About

The University at Buffalo Poetics Program was founded in 1991 and has since been a vital part of the English department and the broader poetry community. Recent administrative actions have placed the program in jeopardy. This site collects and presents updates regarding the program’s precarious position with the hope of making the situation clear for those left in the dark because of the administration’s lack of public statements on the issue. This situation is ongoing. The information here is represented to the best of our ability and is based off of the materials available to us. As new developments emerge, we will update this site as needed. We, as graduate students, value the program’s history and reputation and believe that transparency is a necessity.

updates

October 13, 2026 | Updates on Department Meeting
Graduate students are informed by email that the upcoming department meeting will take place in small groups divided by rank (full professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and graduate students). Each rank cohort will meet separately with the department chair. We are told this change is for “convenience.”September 28, 2026 | Meeting with CAS Dean
Faculty and graduate students meet with the Dean to discuss the chair rotation and its effect on the Poetics Program. At odds with the department chair’s explanation, the Dean claims that the reallocation of the chairs was based upon seniority and record, in accordance with historical precedent. The Dean insists that hiring will not take place for at least three years (the interim term of the endowed chairs) and will be contingent upon the department’s undergraduate enrollment, good behavior, and financial stability. Faculty point out that undergraduate enrollment has steadily risen over recent years despite significant faculty losses and that the department is making money for the college. The Dean also suggests that the department does not have a clear identity and cannot hire until it crafts a clear vision for itself. Faculty observe that we are being asked to envision a departmental identity when a major pillar of our existing departmental identity has been eliminated.September 12, 2026 | Department meeting #2
Faculty meet to discuss the impact of the chair rotation on the Poetics Program and consider options for responding to the change. Suggestions include writing a letter to administrators on behalf of department faculty, creating an intra-departmental resolution formally tying the McNulty and Gray Chairs to the Poetics Program, and the voluntary vacancy of the chairs. The department chair insists on the need for “practical solutions.” Students read another statement asking for clarity on the events leading up to the chair rotation. The students emphasize that funding without Poetics faculty hires cannot sustain the Program.VIEW STATEMENTSeptember 10, 2026 | Students meet with department chair
The English department chair invites Poetics students to a meeting to discuss the state of the program. At the meeting, 19 graduate students deliver a written statement explaining their position. The statement asks the department to push administration for immediate Poetics hires into the Gray and McNulty chairs, which would restore funding and autonomy to the program. The department chair suggests a meeting between students and the CAS Dean.VIEW STATEMENTAugust 28, 2026 | Department meeting #1
During the first full department meeting, the new chair of the English department explains that the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences has reassigned the three endowed chairs within the English department. Two of these chairs, the James H. McNulty Chair and the David Gray Chair, have been the sole funding source of the Poetics Program since its inception in 1991. The chairs will remain in the English department, but will serve different faculty members who are unaffiliated with Poetics. The department chair names the three new chair holders, of which she is one, but refuses to disclose which faculty member holds which chair. The department chair explains that her endowed chair assignment was part of compensation negotiations. Graduate students later find out through external sources that the department chair was assigned the McNulty Chair, and her partner, also a faculty member in the English department, was assigned the Gray Chair.August 24, 2026 | Students are informed of funding loss and resignation
Poetics students are invited to a Zoom meeting, in which they are informed that funding for the program has been reallocated within the department without consultation of the Program director. The Poetics Program director resigns in response. There will be no programming this year.

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September 10, 2026 | Students meet with department chairTo begin, we would like to define the UB Poetics Program, so that we can move forward with a collective understanding of its history, local and national value, as well as its institutional purview and the conditions we believe will be necessary for it to continue to exist. The UB Poetics Program was officially founded in 1991 by renowned North American poets Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, Dennis Tedlock, and Charles Bernstein. It was founded as an alternative to both the MFA model and the traditional English PhD model; instead, it emerged from the idea that “practice overtakes theory, practice changes theory”—that poiesis, “the actual making or doing of poetry” has immediate and generative consequences for literary scholarship. Therefore, the Poetics Program is a methodologically singular entity in both the academy and literary history. It produces poetic scholarship and poetry that shapes the poetic canon.This year should mark its 35th year of innovative scholarship, community arts engagement, and experimental poetry—from artist’s books to publications by Guggenheim and Pulitzer-prize winning authors. The legacy of Poetics not only attracts strong graduate students, both in and outside the Poetics Program, but it also attracts famous speakers, readers, and even prospective faculty members to the English department and to the University writ large. What we mean to say is that beyond the Program’s cultural and community importance, the Poetics Program is a valuable asset of the University and should be considered as such.In 2024, the Poetics Program was strained by the decision not to open hiring lines to fill the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters and the James H. McNulty Chair after they were left vacant following the death of Tyrone Williams and the retirement of Myung Mi Kim respectively. It was our understanding that this temporary situation would be resolved as expediently as possible by hiring two full professors in Poetics to fill these chairs. And, despite the chairs’ temporary status as ‘empty,’ due to the ongoing administrative ‘hiring freeze,’ funds from the McNulty chair remained available to Poetics on an interim basis.On August 24th, 2026, however, we learned that the funding of the Program, coming through the James H. McNulty Chair, had been distributed to an English department faculty member unaffiliated with Poetics. The redistribution of funds from the McNulty chair was paired with the assignment of the formerly unoccupied David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, an appointment that is also traditionally* reserved for Poetics faculty. Again, the David Gray Chair was awarded to a faculty member not affiliated with the Poetics Program, and we believe that these decisions leave the Poetics Program without the support necessary for its survival. Poetics graduate students believe that this reallocation of funds will limit the Poetics Program’s reach, severely diminish the program’s autonomy, and potentially damage the reputation of the English department and UB as a whole.This apparent restructuring represents a devastating weakening of Poetics that materially harms graduate students, many of whom applied to and enrolled at UB specifically to carry out the tradition of the Poetics Program with the belief that these chairs would be occupied by Poetics faculty members from whom we could learn and with whom we could work and generate community. Loss of funding and faculty affects our development as scholars and stewards of language, as well as our access to scholarly and creative networks, mentorship, and opportunities. We fear that the reputation of SUNY’s flagship university is also at stake, since the reallocation of funds appears to result from a misinterpretation of the chairs’ purposes. The misinterpretation, and subsequent reallocation, portrays the English Department and the College as unaware of the Program’s historical and cultural significance and as negligent of its students’ needs. Every day, criticism and speculation grow online, as well as in conversation among poets, publishers, and faculty at other universities. The narrative, which cannot be controlled by the department, is that the Program is already “dead,” due to departmental austerity and disregard. We are here today because we do not want to see our program terminated, and we anticipate discourse around the decimation of Poetics will only increase if this error is not rectified immediately. Our perception is that if this narrative continues to spread, it will weaken not only the Poetics Program, but the English Department as a whole.In order for this error to be overturned, we will offer four key definitional requirements, which are necessary for the Program to exist:Subject Matter: a sustained focus on poetry and poetic theory, especially experimental and avant garde poetry and poetics.Pedagogy: by which academic work and teaching are fundamentally and structurally inseparable from the artistic praxis of the poet-scholar and creative and critical work are likewise integrated throughout graduate student experiences.Faculty: a core faculty made up of poet-scholars that share a common understanding of Poetics pedagogy.Community Programming: a commitment to organizing and supporting opportunities and events, centered around poetry, for the graduate student and wider community, supported by funding controlled by the Poetics faculty.In order to preserve Poetics as it is herein conceived, we insist that the English department immediately begins the process of hiring two poetics faculty members to permanently fill the McNulty and Gray chairs. We are aware that hiring decisions are approved by the Dean and cannot be pursued without agreements from the administration. Our ask, then, is to see the English department, spearheaded by the department chair, engaged in a vigorous and sustained campaign advocating to the College for Poetics faculty hires and an agreement to reallocate the Gray and McNulty chairs to these new hires. Graduate students will be making this case to the department, university, and the public as needed, and we hope to be joined by our faculty in supporting this important cause.*Though these chairs predate the Poetics program, they have been held by Poetics faculty since the establishment of the program.

September 12, 2026 | Department meeting #2On Thursday, September 10, 19 graduate students met with Ruth, where we read another written statement that has since been signed by twenty-six graduate students in the department. The statement delivered to Ruth in that meeting is the same one that everyone received in their inboxes last night.In summary, we argued that the Poetics Program doesn’t exist without four definitional requirements: (1) graduate courses with a sustained focus on poetry and poetic theory; (2) a pedagogical framework in which academic work and artistic praxis are inseparable; (3) a core faculty of poet-scholars; and (4) community programming organized and directly funded by those poetics faculty. The only way for the Poetics program to meet these four criteria and remain active is to begin hiring faculty in poetics. The hiring freeze that started three years ago, leaving the Gray chair empty and the McNulty chair held only in interim, is the root cause of our present crisis, which has been brought to a critical head by the reallocation of those chairs away from poetics.The loss of those funds represents a loss of autonomy that renders the Program effectively discontinued. While we’ve been told funding is available for some student-organized programming, those offers do not restore programmatic autonomy. It is this aspect of the situation that is causing social media backlash and reputational damage to the English Department and the University.In short, funding without faculty does not make a Program. As a collective, we’ve agreed that we’re interested in putting the bulk of our energy into pushing the administration to open hiring lines for Poetics faculty to fill both the Gray and McNulty chairs. We would like faculty to join us in applying this pressure.In our meeting, Ruth suggested students meet with the dean so we can voice our concerns directly. We agreed that this is a useful first step, and we would like the request to be made as soon as possible.Additionally, we believe there has been a lack of transparency surrounding the events that have led us to this situation. To date, we still do not understand why chairs that are historically tied to Poetics were moved, and we still don’t understand the short and long term consequences surrounding these decisions. We feel that having these changes explained to us in person has not led to a better understanding of the processes involved.We therefore request that the following questions be answered in writing:What are the events that lead to the Chairs being moved from Poetics faculty? Why were Poetics faculty not informed of these significant administrative decisions until after the fact? Why were they excluded from these conversations in the first place? How will this administrative change alter the way in which the funding tied to the Poetics chairs is distributed? Will chair funds be made available to non-Poetics related programming?If any faculty members want to discuss our plans with us further, they are free to reach out to us after this meeting. They are also free to ask us any questions in this meeting regarding our collective position on the present and future of Poetics. However, given that only a minority of the participating graduate students can attend this departmental meeting, those present may not be able to answer certain questions on behalf of the group. We will, however, record these questions and discuss them.