or Medieval studies. The latest tenure case or promotion scandal, the job mar-
ket news, the new endowment gift or budget shortfall: these keep us in close
contact. At the same time, academic “who’s who” talk can also be the kiss of
death, so far as imaginative work is concerned. For how can one concentrate
on poeticity or related issues when one has to prepare for the upcoming ten-
ure meeting or the Q & A session for a job candidate in a ¤eld quite remote
from one’s own?
On the other hand—and this is my subject here—af¤liation with the “un-
af¤liated” poetry community for someone who is not one of “them” is not
without its problems either. Since my own allegiance has been and continues
to be to the poetic avant-garde, whether that of the early twentieth century
or the present, I am in many ways a natural enemy for the Creative Writing
cohort in the English department. By de¤nition—although there are now no-
table exceptions like SUNY–Buffalo or Brown—the Creative Writing work-
shop is, by de¤nition, conservative. For one thing, its appointments tend to
be made through the English department, which means that its members,
whether poets or ¤ction writers or even dramatists, must be acceptable to
the entire department. I am continually astonished by the tastes of most of
my colleagues when it comes to hiring faculty for Creative Writing. I have
seen the most stringent critics of, say, Renaissance literature be satis¤ed to
hire someone who writes New Yorker–style short stories that are “entertain-
ing” and “well done” but that on a serious level don’t have the slightest artistic
merit. English professors who are rigorous about the canon when it comes to,
say, eighteenth-century ¤ction will endorse work of the late twentieth cen-
tury that they would never dream of including in a course reading list. And
so those of us who are postmodernists are often caught between the scholars
and the “creative writers,” with uneasy af¤liations with both.
But my dual—or perhaps, more accurately, divided—af¤liation has a sec-
ond aporia. In Radical Arti¤ce: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992) and
related studies, I have enthusiastically advocated the breaking down of the
traditional genres, the production of “theorypo” or “poessays”—which is to
say the writing, much of it very exciting, that, strictly speaking, is neither
lyric poetry nor literary theory or cultural criticism but an inspired blend of
all three, as is the case with Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-
mark, Charles Bernstein’s Content’s Dream and My Way, Steve McCaffery
and bpNichol’s A Rational Geomancy, or Johanna Drucker’s A History of
The/My Wor(l)d. Wonderful as these works are, they are now spawning a sec-
ond generation of self-proclaimed hybrid texts that are less successful, at
least from the point of view of someone like me who has had, like it or
not, academic training. As more and more “experimental” poets have entered
Writing Poetry/Writing about Poetry 263