Beyond the creative/critical divide: The metapoetics of innovative American writing

"Beyond the Creative/Critical Divide" suggests that the central categories of the creative and the critical present a rich array of difficulties---and that these categories have proven particularly problematic in the context of twentieth century American poetry. I make the case that hybrid literary works which contain both critical and creative elements---works which I describe as "poeticritical"---are of considerable importance to modernist and avant-garde literary movements. The writings of William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky all display poeticritical qualities, as do the writings of a number of postwar poets including Charles Olson, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein---yet little scholarly work has been done to characterize this writing as a genre with its own significance.; American experimental poets have challenged, and continue to challenge, creative and critical divisions of labor by seeking alternatives to conventional expository academic and journalistic literary criticism. One contemporary poet-critic, Lyn Hejinian, has recently written that among the most important shared premises of the Language writers are that "theory and practice are not antithetical," that "prose is not necessarily not poetry," and that "a poem is not necessarily a rarified aesthetic object." Such considerations animate much contemporary experimental writing, challenging received notions of aesthetic value and artistic creation.; With respect to American poetry and its increasing academicization over the course of the twentieth century, I propose that poeticriticism raises important questions about how poetry is predominantly taught and disseminated in contemporary American universities. Grouping a number of metapoetic texts under the rubric of poeticriticism draws attention to how these texts have been neglected---in part because these texts still trouble standard generic categories. Poeticriticism is not likely to supplant historical scholarship or lyric poetry, nor do I argue that it should. I make the case finally that too rigorous a separation of creative and critical activities within the university is detrimental to the reception, as well as to the ongoing production, of critically and politically engaged experimental literatures.