In 2014, poet Sharon Thesen gave a talk at a Creative Writing Conference in Vancouver about the state of Creative Writing and English Departments. Although over ten years old, this talk is still incredibly relevant to what she calls the “demise of originality” by “official, institution-mandated creativity that manufactures innovation for what the academy has decided is the public good” today and the need for creative writing resources that are not institution-mandated. In the talk, Sharon says:
Today, Creative Writing and the English Department are co-evolving, in order to gain research grant funding and fiscal credibility for the survival of both disciplines in cash-started Humanities facilities, a postliterature, ethically appropriate, technology-mediated creative and critical practice that can be marketed as innovative…The English Dept. was and is mistaken to treat literature as threatening rather than threatened.
Another relevant quote from the talk, Sharon says:
The arts—and the Humanities—have been justifying themselves for so long now that they have begun to adopt the positivisms of commerce, management, and health…What is missing in this picture is literature and poetry as art forms sufficient and powerful enough to sustain and continuously renew themselves in the service of human sanity. No discourse, no epistemology is, or should be, off limits to poetic imagination…When both the corporatized university and the globalized corporate economy are using the same concepts, the result may be one of the tragic ironies of our age if literature just disappears from common life. Art must somehow regain its ground…
You can read the full talk HERE: Creative Writing & Eng. Dept. (1)
Learn more with Sharon Thesen at the 9th Cascadia Poetry Festival THIS WEEKEND, October 10-12. Join Sharon Thesen’s workshop Friday, Oct. 10 on Investigative Poetry with the intention, as its most vocal practitioner Ed Sanders says, to ‘investigate the Abyss.’ The Abyss is anywhere you feel darkened, blocked, false, or un-permitted. What we want to try to do is to restore the vitality of poeisis and the dignity of the bardic voice.
You can register for a CPF9 workshop pass HERE. We hope to see you there!
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