Poetics at New College of California: "The Roots and Routes of Making Poems" (In-Person) (Panel / In-Person)


Special Session
Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing / Professional and Pedagogy

Patrick James Dunagan (University of San Francisco)
pdun@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

The Poetics program at New College of California (ca. 1980-2000s) was a distinctly alien presence among graduate-level academic programs in North America. Focused solely upon the study of poetry, it offered a truly alternative approach to that found in more traditional academic settings. Throughout the program's history few of its faculty possessed much beyond an M.A. degree, if that, (indeed the longest serving core faculty member David Meltzer possessed no degree whatsoever) yet the vast majority—and all of its core faculty through the years—were published poets actively publishing and pursuing further opportunities outside of academia.
The Poetics program endeavored to remain open to all manner of personal, poetical, and political incursions from outside, at least engaging and at best incorporating diverse and often contestatory ideas from the wider artistic, political, and intellectual community of the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Such study was deemed far more useful, in both the short term and the long run, for the young student-poets, as it gave them a ground from which to work, rather than merely a context, i.e. the workshop, within which to work. As critical evaluations of the Creative Writing MFA industry continue to build on the work of writers like D. G. Myers (The Elephants Teach), Mark McGurl (The Program Era), Eric Bennett (Workshops of Empire), and others, the example of the Poetics program illuminates certain alternative, indeed fundamentally different, ways and means of teaching the methods and materials of what we call Poetry to young practitioners of the art. The discussion(s) generated by this session will prove useful to a wide range of faculty, poets and scholars alike, interested particularly in USAmerican poetry of the late 20th and early 21st Century, more broadly in the literary history of the United States throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, and more broadly still in fundamental ideas of poetics across temporal, spacial, and linguistic borders. Looking closely at work by Poetics program faculty and alumni offers a glimpse of the formative years and ideas of a number of poets who have gone on from their experience in the Poetics Program to become key contributors to the national poetry community, as writers, editors, publishers, teachers, and even directors of writing programs at various institutions, extending the lineages they came to recognize through their studies at New College.

Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California, edited by Patrick James Dunagan, Marina Lazzara, Nicholas James Whittington has now been published by Vernon Press. See https://vernonpress.com/book/867 for more info including a list of contributors, table of contents, and excerpt.