Creative wreading

a primer

Charles Bernstein

pp. 275-281

in: Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr (eds), Poetry & pedagogy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

I am professor of poetry. I take the term literally. I profess poetry—profess poetry in a society, and often a classroom, where poetry is at best a half-forgotten thing, something confined to the peripheries of cultural imagination, a once grand enterprise perhaps, but today eclipsed by more compelling media. Many undergraduates have no experience at all with poetry and certainly little contact with poetry as an active contemporary art form. Indeed, college is a crucial site for the introduction, the continuing reintroduction, to poetry in both its historical and contemporary particulars.