“Plerk,” “Plabor,” and a Conventional Caper: Redefining the Work and Play of Poetry Within the Discipline of English

Despite Wendy Bishop's call for all writing teachers to investigate " the basic commonalities of writing a poem and writing an essay " (190) few of us within the discipline of En-glish have attempted to transgress current intradisciplinary boundaries to reintegrate the seemingly discrete textual practices we associate with either composition-rhetoric or creative writing. In most cases, we have allocated the responsibility of teaching the production of different forms to different cur-ricular locations. Instruction in the writing of poems is most often reserved for upper-or lower-division creative writing electives; instruction in the writing of essays is usually considered the domain of the first-year composition course. Both these forms and the academic enterprises that have usurped them have lived divided institutional lives with some but little protest. As a result, composition-rhetoric has been allowed to remain the industry of rhetorical and discursive production and creative writing the respite of aesthetic and formalist recreation. Because, in higher education, the poem and the essay have been firmly entrenched within these seemingly incompatible enterprises, their functions have been restricted, their possibilities limited. Poems, under the fine arts model and extended New Critical paradigm, which have long dominated creative writing pedagogy, continue to be defined as isolated objects of art designed to provide audiences with pleasure and entertainment. Creative writing students are encouraged to use this genre to demonstrate their mastery of craft through formal and stylistic " play. " In other words, they are asked to experiment