Punk Bodies, Jorie Graham, and the Draft Itself: Notes Toward a Lyric Formalism

As an MFA in poetry and something of an academic mutt who has worked for two decades in a single small department, regularly teaching creative writing, literature studies, and critical theory (and just about every other undergraduate course in English), I’m used to crossing borders. My MFA background compels me, for a number of reasons, to genuinely identify with both formalist and culturalist approaches to literature. That same background, along with a personal bent for philosophy/theory and years in the teaching trenches, compels me to value literary criticism right alongside literary production or art-in-practice. But no amount of boundary-crossing and certainly no single approach or discipline has ever seemed adequate to me in shaping our students’ relationship with language. What is wanted is a kind of literary study which (1) legitimately honors the literary text as somehow both discrete and contingent; (2) moves fluidly between the two understandings without at the same time erasing the friction between them, without, that is, intellectualizing the life out of seriously conflicting premises; and (3) brings both the creative writer’s and the critic’s mind into the act of literary appreciation, without forgoing the benefits and challenges of either.