Oddly, it thus set the stage for the writing of
my memoir, The Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2004), a reconsideration,
now that I think of it, of yet another of my affiliations—that of Austrian Jew-
ish refugee in the United States.
14
Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry
Some Problems of Affiliation
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
A painter, but I am not. Well....
Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter”Academics like myself, who write about contemporary poetry and poetics,
often have an af¤liation problem. On the one hand, our subjects are alive,
kicking, and ready to praise but also challenge our interpretations of their
work. On the other, our more traditional colleagues regard our area of ex-
pertise as “soft” and trivial. When the time comes to hire for the Creative
Writing program, moreover, they are convinced they can “judge” the poetry
to be evaluated at least as well as we do. Creative Writing is only a fun “extra”
activity any way, isn’t it? A few years ago, when my brilliant colleague Gilbert
Sorrentino ventured an opinion as to a “regular” job applicant’s understand-
ing of James Joyce (whose work Gil taught almost every year), I heard a sec-
ond colleague say, “What does Gil know? He’s only a writer!”
I am not myself a “writer”; I have, as one of my favorite Oberlin profes-
sors, F. X. Roellinger, told me tactfully many years ago, more talent for the
“critical” than the “creative” essay (much less, for the poem), but I do have a
special af¤nity for work in progress, the writing that is not yet canonical or