Founded in 1991 by Robert Creeley, Susan
Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Charles Bernstein, and Raymond 
Federman,
the Poetics Program takes as its principle that literary
artists should teach not only the art of writing but also
the theory of writing practice, in both undergraduate
courses and graduate seminars. As the founding document
states, the the Poetics Program gives formal presence
to “an extraordinary concentration of interest in
poetics that makes UB unique among literature departments
in North America,” encompassing “subjects
well beyond contemporary English-language poetry.”
Its range includes ethnopoetics, the poetics of fiction
and ‘prose,’ of translation and, more generally,
the poetics of various literatures of the Western traditions.
As part of the English Department, the Poetics Program
draws upon critics and scholars from Comparative Literature,
Romance Languages, Art History, American Studies, Philosophy,
Music, and Media Studies. Its universe is an amalgam of
practice, theory, and textual study, with influences from
the literary avant garde, links to the graphic arts, openness
to critical theory, connections to the linguistic flux
and polyphony of modern diasporas, and a keen appreciation
of the cybernetic worlds of hypertext and digital media.
It has a fundamental and close working relationship with
the renowned Poetry
Collection of the University library and with the
vast web matrix of the Electronic
Poetry Center (EPC).
Poetics at Buffalo is committed to all methods
of analysis that open up poetry and other forms of writing
for inspection. It regards “poetics” as the
sum of the theoretical languages that define and inform
the term poiesis as construction and making. It recognizes
the literary text from its material existence—right
down to the ink and paper—to the labor that creates
it, its personal significance to the poet, and its historical
value to the culture that consumes it. It attends to its
relation to the human body, to speech and physiology,
to the poem as utterance and performance. It acknowledges
historical forces and philosophical movements, poetry
past along with poetry present. It is mindful of neuro-linguistics,
of speech acts, of the poetics relevant to a wide range
of cultures. Via ethnopoetics (which entails attention
to the ethnic specificity and regional locality of all
poetic practices) it considers both alphabetic and non-alphabetic
writing codes of the historical past and imaginary codes
of a potential present.
The implications of this multiple perspective are programmatic
as well as theoretical. The Poetics Program insists that
scholarship, historical research, and critical writing
are at the core of graduate education. The many visitors
who come to UB to read and talk as part of the “Poetics
Plus” program are integrated into the seminar work
of graduate students. As a result, Poetics has become
a major national and international center for the study
of modernist and experimental poetry and attracts an outstanding
range of students interested in both scholarship and creative
activity. The Program recruits students and scholars both
nationally and internationally making the the UB Poetics
Program one of the world’s most prominent programs.
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