Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Birkbeck University, and the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at the University of Edge Hill. And in the US, there
are the various organisations connected to the University of Pennsylvania, which I mention in my Introduction.
SETH ABRAMSON: But we do have the boogeyman of “academisation” brought out from under the bed yet again, the
only problem being that the term is not (of course) being used literally here, or anywhere, as the above author is
neither claiming that avant-garde poetries are increasingly being written by literary studies professors
(“academics”), nor that avant-garde poetries are now being produced primarily in literary studies degree programs
(“academic degree programs”), nor even that the only evident consumption of avant-garde poetries is now
happening on college and university campuses.
JEFFREY SIDE: True, I’m not saying that. I’m merely saying that certain types of avant-garde poetry (those primarily
listed by Grumman) are being excluded from consideration and study by academics in the UK and US who are
scholars of contemporary avant-garde poetry.
MY INTRODUCTION: Academic poetic output is operating to a healthy extent in the US, where university creative
writing departments are flourishing. The University of Pennsylvania has its Kelly Writers House programme, its
PennSound website and its Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, all sympathetic to academic avant-garde
poetry. The University of Pennsylvania also edits Jacket2, an influential online poetics website, which was formerly
called Jacket, and which was edited by the independent John Tranter before he passed it over to the university. And
similar things are happening in the UK, with various institutions such as the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
at Birkbeck University, and the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at the University of Edge Hill, both promoting
academic avant-garde poetry.
SETH ABRAMSON: We must put aside that the only university referenced here-Penn-is one that does not have a
graduate creative writing program (which maybe, depending upon our working definition of “Academy”, puts it
outside the “Academy”?),
JEFFREY SIDE: I am not claiming that graduate creative writing programs matter in the way you think I am
suggesting. By and large, they are outside the scope of the Argotist feature. I don’t know why you keep bringing them
into it.
SETH ABRAMSON: … just as we must put aside the author’s minimal awareness of what’s happening at any of the
200+ American universities which do have graduate creative writing programs.
JEFFREY SIDE: My apologies for not being able to keep up to speed with the 200-plus institutions you mention.
Again, though, I am not claiming that graduate creative writing programs matter in the way you think I am
suggesting. By and large, they are outside the scope of the Argotist feature. I don’t know why you keep bringing them
into it.
SETH ABRAMSON: No mention is made here of the evident and notable avant-garde sympathies of the MFA
programs at Brown University, University of Notre Dame, University of California-San Diego, Temple University,
California Institute of the Arts, Mills College, Cornell University, Columbia College Chicago, Naropa University, The
New School, Saint Mary’s College of California, University of Colorado-Boulder, University of Montana, University of
Utah, or any of the other avant-friendly universities even the greenest MFA applicant in America would be aware of.
No-we get none of that.
JEFFREY SIDE: It seems you have misunderstood the argument of the Argotist feature. It is not about the avant-garde
sympathies of MFA programs, but about the exclusion from study of the types of avant-garde poetry Grumman has
listed.
SETH ABRAMSON: We get no such acknowledgments here, because- as noted already on this blog, in previous
essays- the avant-garde, of whose various poetics and poetries I consider myself both an admirer and a student
(and sometimes an adherent, poetics-wise if not often aesthetically) seems fixated on discussions of “the academy”
despite not understanding its contours in the slightest. It is no coincidence the author of this brief piece mentions
Penn, one of the only universities in the United States to have a conspicuous non-degree-granting avant-garde
outpost-as no other presence of the avant-garde in the academy is cognizable to these avant-garde poets and critics.
It seems their distaste for academia is so virulent they’re unwilling to even “know thy enemy”.
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