What does it mean to be an academic poet? Are poets affiliated with undergraduate or terminal degree programs at universities necessarily part of the “establishment” against which experimental, collaborative, spoken-word and visual poetries rail? By being the products of, and supported by, the institution of the university, are they doomed to write uninteresting, homogenous poems, and teach their students to do the same? 

Or can they use the security and ready-made audiences found in the university setting to introduce and/or produce fresh, avant-garde literature that brings in traditions other than those emphasized by the classroom format? 

This month’s Main Street Reading Series reading event, the second in the year-long series organized by Emeritus Professor of English David Young and three student interns, presented two divergent examples of the academic poet. 

Readers should be reminded that the academic creative writing career path, one that has the university and “writing workshop” at its center, is a relatively new one.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the oldest program of its kind in the United States, opened its doors in 1936, and only in the latter half of the twentieth century has the country begun to see an outcropping of MFA writing programs at every turn of the highway.

Some writers have criticized the prevalence of the programs for producing too many writers too quickly, and have even gone so far as to say that the work produced within “the workshop” tends toward the homogenously mediocre and dully anti-lyrical.

Writers who emerge from these programs intent on teaching college creative writing classes, say the critics, are often ill-equipped to judge or advise student work, but with such a glut of poets on the nation’s hands, they have to go somewhere. There were even a few years in the ’80s during which the death of poetry was declared nearly on a weekly basis, and the academic poetry career denounced as conspiring murderer. 

Don Bogen, professor of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and the first reader on Main Street’s program, left his poems not dead, but surely gasping for air. 

Bogen has a number of poetry and other credits to his name, including a 2003 Fulbright Senior Lectureship in Spain and three books, so someone is giving his work artificial respiration in the form of honors. However, most of the poems he read Sunday night felt hollow, as though he had held a good glowing idea in his hand and scooped it out. 

“I’ve been interested in writing poems about things… different kinds of things, in their contexts,” he said as an opener, and introduced Rainer Maria Rilke’s word “dingedicht,” or “thing poem.” 

But the things did not appear in their contexts at all — instead they were a horse in “Thoroughbred” at a racetrack Bogen confessed to never having attended; a tree in “Palm” which the speaker describes in detail, but which seems to be attached to no land and observed by nobody; and household appliances.

The household appliances in the aptly titled poem “Among Appliances” at first promised to be more interesting, even after Bogen’s in-crowd comment “English majors will recognize the reference [to Yeats’s “Among Schoolchildren”].” 

However, the appliances also went the way of the palm tree with the tentative line, “Sometimes they seem like sheer marvels.” 

The idea behind much of what Bogen read seemed to be the relationship between people and things — or, rather, how things could be divorced from people, merged with people or turned into people.

In his poems, the refrigerator decides to defrost itself, the coat wears memory, the palm is twice as tall as a man; these are potentially surreal and loaded images, but Bogen failed to drive them home. 

Even when his work was about people, as it was in the sequence “Vaporizer,” which was about his children during a year spent in the south of France, he achieved a disconnect from their personhood that made the poem fall short of its promise.

Although prior to reading “Vaporizer” Bogen gave the audience a series of anecdotes his experiences in Europe, and mentioned his children by name, in the poem they were “the baby” and “the girl.” The baby and girl did very similar things as did the palm and the thoroughbred. 

As an academic poet, Bogen seemed to claim the nomenclature of “academic” over “poet” when, upon reading his attempt of the unabashedly silly “Paradelle” form — invented by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins — he talked the audience through it line by line. 

He then included a disclaimer that the lines were taken from ’60s pop songs to create the form, “not lines of poetry.” 

Before you stop reading and join the death march for poetry, let me introduce Stephen Kuusisto. Kuusisto has not run off to join the MTV poetry generation, has not said no to “the establishment,” even graduated from the mother of all MFA programs, Iowa, and teaches creative writing and disability studies at a total of three universities, but his delightful juxtaposition of adaptations of Finnish poetry and his own nonfiction lived and breathed good air.

Kuusisto is always introduced as having been born blind, but it is not an irrelevant note, since much of his writing deals with the experience of blindness. For this reason, he saw no point in ignoring the fact that his dog, Vidal, approached the podium alongside him. He also explained to the audience that he “read” his work by listening to a voice-recognition program on headphones and, as he put it, “simultaneously interpreting.” 

Kuusisto’s productive incorporation of his disability into his art is such that his versions of a few small and beautiful Finnish poems were, he claimed, the result of mistakes. 

He said that the recognition program which reads the original Finnish to him often makes mistakes, which results in the changing of the poem. To an unknowing audience, the mistakes were welcome, in such poems as “Columbus, what were you thinking? I’m the one who found India. Odysseus, I’m the only one who got home.”

Kuusisto also brought a rare change to the fiction- and poetry-dominated Main Street series by reading a selection from his nonfiction book, Planet of the Blind.

He began with an awkward airplane conversation in which his fellow passenger offers to cure his disability by having him walk across hot coals. Here Kuusisto demonstrated his ability to be bitingly funny as well as moving — when the passenger asks him how he went blind, he replies that he was born that way. 

“Were your parents blind? the passenger presses. /  Not at first, says Kuusisto. / Glaucoma? / Death. / All dead people are blind.” 

Another section of the book explored Kuusisto’s attempt to write a “sightseeing by ear” guide for travelers who are not privy to the endless “triggers” of visual tourism. He cites John Cage’s philosophy of looking for “soundscapes” in the everyday world. 

“If you really want to hear it,” he quotes, “you must imagine you are waking again and again.” 

This is difficult for Kuusisto, even with his hearing as his dominant sense. The crowning “compositional moment” for him turns out to be his dog and a housefly, who augmented a performance by a famous violinist and a high school orchestra. Listening, he concludes, is much slower than seeing, but it must be let in by chance.

If in the last week you had been thinking of writing a requiem for poetry, driving to Iowa City and protesting, or worse, considering moving to Pamplona to run with the bulls, think again. There is variation even in the establishment, and contrary to popular belief, the larger the establishment grows, the more difficult it is to standardize it.

There are poets who were born to be academics, and then there are poets who happen to be academics because the fishing boats and the cancer wards weren’t hiring people with M.F.A.’s. Let the work of the former die its slow death between the pages of magazines and on the dusty shelves of bookstores, and put your hands in the air for the latter. And go to more readings. Listening is slower (and sometimes better) than seeing.