Poetry at One Remove

Abstract

Poetry at One Remove John Koethe (bio) The installation of poets in the academy is now so complete that it is easy to forget that the relation of poetry and contemporary literature—let alone poets and contemporary writers—to departments of literature was once considered problematic. It was not really until the establishment of the New Criticism that contemporary poetry became an acceptable object of academic literary studies, and even then the methods of reading it applied, and the readings of the works of high modernism those methods yielded, tended to ignore issues of authorial presence and of the ways in which works of literature were actually produced. True, most of the major poets of the generation succeeding the high modernists—Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop—spent at least parts of their careers in English departments. But more often than not this was as teachers and scholars of literature, as with Berryman and Schwartz, or, as with Lowell and Bishop, as individual teachers of writing, whose roles were sui generis and left them only distantly connected to the departments to which they were formally attached. It is only recently, with the explosion in the number of creative writing programs, that the idea of poetry as the basis of an entire academic career has emerged, a career in which one receives formal instruction in the writing of poetry both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and having thus acquired the requisite credentials, joins the professoriate in a capacity structurally no different from that of a professor of German, philosophy, or economics. My own situation as a poet has always placed me at one remove from formal literary studies and the teaching of writing. In high school I was deeply fascinated by literature, particularly modernist fiction, and did a certain amount of writing myself. But these were secondary to my primary interests in mathematics and physics, which I intended to pursue as a career. In college my interest shifted to philosophy, and I began writing poetry seriously. At that time there were at Princeton a number of undergraduate poets, most of them (even those who were English majors) united in their disdain for the English department and the contemporary poets of whom its faculty approved. R. P. Blackmur did serve as a source of encouragement and inspiration, though of course he was himself an autodidact whose relationship to academia was [End Page 93] a somewhat uneasy one. Several little magazines were edited on the campus, some with ties to poets of the New York School, and discussions of poetry were usually intense exercises in what nowadays would be called theory. As a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard I found the relation of students who were poets to the university to be different, with a much greater sense of allegiance to the institution and to the writers associated with it. I found this atmosphere uncongenial, and came to think of my role in the university almost entirely in terms of my philosophical studies, while associating myself as a writer with the poets and artists I knew in New York, in the completely uninstitutional setting of the small part of the literary world they constituted there. And I have continued to think of my role as a philosopher as a professional and academic one, and of the writing of poetry as at some level an essentially gratuitous act. And while it may be making a virtue of necessity, I have a vague feeling that this sense of estrangement from the idea of writing as an academic profession is not entirely disadvantageous, and that it has had a distinctive effect on the way in which I think of poetry and on the actual poetry I write. At least that is what I want to try to explore here. There are certainly incidental effects of coming to poetry from outside the arena of literary studies, and of coming to it from the practice of philosophy in particular. There is a kind of orthodoxy in contemporary poetry that favors the concrete, the vivid, the evocative, and the particular, and avoids the discursive and the abstract. I think that it...