Craft-Criticism and the Reformation of How "Poetry" is Taught...
(From my other blog)
In any English department, there are, at the least, three main "areas" or "groups" of inquiry/study/scholarship.
These three are:
Composition
Literature Studies
Creative Writing.
In a strange twist of common sense, however, there exists two competing and often antagonistically opposing camps: Those who see Literary Studies as the most important thing, and composition. Creative writing, interestingly, is a part of literary studies, NOT composition.
Think about it:
In most creative writing classes, students are required to read a "wide variety" of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works as well as the interpretations of the works of others. They may even be asked to read common literary criticism of works they are reading.
In Literature classes, students are required to read a wide variety of poetry. They are asked to engage in the interpretation of those works. They are generally asked to read common literary criticism of the works they are reading as well.
The only difference between a literature class is the output. Students in a creative writing class are expected to turn literary studies into literature. Students in a literature class are asked to turn literary studies into literary criticism. But while the output is different, the methods are generally the same.
Composition, on the other hand, concerns most of its work and scholarship with the actual processes that produce writing. It combines both the rhetorical tradition as well as the more recent "composition studies" tradition which is where most of the mainstream process orientated writing theories have come from.
Composition studies, since it is a forward looking inquiry, can do work into how to break genre lines. Literary studies can only, at best, recognize where the lines exist. This, in my opinion, helps to explain why most poetry that comes out of a poetry class is really, frankly, dull. We aren't teaching them to be innovators or revolutionaries. Rather, we're teaching them to look backwards, interpret, describe, and then mimic.
As I've said before, creative writing when it utilizes the literary studies approach to writing can only result in the fulfillment of a pre-determined idea, form, or conception of what poetry "is." And by "is," I mean what already has been.
Craft-Criticism
In Tim Mayer's book (Re)Writing Craft, there are several ideas that I think are just crazy enough to work. The main one is his idea of craft-criticism.
When Mayer's talks of craft, he's not talking about what most in creative writing think when they think of craft: technique. Rather, Mayer's argues for a radically exploded definition of craft that is so wide that it can even question its own tenants. Craft-criticism in this formation can even be utilized to address the question of "what IS craft, anyway?" and "what IS the function of the poet-critic."
Academic literary criticism is preoccupied with the question of interpretation. Craft-criticism, while it may use interpretation as a tool, is more concerned with the question of production.
Literary criticism asked "what does this mean?" Craft-criticism asks "how can this happen?" One is always looking back, the other has the potential to look forward.
Craft-Criticism as Radical Pedagogy
In a sense, this is what I am trying to set up in my advanced poetry class. A community of writers who are engaging in craft-criticism. Why this is so radical is that it turns the current-traditional pedagogical methods of creative writing completely upside down and runs the risk (although a healthy one) of turning its own guns on itself. By allowing and even encouraging craft-criticism to happen, the doors open to allowing harsh and brutal interrogations and investigations into the hows and whys of "creative writing" that have, traditionally, been feared to the point of censorship by the vast majority of those who teach creative writing.
The end result that I see in this is that it does something very important: It returns the power to the student over their own definitions of writing. It gives them a voice in their own writing processes, and a weapon to use against future attempts at order and institutionalized process censorship.