Hmm …

… Looking for (Mrs) Laura (Riding) Jackson, the anti-social people’s poet, from Jamaica (Queens) to Woodruff Avenue (Brooklyn) | The Brooklyn Rail. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)



I'm not sure I follow this, but this is certainly to the point:

Riding’s judgment that craft was “suffused with a light drab of poetic secularity” suggested that it had replaced the religious truth telling activity of poetry. I wonder if she could have envisioned what would be “systematically going on” when teacher-poets came to institutionalize “craft-individualism” within the M.F.A. orbit. As Eric Bennett has recently written in “How Iowa Flattened Literature”: 

Within today’s M.F.A. culture, the worst thing an aspiring writer can do is bring to the table a certain ambitiousness of preconception. All the handbooks say so. “If your central motive as a writer is to put across ideas,” the writer Steve Almond says, “write an essay.” The novelist and critic Stephen Koch warns that writers should not be too intellectual. “The intellect can understand a story—but only the imagination can tell it. Always prefer the concrete to the abstract. At this stage it is better to see the story, to hear and to feel it, than to think it.”

Further proof that there is nothing that can't be effectively embalmed in the academy.