Nancy Grace and Rocko Foltz ’21 co-publish essay on Beat Generation poet

Nancy Grace, professor emerita of English at The College of Wooster, and Rocko Foltz ’21 collaborated on an essay about the Beat Generation poet Ed Sanders that was recently published in the book The Beats and the Academy.

Grace and Foltz’s essay sheds light on Sanders’ work Investigative Poetry and his pedagogy. “Very little research focuses on Sanders even though he was such a powerful figure in the later Beat movement,” Grace said. “No one had written about his actual teaching, testing the method, and talking with his students about his presence in the classroom and what they learned or didn’t learn from him. It was a topic begging to be explored.” Sanders’ method focuses on the long poem as history and requires extensive research, or detective work, into the historical topic of the poet’s choice.

The Beats and the Academy is the first significant effort to discuss the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. “Bringing these writers into the academic space in an explicitly pedagogical way, as is the premise of The Beats and the Academy, recenters them as not only intellectually rich contributors to an American literary history, but also as intellectuals with legitimate contributions to the teaching, learning, and overall acts of reading and writing,” Foltz said.

Rocko Foltz ’21

Foltz first became interested in Beat literature and decided to major in English when they took Grace’s class Literature of the Beat Generation during their first year at Wooster. They continued to study Beat literature throughout their time at Wooster. When they shared with Grace that they had written a poem based on Sanders’ methods during their senior year, Grace invited them to co-author the essay for The Beats and the Academy with her.

In their portion of the essay, which investigated the book publishing industry, Foltz experimented with the method of Sanders’ investigative poetry, using glyphs, or drawings, as well as a musical arrangement. “I found it important to explore all of the mediums that Sanders himself might have taken to in order to tell a story,” Foltz said. “To me, this was important also because it directly confronts the concern of Beat studies not being considered an intellectually or academically rigorous field.”

Grace, a Beat scholar, was excited to work with Foltz due to their natural affinity for Beat experimental poetics and concentrated study of the field throughout their time at Wooster. “It is extremely rare for young scholars in the humanities to co-publish with a faculty member, and even with a senior scholar in the field,” Grace said. “But Rocko has risen to the level of publishing with a set of major twentieth-century American lit scholars, and their part of the essay, significant in its serious length, demonstrates the abilities of the College’s English majors and the value of working with a faculty mentor.”

Foltz recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, a program founded by Beat writers that Grace initially told them about. They are beginning a Ph.D. in English Literature at The University of Arizona in the fall. “Having written this paper with Grace has definitely demystified the process of academic publishing,” Foltz said. “As a first-generation college grad, it’s difficult to express how important mentorship like what I have experienced with Grace has been throughout my academic career.”

Image: Pictured is Nancy Grace, professor emerita of English at Wooster.

Posted in News on June 12, 2023.