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School of Unlikeness: the Creative Writing Workshop and American Poetry

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School of Unlikeness: the Creative Writing Workshop and American Poetry School of Unlikeness: The Creative Writing Workshop and American Poetry Sarah Cohen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Jeanne Heuving Jessica Burstein Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English University of Washington Abstract School of Unlikeness: American Poetry and the Creative Writing Workshop Sarah Cohen Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Brian Reed English This dissertation is a study of the creative writing workshop as a shaping institution of American poetry in the twentieth century. It takes as its starting point the observation that in the postwar period the rise of academic creative writing programs introduced profound material changes into the lives of American poets, as poetry became professionalized within the larger institution of the university. It goes on to argue that poets responded to these changes in ways that are directly legible in their work, producing a variety of poetic interrogations of the cultural and psychological effects of the reflexive professional self-fashioning that became, partially through the workshop, the condition of modern literary life. In other words, as poets became students and teachers, their classroom and career experiences occasioned new kinds of explorations of identity, performance, vocation, authority, and the cultural status of poets and poetry. The cluster of concerns linked to the evolving institution of "creative writing" shows stylistically diverse works to be united, and also resonates with and helps to clarify the major debates within the poetry world over the past decades between the camps of the "mainstream" and the "avant- garde" or, as Robert Lowell put it in 1959, "the cooked and the raw." My dissertation examines a variety of iterations of the relationship between workshop culture and poetic production through case studies of the poets Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, and Jorie Graham. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: The School of Unlikeness …………………………………….. 1 Chapter One: Poets are Not Made in School: Assessing the Workshop and its Contradictions …………………………………. 7 Chapter Two: Raw Poems in Cooked Classrooms: Robert Lowell and the Poetics of Vocational Self-Fashioning ………………. 50 Chapter Three: Tone-Deaf and Unteachable: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Women in the Midcentury Workshop …………….. 101 Chapter Four: The Daily Business of Revelation: Theodore Roethke’s and Richard Hugo’s Pedagogical Poetics …………………. 146 Chapter Five: Ravel and Unravel: Jorie Graham and the Charisma of Routinization ……..…………………………… 195 Bibliography ……………………………………….…………………. 235 i Preface: The School of Unlikeness When first I knew Thee, Thou didst lift me up so that I might see that there was something to see, but that I was not yet the man to see it. I knew that I was far from Thee in the region of unlikeness, as if I heard Thy voice from on high: I am the food of grown men: grow and you shall eat Me. —Augustine, Confessions1 The two poets who bookend this study, Robert Lowell and Jorie Graham, both use the same phrase from Augustine’s Confessions to provide the title of a book of poems. The phrase, regio dissimilitudinis in the original, means land or region of unlikeness, a place where, according to Augustine, the soul wanders, estranged from God. In this land, spiritual exile means not only separation from God, but also from the ability to discern “likeness”—to make meaning. Without this meaning-making ability, Augustine’s phrase suggests, nothing can be grasped or understood; in a land of pure singularity, there is only confusion and distress. It is not surprising that Augustine’s phrase would be an evocative one for poets attempting to create meaningful poetic expression amidst the radical dislocations of the second half of the twentieth century. Estranged from nation and culture by war and social change and estranged from the self and from language by psychology and philosophy, postwar American poets have often seemed to themselves and to critics to be wandering, like Augustine, in a land where old ways of making meaning— “likeness”—have dissolved, leaving only fog. “What is the purpose of poetry, friend?” the title poem of Graham’s 1991 Region of Unlikeness aptly inquires, for in the regio dissimilitudinis no such purpose—expression, communication, beauty, truth—seems sure and stable. While Lowell and Graham may have wandered in imagination in a realm of estrangement and uncertainty, however, they spent much of their actual time, and formulated many of their 1 ideas about the “purpose of poetry,” in a world that seems the opposite of the regio dissimilitudinis: the professionalized, bureaucratized postwar university. As professors of poetry, Lowell and Graham and a host of their contemporaries have spent their careers not in any literal scene of disconnection but in a land of classrooms and chalk, of office hours, faculty meetings, and grade sheets, where they have provided instruction in creative writing and professionally embodied the role of “poet.” But while the university as an educational and research institution may seem to specialize in the identification and dissemination of meanings—of “likenesses”— the creative writing classroom is in many ways a regio dissimilitudinis. Unpredictable, irrational, and, for practical purposes, useless, “creative writing” is at odds with its professional and bureaucratic setting; it purports to turn creativity into a curriculum and self-expression into a group activity. Furthermore, as poets have actually enacted it, the poetry workshop, creative writing’s central pedagogical instrument, is a scene of education in which the value of all instruction is continually questioned, and in which acts of discernment are attempted against a persistent recognition that poetic judgment is a matter of utter subjectivity. “You’ll never be a poet,” Richard Hugo begins in his classic workshop textbook The Triggering Town, for example, “until you realize that everything I say . is wrong.”2 “Unlikeness” is the condition of the workshop not only because of its dissimilarity to its university setting or its openness to a pedagogy of contradictions, however, but because as participants attempt to reach a consensus of judgment (or even as an instructor imposes such consensus) the workshop allows poets to register the struggle of meaning-making; signification takes on an actively dialectical relationship with incommunicability and meaning becomes a process rather than a fixed point. Borrowing Augustine’s term, the workshop is an institution of paradoxes, a “school of unlikeness.” 2 “School of unlikeness” is also an apt descriptor for the poetry workshop because Augustine’s topic is, ultimately, education. “I am the food of grown men; grow, and you shall eat Me,” God tells the troubled young seeker. Passage out of the land of unlikeness, then, can be gained over time—can be learned. Spiritual communion—or poetic inspiration—is not innate and predetermined, but a matter of maturity; a phase of apprenticeship in which one can only begin to “see that there [is] something to see” must be traversed, with guidance from a voice “on high.” Furthermore, the narrative of this spiritual and intellectual journey is for Augustine himself the stuff of writerly material. As workshop poetry coincided historically and biographically with the genre of personal lyrics termed the Confessional, it is perhaps intriguing to consider Augustine’s regio dissimiltudinis in the Confessions as an antecedent of the stories of individual disorientation around which many workshop poets have structured their work. “Unlikeness” is also a rich term for the poetry workshop because while for Augustine it may be a purely negative state of mind, it is for the workshop a source of strength as well as of weakness. As a comparative term unmoored from context, it connotes not only a discomfiting inability to make connections but also a transformative ability to create new realities where none existed previously. “Unlikeness” speaks to a valorizing sui generis understanding of creativity, one that may be at odds with most of the practices of the university but that can also be seen as in step with its progressive values of intellectual invention and social mobility. In this sense, it helps to illuminate the ambivalences with which university study and teaching have presented poets. As they have worked within the “school of unlikeness,” these mixed feelings and paradoxes have been a fruitful source of poetic invention and engagement. Chapter one, “Poets Are Not Made In School,” begins to give specific shape to these ambivalences and paradoxes. Tracing the history of the workshop, it suggests that questions and 3 debates about the nature of poetic meaning and value were already being contested during the late-nineteenth-century origins of academic “creative writing.” Poets’ theorizations of the workshop from the 1950s to the present day also detail the way that the workshop can serve as a locus for larger debates about the nature of literary authority, poetic vocation, and the relationship between a poem, its author, and its readers. The chapter argues that for twentieth- century poets, engagement with these debates through the workshop can be an important step to forming a poetic identity. Furthermore, the very plurality and democracy that the workshop format, at its best, encodes can help poets think toward a mode of writing that engages the epistemological complexity of postmodern thought. In chapter two, “Raw Poetry in Cooked Classrooms,” debates about the workshop coalesce around an individual figure and body of work. The chapter argues that Robert Lowell should be seen as an exemplary figure of early workshop culture and a bridge between the heroic poetics of high modernism and what Mark McGurl calls “the program era.” In Lowell’s influential work, particularly his “breakthrough” volume Life Studies, the experience of the workshop is transmuted into a larger examination of modern vocational identity.
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