Polemics and the Age of Rage: Poetry Writing Students and the Lines between Polemics and Poetics

Many students come to the poetry workshop with preconceived missions and explicit goals for their writing. These often involve desires to expose injustice or to shatter some power structure: parents, church, boss, a spurning or abusive lover. Such impulses are natural and in large part crucial to the making of poems, simply because art is never purely an aesthetic enterprise devoid of historical context, stripped of real-world struggles, or personal crises. Scholar Morse Peckham, for example, interpreted the entire Romantic movement in terms of what he called “cultural transcendence, ” the drive of German, British, and American artists to critique culture in order to overcome its stultifying claims on the imagination (32). Still, in an increasingly “tell all ” contemporary culture—as well as in the aftermath of confessional and Beat poetry, with their forceful (and often misinterpreted) representations of personal trauma and social ills—the compulsion of many student poets to “rage against the machine, ” to reveal corruption, or to bear witness to personal and/or public sufferings, may have reached unprecedented heights. Such urges too often lead students away from poetics and into polemics, a movement that can seriously compromise the ability to create and understand poetry