About a year ago, as a 2nd-year student in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program, I was required to write a 10-15 page essay articulating my "poetics."
I think that this might be a good forum in which to post my response. If it were today, I might formulate some things differently (or more specifically), but the early sketching out of the problematic/desires I find myself writing into is there (I'll try to update/footnote/extend some things in the comments section). The whole exercise is maybe interestingly symptomatic, too, of what it means to write and exist ambivalently (/amorously) within the particular institution of the Iowa Writers' Workshop; I imagine that this is both usefully representative and divergent from the experience of students in other MFA programs, poets writing in the contemporary US, and others' within the Iowa program itself—so I'd welcome all those other perspectives into the fold. That said, my approach was to try to imagine ways out of the ideology of contemporary American poetry, as I experienced it. What was deemed impossible, within its borders? Wasn't that, in some respect, exactly what we wanted to be trying to do?
The essay comes in three sections, with an appendix (and an intermission!), but there are natural breaks—I'll try to post it so you can have a sense for the pacing.
[INTRO] [SECTION I] [SECTION II] [INTERLUDE] [SECTION III]
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