The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional Query

Abstract

When I arrived at Brandeis University in 1969, the first graduate course I registered for was a creative writing seminar taught by J. V. Cunningham, a poet, noted Shakespearean scholar, and translator of the Roman author Martial. On the first day of the seminar he announced that he wrote poetry with his left hand, did scholarly work with his right, and never let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. This aloofness, within the same mind, of the scholar from the poet serves as a useful figure for certain professional contradictions rising out of the anomalous position — the strangeness — of creative writing at the research university. Quite a bit has been written about the ignorance and disdain said to characterize the estrangement of creative writing programs, usually institutionalized in English departments, from the rest of the profession of English. Ben Siegel (1989: 7) notes that “certainly in no other area of the university are the internecine hostilities as frequent and vocal as those between its professional teachers or professors of literature and its invited poets or novelists. . . . Here resentments and bruised sensitivities on both sides appear most bitter and open.” 1 I intend to avoid such characterizations and to survey instead the uneasy, embattled territory on which what has sometimes been viewed as a hegemonic English discipline incorporates, bifurcates, rejects, separates, or otherwise manipulates the provisional practices that pass for creative writing pedagogy and programs. How does the modern research university incorporate or contain creative writing? Does creative writing possess a disciplinary base from which certain methodological notions and practices can be drawn, and if so, how should we begin to talk about such a discipline?