Poetry in the Program Era

doi:10.1017/9781108699518.016

14 - Poetry in the Program Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2021

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

Edited by

Timothy Yu

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Timothy Yu: Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin

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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.

Keywords

poetry contemporary American academy university creative writing MFA

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry , pp. 206 - 219

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108699518.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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