Research seminar: "Poetic Knowledge: The Academic Lives of Poets"

Most American poets now teach, which has meant that poetry has at times merged with academic output. While this situation has tangible consequences for the dissemination and circulation of poetry, from a sociological point of view, the immersion of poets in higher education has also affected the aesthetic dimension of the poetry produced. My research investigates how teaching and academic life appear in the poetry of a number of poets, ranging from Charles Olson in the 1950s to Bernadette Mayer in the new millennium. It also traces the interrelations and convergences between poets’ teaching and their poetic output, just as it considers the mutually generative relationship between experimental pedagogies and experimental poetry. The archive plays a crucial role in this project, as I examine the largely neglected teaching papers typically found at the end of a poet’s papers in rare books and manuscript collections across the US. In this talk, I present some findings from the archives of Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Jack Spicer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, Bernadette Mayer, Susan Howe, and Lyn Hejinian. I focus especially on their teaching, the pedagogies they espoused, and their recorded experiences from different educational settings, from innovative programs like Black Mountain College and the UB Poetics Program, prestigious universities such as Stanford, large public universities, such as UC Berkeley, programs abroad, and even high schools.