In the years since the publication of Mark McGurl's The Program Era (2011), scholars have reckoned with its central insights—that creative writing is shaped by the institutional matrices in which it is produced, and that the rise of the creative writing program has constituted an epochal shift in the history of North American fiction and poetry. The argument has become so entrenched as to feel like common sense, and a recent spate of scholarship has begun to extend and fine-tune the thesis in important ways. One of McGurl's main interventions was to focus on the role of the post-Iowa creative writing workshop; the two books discussed here allow that workshop to fall ever so slightly out of focus.Christopher Kempf's Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture shows how the discourse and practice of teaching "craft" in "workshops," so integral to the modern MFA, originated outside of the university itself. Extending McGurl's analysis to writers on the Left, Kempf demonstrates how "the term 'workshop' was taken up by diverse factions of writers and educators in an effort to reframe literary production as a particular, politically determined mode of labor" (3). In Kempf's analysis, both the form (workshop) and content (craft) of creative writing pedagogy in the university are rooted in the American Arts and Crafts Movement (active during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth), a movement enmeshed in Left debates about labor and its degradation. The history of creative writing in the university, Kempf shows us, is a tale of subsumption: "Like almost every other avant garde, craft was . . . commodified within and tactically redeployed by the professionalizing machinery of postwar higher education" (158). Kimberly Quiogue Andrews's The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University supplements McGurl's argument not by moving outside the university, but by moving around within it. If Kempf estranges the creative writing workshop by historicizing it, Andrews dethrones it by focusing on the unsung impact of other university disciplines on creative production. In Andrews's hands, the story about the institutionalization of literary forms is incomplete without a broad view of a range of educational disciplines. Her study, then, walks us down the hall—from the creative writing classroom to the department of literary studies. In the latter, she finds the home of "critical thinking," a difficult-to-define metaperspective on one's own thought and writing that proves a crucial influence on a subgenre of poetry she calls the "academic avant-garde." Taken together, these books form an important complement to McGurl's ideas. They also complement each other. Whereas Kempf's study provides a primarily diachronic account of the formation (and cooption) of the language and practice of literary craft, Andrews's provides a mostly synchronic account of the formal encoding of the language and practice of "critical thinking." They both highlight the centrality of labor—nonacademic and academic, respectively—to twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetic production.Kempf's book offers a "distinct genealogy for the discipline" (6) of creative writing. Things kick off in 1912, with "George Pierce Baker's recommendation to use the term workshop for a course in playwriting" (29). Kempf situates Baker's recommendation in the context of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, which had helped repopularize the term as part of a historically inaccurate conflation of "earlier forms of guild craftsmanship with the proto-industrial workshop" (10). Following Marx, Kempf observes how, in fact, the workshop "marked a transition between skilled hand craftsmanship and the alienated work of the factory." This historical insight injects "workshop" with the real ambivalence it will continue to carry throughout the twentieth century: "Far from some medieval other to capital," Kempf writes, "workshop names a critical waypoint in capitalist development, a juncture as contested in sixteenth-century textile shops as it remains in the creative writing classroom" (11).The first chapter focuses largely on Baker's inf luential "47 Workshop" and on "a genre since expelled from standard creative writing curricula: the drama" (32). The modern-day workshop often entails a group of students seated around a table, offering feedback on each others' writing. This version of the workshop, we learn, owes its shape to a genre that required a mechanism for group feedback: "For Baker, the self-expression of the playwright was tempered by the workshop's collective stagecraft, as work committees for scenery painting and stage lighting, for instance, ensured the maintenance of rigorous technical standards—on these committees, the playwright became merely one worker among others." Over time, the workshop form of a once literally collective process of production would come to apply to the more solitary artistic production of poetry and fiction.After his account of Baker, Kempf tracks the fate of the literary workshop, and the American Arts and Crafts principles it encodes, as it migrates "through the 1930s Left to reenter the ambit of US higher education" (106) in the famous case of Black Mountain College. Black Mountain is treated at length in the third chapter—one of the book's best. Whereas the prior chapter considers the invocation of craftsmanship "as an instrument of proletarian revolt," this one shows the artists at Black Mountain "invoking craftsmanship . . . as an exercise in self-transcendence" (104). For many, Black Mountain is synonymous with Charles Olson—influential rector, teacher, essayist, and poet. Kempf refreshingly keeps Olson at the margins of his story, focusing instead on the influence of a pair of visual artists, Josef and Anni Albers. The Alberses, one-time students of the Bauhaus, bring its craft ideal across the Atlantic, ultimately incorporating its philosophy into American (and pre-Columbian) craft traditions. The Alberses's mixed-media artistic practice embodies a craft sensibility that reappears, perhaps most famously, in the "significant craft" (104) of poet Robert Duncan (Kempf adopts Duncan's phrase for the chapter's title). Kempf suggests, for instance, that Anni's 1958 weaving Open Letter—which "recalls . . . a patchwork grid of fields and farmland as seen from above"—may have influenced Duncan's concept of "open form" and his style of "field poetics" (128). Kempf takes as keen an interest in the poetry as he does in the nuances of the Alberses's glass, textile, and drawing work; that latter interest brings to life the sort of excitement Duncan and others would have felt as writers sharing actual space with the craftspeople.Throughout the book, which includes readings of work by John Dos Passos, Meridel Le Sueur, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Richard Hugo, and Margaret Walker, Kempf shows us that the idea and practice of craft does not, in some transhistorical way, either subvert capital's deformations of labor or contain that subversion. Ideas and practices of craft, rather, evolve dialectically, often ushering in the sort of transformations they once resisted. As Kempf puts it, the workshop "resisted the hegemony of new industrial-corporate and informational-corporate regimes even as, in other ways, it labored those regimes into existence" (9). Craft signifies, in other words, a potential mode of resistance that turns and is turned in various directions, over time. In its most recent turning, the university has enshrined it as part of "a falsely nostalgic lexicon evocative of work practices the university itself has helped to render obsolete" (17), insofar as the university "perpetuates cultural and economic frameworks hospitable primarily to its core constituency: the professional-managerial class" (18).The title, Craft Class, is a double entendre—at least. Most obviously, the book is about the history of classes in which craft is taught. Subtextually, the book is also about the fact that those who teach and are taught the craft of writing form a social class. But even beyond that, the lexical ambiguity of "craft" in the title (it can operate here both as an adjective and a verb) allows the phrase to express a yet deeper subtext in which class becomes the object of a commanded crafting—something we might do more deliberately. Remaining focused on literary history, Kempf sidesteps the sometimes acrimonious debate on the Left about the status of the professional-managerial class as a class in the Marxist sense; but he uses the term, and, by implication, he acknowledges that the institutions that have taken over the craft ideal have real class-crafting powers.1 Ultimately, he leaves it for us to ask if his study offers a genealogy not only of a discipline but of one flank of the famously motley group of laboring, relatively wealthy, nonowners of capital that is the professional-managerial class. The book's final claim is stated negatively. To ignore the institutional history his book has just tracked, he writes, "is to imagine that we could ever exist outside of those institutions, to imagine that we are not, even now, the real class they are crafting" (225). The sentence surprises readers with a renewed sense of their own class belonging, and it charges them implicitly with the task of figuring out what that class really is and how it works.While Andrews does not flesh out a theory of the professional-managerial class, her study does offer an explication of Kempf 's riddle about the connection between teaching linguistic craft and crafting classes. To do this, Andrews leans on sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner's theory of the intellectual class. Andrews is particularly interested in Gouldner's assertion "that class sensibility can be formed through language, rather than language being merely an effect of socioeconomic positionality" (23). But her book's main stake is not in a theory of class formation; what she takes from Gouldner, instead, is his neat formulation of the intellectual class's defining feature: its "culture of critical discourse" (22). This culture, in Andrews's rendering, is one that prizes "thinking about thinking, and being able to express the very conditions that allow oneself to have expression" (24). It is also, as it turns out, an aesthetic.Andrews's book is an elaboration of a kind of common sense. The introduction begins by extending Ron Silliman's metaphor that "the university is the 500 pound gorilla at the party of poets" (1). That the university has had an enormous influence on self-styled experimental, avant-garde, and innovative poets, especially, seems self-evident. The difficult poetry they write does seem to have an obvious rapport with the cultures of reading sponsored by the university. But if many would take that rapport to be a kind of answer to the question of difficult poetry, Andrews's questions begin just there. What constitutes, exactly, the relationship between avant-garde poetry and the academy? Andrews answers that question by looking past mere institutional affiliation, probing instead the ideological fascia of "critical thinking"—an aspect of university culture that binds disciplines from across the humanities, including literary studies. While we typically understand the work of literary studies to be to interpret texts, Andrews "makes a case for the poetic possibilities of the work of literary studies" (2; my emphasis). The tools of reading become the tools of writing the texts we read.Andrews's first case study is, appropriately, Wallace Stevens—a poet proud of his philosophical abstraction and explicitly interested in "academic discourse." Andrews's local insight that Stevens's "thought forms pre-empt the philosophical reader" (27) is well worn. But her larger project revitalizes that understanding of Stevens's poetry as philosophical by placing him in a continuum of poets who aestheticize academic critical thinking more broadly. While Stevens was influenced specifically by "the active laboratory of educational policy" (30) that was Harvard in 1901, and by "the dominance of philology in turn of the century English departments" (27) more generally, Andrews stops short of arguing that Stevens's poetry is the result of an iron-clad connection to specific forms of humanities scholarship. As is the case throughout the book, the two run "parallel" and exhibit "a spectrum of interdependence" (15).The chapter on Stevens functions as a kind of extended introduction. With the exception of a reading of Melvin Tolson's midcentury work, the rest of the book focuses on figures from the later twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Chapter two focuses on John Ashbery; chapter three on Jorie Graham; chapter four on a group of poets, including Claudia Rankine and John Keene; and chapter five primarily on Susan Howe. The last two chapters, ranging widely and attentively across multiple poets, make the book's most compelling case for the existence of the "subgenre" (academic avant-garde poetry) the author is naming. In addition to advancing scholarship on the relationship between creative writing and the academy, the explication of this subgenre also provides a new way of tracking the relationships between contemporary poets and their forebears. Chapter four's reading of Keene and Rankine as heirs to the citational work of Melvin Tolson, for instance, is a significant contribution to scholarship on contemporary Black poetry and poetics, as it situates the seemingly sui generis Tolson at the headwater of a contemporary poetic tradition characterized more by "racial analysis" than by "racialized experience" (121). Triangulating Tolson's extensive use of footnotes in Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), Rankine's citational practice in Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), and the interdisciplinary methods of Black studies allows Andrews to account for the development of a kind of Black writing less focused on expressing racialized subjectivities than on thinking critically about the formation of racialized subjecthood itself.Andrews's key concept, "critical thinking," is one she hopes to sharpen and repurpose (it is "normally a milquetoast bucket into which we put vague hopes of a better citizenry") (11). Much of the book attempts to sharpen our sense of critical thinking, as it appears in poems, by demonstrating its relationship to certain strands of poststructuralist thought. Ashbery's self-critical poetry looks like the self-critical criticism of Derrida and de Man (59); Keene uses "the language of deconstruction and identity studies" (138); Rankine "foregrounds . . . analyses inflected by poststructuralism" (147); and Howe straddles "the poststructural impulse to separate signifier from signified" and "the historicist tendency toward . . . material evidence" (168). This academic avant-garde is largely, although not completely, a theoretical avant-garde. While Andrews does not argue explicitly that (mainly French) theory is the predominant mode of critical thinking these poets "lyricize" (11), the book spends most of its energy tracking parallels with poststructuralist reflexivity. Other kinds of reflexivity—say, of the historical materialist variety—get somewhat shorter shrift.Andrews's book—full of phenomenal close readings of the actual poetry—does not simply use theory to interpret primary texts. Rather, she finds that those primary texts already apply the sort of thinking other critics might have brought to their reading. Method, here, is not the critical subject (a tool for the reader of poetry) but its object (a tool for the writer of poetry). This inversion is particularly clear in chapter five, titled "Archival Authorizations," where, instead of the critic proclaiming her own participation in an "archival turn," she traces "the nuanced effects of various archival 'turns' in scholarship making their way into avant-garde poetics" (189). Andrews does have a method herself—and it's a deliberately heterogeneous one. The book is by turns historicist (with regard to pedagogical and institutional history), biographical (with regard to the writers' actual proximity to literary critical environments), and formalist (in its close readings). Andrews justifiably eschews a historical narrative of poetry "that would move it from point A to point B over the course of the last half century" (7). While she might have productively placed her close readings in the context, say, of a more detailed history of the forms of literary criticism, her approach allows her to track surprising reappearances and recursions of academic postures among poets of different eras.Craft Class and The Academic Avant-Garde are two new entries in a fast-growing field of criticism focused on the nexus of poetry, poetics, and the history of education in the twentieth century.2 As I've shown, they share an approach, as each demonstrates the influence of one key, practical concept ("craft" in Kempf's case, and "critical thinking" in Andrews') on the form and content of the poetry they read. The books have complementary strengths. Kempf's reigning concept is more naturally coherent, and thus easier to historicize; the power of that historical intervention renders the close readings of that concept's impact on poetic form and content less significant to his story. Andrews's orienting idea, by contrast, is more naturally shapeshifting (it can appear in various guises, such as "critical discourse" of "reflexivity") and is thus difficult to historicize. That difficulty, however, allows Andrews to devote the bulk of her attention to the poetry itself—a focus that her own study helps us understand. "Academic avant-garde poetry," Andrews concludes, "crystallizes the form of literary studies in a way that literary studies itself cannot" (207). To think about what literary studies is today, we would be wise, Andrews teaches us, to think about the poetry in which it takes its most significant shape. Together, the books think creatively about the connections between poetry and arts education in general, moving beyond a focus on the specific relationship between poetry and institutional creative writing education. And together, they provoke us to think even further afield, searching for yet other ways artistic and educational forms might be read together.
Alex Streim (Fri,) studied this question.