Interesting piece by US academic and poet Joshua Corey (spotted via Currajah) on poetry, institutional support, gatekeepers, and the relationship between what we make and how we make it. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the ongoing strategies of radical writer-reader relationships.

If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don’t sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I’ve found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one’s own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one’s work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees.

The possibilities of initiative are exciting at the moment in terms of self-promotion and potentially having so much more control over our means of production, at least in the brief window before Amazoogle takes over our very brains.

I’m curious what folks here think about the possibilities of ‘DIY’ (or is that entrepreneurialism?), and whether your work can or should be liberated from institutional gatekeepers? It seems to me that the academics don’t have as much of a stronghold here in Oz, but I don’t spend any time with academics or established poets. (Corey’s post is itself quite academic in tone and I had to read it a few times to get the threads.)

How do we avoid conformity and marginalisation? Perhaps I have misunderstood the concept of ‘strategies of failure,’ but I would like to think we have more strategies of resistance up our sleeve than bad writing.

It is an old problem of the Left in capitalist societies to embrace failure as a form of resistance. Can we have radical success instead? What do you reckon?