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Dennis Nurkse
Dennis Nurkse (Poetry; published as D. Nurkse) is the author of eight books of poetry, including Burnt Island and The Fall (Knopf, 2005 and 2002). He received the Whiting Writers Award, two NEA fellowships, two NYFA fellowships, two awards from Poetry (Chicago), and a Tanne Foundation grant. Dennis' work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Times Literary Supplement (London), Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and the Best American Poetry series. He has taught advanced workshops at The Writer's Voice, The New School, and the Brooklyn College MFA Program. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence. Selected Publications: Burnt Island (Alfred Knopf, NY, 2005) The Fall (Alfred Knopf, NY, 2002) Teaching Philosophy: Most stages of the education process are passages-rungs on a ladder, preparations for a future in which abstract skills will be concretized. A low-residency MFA commitment is radically different. It"s a decisive chance—for some students, a one-time chance—to claim an artistic vocation and make it real. It demands a special pedagogy. The most important teaching goal is to foster the autonomy of the artist, the individual voice. The teacher"s job is two-fold: to encourage wild experiment, and to shore up technical skills which may impede the free flow of the imagination. In both cases, the teacher will tailor the program to the student. We live in a time of astonishing artistic diversity and possibility. There are huge differences of opinion as to what constitutes poetic success. My role is to help writers find their own paths. I don"t really believe in success or failure. When I feel successful, I may be just imparting received ideas; and I"d rather see an ambitious setback than a formulaic achievement. Having said that, it"s been thrilling and instructive to see students set themselves deeply personal goals—to write without judgment or to develop a philosophical vision, to abandon "polish" or to master eloquence, to write spontaneously within specific forms or to invent new forms—and realize them without compromise. With first and second semester students, my basic model is a detailed written response to a text. I prefer not to write on the margins of a student"s work: I think this inevitably conveys a sense of "correction," and it can be confusing if I"m trying to convey an ambiguous idea. The "creative thesis" and "critical essay" semesters are different. As the goals are time-bound, I stress more "live" communication, perhaps a few hours of phone conversation within a month, and more frequent exchanges; the focus will be highly specific and it"s problematic for the student to be working without a sounding board. Exercises are always available, but I don"t lead with them. Wide and passionate reading is absolutely essential. Students are encouraged to develop their own strong opinions—including, if necessary, deep dislikes of iconic figures. "Annotations" have frequently been wild; personal and idiosyncratic engagements with topics like the ghazal in America, pilgrimage in Seamus Heaney, point of view in Gilgamesh, or music versus idiomatic accessibility in translation. Finally, it"s my job to create a climate of safety, a net for high wire acrobatics. Writers need self-awareness and technique; they also need to be able to forget themselves. My responsibility is to respond honestly to the student"s work at the most minute level of detail, but always to provide support, to practice dialogue rather than monologue, and to be open to the unknown. ^top
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