The 95 Cent Skool

Right now in Oakland, the 95 Cent Skool is happening. 

Think about it.

The Skool--put on by poet, cultural critic, and professor Joshua Clover (a.k.a “Jane Dark”) and poet, editor, critic, and professor Juliana Spahr--is a six day long experimental seminar that promises NOT to include anything crusty and stodgy like a  “master poet” or “a Richard Wilbur Celebration Night.” Instead, Clover and Spahr have guaranteed that some thinking and some learning and some drinking might happen. Here’s their ethos/manifesto/statement of purpose/call to arms:

Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. 'Social poetics' is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.”

The Skool's occasion gives us a good opportunity to rehash last month's poetic brouhaha, when Clover spoke at the Re-Thinking Poetics Conference at Columbia University, and Rebecca Wolff –- poet, professor, editor of Fence magazine –- took issue.  In a piece that defies categorization entitled “Gluten: Essay with Redundancies, Embedded Open Letter to Juliana Spahr, Disclaimers, and Psycho-Political Unraveling,” Wolff took to the pages of the summer issue of Fence to explain just what was so insulting and wrong with the 95 Cent Skool ethos -- and what caused her to call M. Clover some nasty names at the conference.  You can read the entirety of Wolff’s essay here, but here’s a teaser:

What’s wrong, then, with Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr issuing a dictum, a decree, a gatekeeperish sort of sentiment on the order of—?

Here’s what’s wrong with it: The political efficacy of a social poetics cannot possibly merit the authoritarian and exclusionary nature of the 95 Cent Skool’s call. Spahr and Clover are, however inadvertently or unconsciously, wielding what I will call a “rapier of coolness,” by which they are meaning to dictate, and chop the heads off of those who fall outside of, the parameters of what is cool to do in poetry. If we follow them down the road they’re building, we abandon free thought for group fitness . . .

All of which makes it that much more interesting to follow the Skool's blog, Facebook page, and to continue to re-think the re-thinking about poetry.