Trade Secrets: Poetry in the Teaching Machine

This essay explores the ways in which experimental writers who work as professors must reconcile the difficulty of their creative work with the explicatory demands of pedagogy. It takes as its main case study the way in which Jorie Graham's poetry exhibits a deep ambivalence about epistemological authority that can be meaningfully tied to the solidification of her academic career. Her work reveals a fundamental truth about the nature of academic discourse in the humanities: it affirms our sense that the dissemination of "critical thinking" is both necessary and socially relevant, while at the same time drawing itself away from sites of pedagogical disclosure, calling attention to the necessity of "obscured" modes of discourse both to the creative and to the academic-hermeneutic process. The simultaneity of this affirmation and anxiety is performed through the dialectical motions of secrecy and disclosure. Ultimately, Graham registers our best hopes for the possibilities of the creative writing program precisely insofar as she challenges the demand for rhetorical clarity and easily parsed choices of "craft" that have come to characterize many such programs. The central tension of this kind of "academic" poetry thus becomes one between the competing interests of the university as it comes to regulate both the consumption and production of literature.