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The Poet in the University
- The University of Akron Press
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104 The Poet in the University Charles Bernstein’s Academic Anxiety ask an American poet where his or her paycheck comes from, and the most common answer, by far, will contain the word “university.” The phenomenon of the poet as professor is not new, but the predominance of the phenomenon has become striking, and it raises a number of questions. What is the effect on poetry? What happens to poetry’s reputation-making machinery when it becomes linked to America’s hierarchical system of academic institutions? What will the logic of publish-or-perish do to poets? How will promotions and tenure committees adapt evaluation criteria designed for more scientific fields to poetry? I can answer none of these important questions . I do hope, however, to put forward a hypothesis about a related question: how does the confluence of poetry and academe change the poet’s self-definition? Or perhaps that is too grand a claim. Perhaps what I really hope to offer are some thoughts about how entering academe affects the self-image of poets who established their reputations before entering the academy. Charles Bernstein has made that transition more successfully than any other American poet of his generation, but it did not come without a cost, paid in the currency of anxiety. A Short and Easy Commonplace Book The critic Gerald Bruns keeps a small selection of quotations, labeled 105 Poetry in a Difficult World “A Short and Easy Commonplace Book,” on his website. Here’s the first of the quotations: The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than root-cosmos. A strange mystification : a book all the more total for being fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world. In truth, it is not enough to say, “Long live the multiple,” difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n -1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n -1 dimensions . A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and crabgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. (6) The passage comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and has become a kind of touchstone for many critics and theorists concerned with the heterogenic and non-hierarchical nature of thought. The next quote is also concerned with heterogenic and non-hierarchical ways of thinking: Within the academic environment, thought tends to be rationalized— subject to examination, paraphrase, repetition, mechanization, reduction . It is treated: contained and stabilized. And what is lost in this treatment is the irregular, the nonquantifiable, the nonstandard or nonstandardizable, the erratic, the inchoate. Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that’s what I want from it, what I want to say about it just here, just now (and maybe not in some other [34.228.7.237] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:45 GMT) 106 The Poet Resigns context). It leaves things unsettled, unresolved—leaves you knowing less than you did when you started. There is a fear of the inchoate processes of turbulent thought (poetic or philosophic) that takes the form of resistance and paranoia. A wall (part symbolic, part imaginary) is constructed against the sheer surplus of interpretable aspects of any subject. You fix upon one among many possible frames, screens, screams, and stay fixed on that mode monomaniacally . Such frame fixation is intensified by the fetishizing of dispassionate evaluation not as a critical method but as a marker of professional...