Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-10T08:14:53.480Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Poetry in the Program Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2021

Timothy Yu
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
Get access

Summary

This chapter examines the relationship between poetry and academic institutions in the twenty-first century, an era in which creative writing MFA and PhD programs are an established and durable part of the landscape. The real solidification of poetry’s academic situatedness has given rise to poetry that chooses to interrogate the notions of creative freedom and personal expression. Folding an explicitly hermeneutic practice or process into the poetry itself creates a reflexivity that imagines the speaking subject as an actively, discursively analytical subject – one that sees in these analytical methodologies not a way to stifle creative possibility, but to expand it. The work of Myung Mi Kim, particularly Commons, seeks to reconfigure the personal in service of the more broadly intellectual: the lyric speaker as an active analyst both of “lyric” and of “speaker.” Alongside the work of poets like Claudia Rankine and Nathaniel Mackey, the result is what we might call an academic avant-garde at the crossroads of programs in creative writing and those in literature, history, philosophy, and the other humanities.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. Macmillan and Co., 1906.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Charles. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. 1st ed, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Charles. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. University of Chicago Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Andrew. “Verse vs. Verse.” Lingua Franca, September 2000, pp. 4554.Google Scholar
Filreis, Alan. “Wallace Stevens and the Strength of the Harvard Reaction.” The New England Quarterly vol. 58, no. 1, March 1985, pp. 2745.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon Books, 1972.Google Scholar
Golding, Alan C. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Donald. “Poetry and Ambition.” Poets.org, March 9, 2005, www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetry-and-ambitionGoogle Scholar
Harbach, Chad, editor. MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. n+1, 2014.Google Scholar
Hong, Cathy Park.Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” Lana Turner no. 7, 2014, https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-gardeGoogle Scholar
Izenberg, Oren. “Poems In and Out of School: Allen Grossman and Susan Howe.” The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, edited by Ashton, Jennifer. Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 187201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jamison, Leslie. “‘MFA vs NYC’ Is Most Useful as an Explanation of How Writers Get Paid.” The New Republic, February 2014, www.newrepublic.com/article/116778/mfa-vs-nyc-most-useful-explanation-how-writers-get-paidGoogle Scholar
Keller, Lynn. “An Interview with Myung Mi Kim.” Contemporary Literature vol. 49, no. 3, October 2008, pp. 335356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Myung Mi. Commons. University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Kim, Myung Under Flag. Kelsey St. Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Kindley, Evan. “Poet-Critics and Bureaucratic Administration.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, edited by Kalaidjian, Walter. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 248–57.Google Scholar
Lazer, Hank. “American Poetry and Its Institutions.” The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, edited by Ashton, Jennifer. Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 158–72.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies and for the Union Dead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. New Directions Book, 2006.Google Scholar
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
McHale, Brian. “Making (Non)Sense out of Postmodern Poetry.” Language, Text and Context: Essays in Stylistics, edited by Toolan, Michael J.. Routledge, 1992, pp. 635.Google Scholar
Myers, D. G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880. Prentice Hall, 1996.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink.” Boston Review, June 2012, www.bostonreview.net/BR37.3/marjorie_perloff_poetry_lyric_reinvention.phpGoogle Scholar
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Graywolf Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Rankine, Claudia. “Interview with Claudia Rankine.” Jubilat no. 12, 2006, http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_rankine.phpGoogle Scholar
Ritter, Kelly, and Vanderslice, Stephanie. “Teaching Lore: Creative Writers and the University.” Profession, 2005, pp. 102112.Google Scholar
Seidel, Frederick. “Robert Lowell, The Art of Poetry No. 3.” Paris Review no. 25, Winter–Spring 1961, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4664/the-art-of-poetry-no-3-robert-lowellGoogle Scholar
Yu, Timothy. “Asian American Poetry in the First Decade of the 2000s.” Contemporary Literature vol. 52, no. 4, 2011, pp. 818851.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yu, Timothy. “Instagram Poetry and Our Poetry Worlds.” Poetry Foundation, April 15, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/04/instagram-poetry-and-our-poetry-worldsGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×