There's a great post by Nick Sturm over at wewhoareabouttodie about the way that William Carlos William conceptualized of the poem as a machine. Sturm investigates this metaphor and argues that when we use workshop language to talk about poetry, we're really operating under the ideology of the poem as machine metaphor. For example, Sturm describes an imaginary workshop exchange, "Your poem picks up steam after these lines," he writes. And while he does not necessarily encourage this way of thinking, he insists that in workshops writers do this all the time.
It seems to me, at least for the teaching of poetry writing, that, to use a quote from Heather Christle that Sturm includes in his post, when the poet realizes she is a "bag or an owl" and the poem is "a new form of technology," she is partially freed from the notion that poetry springs forth whole cloth from an ephemeral muse. This recognition, no doubt, liberates the writer to get inside of the machine. To take it apart. To investigate its pieces. To see how they work together to produce meaning.
The poem as machine metaphor works precisely because it replaces the ehemeral idea of the poem, that unachievable ideal of perfection which has the power to make something physical happen within the very heart of the human being, with something mechanical. Something complicated. Something made out of gears and belts and pistons. Something which harnesses the power of fire, but something that we built for a very particular use: to transport us, in the case of an engine, from here to the Gulf of Mexico say. What ever the destination, the engine was most certainly built by human beings no more intelligent or capable than the Firestone auto-mechanic we see walking down the street, and that guy learned how to make engines like that work by going to school.
So the academy is the perfect place for the poem as machine metaphor which is not to say that this relationship is beneficial or good. In fact, as Mark McGurl has shown, the academy, like Ford Motors or GMC, only ever knows how to make particular kinds of machines: the kind that the culture (of the university or in general) will support with funding grants and student loans and more lovely free time to spend working on poems in the institution, manufacturing creative writing machines, and then becoming creative writing machines who produce exactly what the production system needs to keep the money coming from the government or the University's trustees.
This predicament is true, of course, about the arts in any human society, but never before has the University system been so preoccupied with not just installing but rabidly perpetuating creative writing programs of all kinds. This proliferation of institutionalized creative writing programs, for all its genuienly wonderful social benefits, can only have turgid formal effects for poetry. To pursue the poem as machine metaphor: in order to achieve anything truly poetic the craftsman poet must ultimately realize that the machine he uses to make the poem, which he learned in his MFA, is itself a machine to be junked in the scrapyard on his way to the poem.
