Beyond University Walls

Charles Alexander

Chax Press, Poetics, & Being Outside the University in Crisis

What is the university?

What is poetics?

What is the crisis?

1979-1984: Chax Press begins as an outbreak from a university, where the practice of literature and poetics seems to be blocked by institutional careerism and a specific distrust of "the present." The subjects and poets I wish to study in my literary graduate program are denied. There doesn’t seem to be much support for creative thinking about poetry, at least as I am experiencing it. One poet, a grad student at my campus, goes so far as to tell me—after he learns of my support for the resistance poetics of the 1960s and forward—"we already fought those battles, and you lost." The university has not been transformed yet by European literary theory. But this is on the horizon. And the wagons are circling.

English departments in this period, when I was enrolled as a graduate student in the late-‘70s and early ‘80s, were particularly resistant to literary theory. And literary theory is what I associate with poetics as a field of inquiry. While English departments may have been uninviting to critical theory, comparative literature departments seemed to embrace these theories coming from Europe and abroad. They were just more open to theory. So two of my grad-school courses

How to Make Our Own Textbooks

Click On Handmade Book Images / Create (multimedia experiment)

Susan Mohini Kane

Rediscovering Living Art by Stepping Outside the University

Inside/Outside/Moving On from the University Structure

After twenty-seven years of teaching, I recently separated from the university. While I was inside the university, my duties were sharply focused and well-defined. I was qualified to teach vocal technique, vocal pedagogy, classical vocal repertoire, and opera

production; along with performing and teaching miscellaneous service courses. I was happy to do this teaching and administrative work for a long time. My areas of expertise encompass huge topics, rich with meaning and endlessly fascinating. I’ll always be grateful for the opportunities offered by the university, my time there—and especially for my students, many of whom are still in touch.