Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Future Chairman
After looking over Seth Abramson’s recent series of posts on poetry’s relevance, I think I finally figured out what he’s up to: he’s laying the groundwork for a future run at NEA Chairman. To test the theory, I put together a little quiz called “Who wrote it: Dana Gioia or Seth Abramson?”:
b/ “[W]hat we’ve become, as poets in America, is conflict fetishists…. But let’s be clear: there is no actual conflict.”
d/ “Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession—not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. Only a philistine would romanticize the blissfully banished artistic poverty of yesteryear.”
e/ “This isn’t the 1950s–when being a poet in many respects required buying into the counter-culture–which is a good thing, not because the counter-culture wasn’t just and justifiably attractive to young people, but because it’s never entirely “fair” to make being a poet part-and-parcel of personally adopting ideas and lifestyles (and even a couture) which are themselves tangential to Platonic Art.”
f/ “Business is a helpful shelter for this careful and introspective kind of writer because his job keeps him sufficiently occupied…. In some way hard to pin down, their jobs protected them from the occupational hazards of writing poetry. For whatever reasons, the profession of poetry is a dangerous one in America, perhaps because it is so damnably difficult to succeed at in any meaningful way. Some poets have literally killed themselves for fame, destroying themselves slowly in public before distastefully appreciative audiences. Suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, and madness are all too often fellow-travelers of poetry in this country…”
g/ “[T]he most efficient method for the expansion of the poetry community is, generally speaking, for the community to possess, as a sociological instrument, a single institutional strategy.”
h/ “The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. Each of the arts must face the challenge separately, and no art faces more towering obstacles than poetry.”
i/ “The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions—universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state—have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style.”
j/ “The avant-garde needs the mainstream, and vice versa; I think it’s time we accept it. And accept, too, that viewing this rift in the contemporary poetry community as a “hot” war is simply nonsensical; it’s a “cold” war in a bi-polar system of cultural capital both superpowers want and need, and whose continuation is vital to the survival and profit of both.”
k/ “The fundamental attitude all of us should take toward MFAs…is that, with 300+ graduate creative writing programs in existence–graduating 2,000+ young people each year–the MFA is the best opportunity to expand our community imaginable.”
l/ “There are about 250 graduate writing programs in the United States. They produce somewhere in excess of 25,000 MFA’s per decade, of whom perhaps 10% to 20% will find permanent, full-time employment teaching in the academy. A young poet is more likely than ever to go through a graduate writing program…”
Answers on the next page.
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That is really cool. Which of these passages are in context; any of them?
My favorite part is how, if you read all the carefully-chosen excerpts closely, there’s no connection between the Gioia ideas and the Abramson ideas. Like how Gioia says writers should become businessmen, and Abramson simply says there’s an important distinction between aesthetics and social culture.
This post is a serious stretch. Who said it: Abramson or Gioia?
– Seth Abramson
Dear Seth,
The context is the links I provide for each of the passages. Did you expect me to quote your posts in full?
I object to many things in your posts. I object to the idea that what this country really needs is a further professionalization–sorry, “legitimization”–of poetry; I object to the idea that poetry and/or poets need to be made safe for the middle class; and I object to the idea that the MFA is or ought to be seen as the key to ensuring poetry’s relevance.
But my post was not about my objections to your ideas. My post was about your attitude, which, like Gioia’s, treats poetry’s irrelevance as if it were (a) a problem and (b) a problem that might solved by a particularly dedicated group of McKinsey consultants. To wit:
I have nothing against McKinsey consultants; some of my best friends quite literally are McKinsey consultants. But what you wrote is not thinking about poetry. It’s arts-administrator speak.
All best,
Bobby
P.S. Gioia doesn’t say that writers should be businessmen. He says that writers shouldn’t not be businessmen. That’s a very different proposition, and one of his reasons for defending it–that business “shelters” poets from the literary demimonde–is not so far from your contention/complaint that “it’s never entirely ‘fair’ to make being a poet part-and-parcel of personally adopting ideas and lifestyles (and even a couture) which are themselves tangential to Platonic Art” and that MFAs have helped to correct this “injustice.”
Bobby,
I understand that you object to many things in my posts; that’s totally cool. Much of what I write is a public form of thinking out loud. My beliefs change over time. I only ask that you not misstate my opinions when you find it necessary to lambast me by comparing me to the most hated figure in contemporary American poetry. I wrote in the second edition of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook that MFA programs are art schools, not professional schools–an observation that carries with it the unique quality of jiving with the facts. I’ve since written a lot of mini-essays in “favor” of MFA programs. You say this represents a desire to further professionalize poetry; I say that I think we can expand opportunities for poets to practice their Art as artists if they get three fully-funded years to write in a setting where the faculty only engages them if/when they engage the faculty (meaning, you can, to an extent, just use it for time to write if you like). You think artists are so cowardly, or malleable (or stupid) as to be unable to weather an MFA program without being permanently intellectually crippled as to their life-long aesthetics; I don’t. What does any of this have to do with increased professionalization? The furthest I’ve gone is to say that one benefit of more jobs being available in the Academy is that they’re there for those who want them when the economy goes horribly wrong–that’s not the same as actually pushing poets to be professionalized.
I get it, I’m an easy punching-bag, because you can twist my ideas so that they seem like kneejerk, reactionary conservatism, and you can look like a defender of the Eternal Flame of Art. A purist. But don’t you think it’s laying it on a little thick when you say I want to make “poetry safe for the middle class,” when what I *actually* said is that young people often can’t envision themselves as poets because of the pernicious (that would be “bad”) middle-class influence of their parents, and that if MFA programs offer both fully-paid time to write and a way for young people to do an end-around past their parents, that’s not a bad thing? I mean, have you ever worked with kids? What kind of person says that, for the sake of upholding our hatred of all things middle-class (a hatred I generally share with you) we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and screw with teenagers’ lives–teenagers who could have contributed to poetry, if we hadn’t been so political as to cast them out of it with their middle-class parents? I mean, it’s easy to argue against a proposition, Robert, when you strip it of all its nuance.
Yes, I think poetry’s “relevance” is a problem, but in defining that “relevance” as a separate matter from aesthetics, and as something *other* than a matter of popularity, I’m hardly running with the herd–thus far I haven’t even been able to have a conversation with anyone about this, because everyone (including you) keeps falling back to the old conversation, in which “popularity” is weighed against “aesthetics” rather than thinking in terms of forms of community-building separate from either. You engage in community-building as a poet all the time; you’re doing it with this very blog. You do it by giving readings, by being editor-at-large for a literary magazine. I say that MFAs can be another fora for community-building, and suddenly it’s a threat to world peace. Are you serious?
Bobby, I can only question your motives when you quote back at me a paragraph I wrote which I subsequently added an *enormous* clarifying addendum to, which addendum said I was talking about esprit de corps, not groupthink. You’d rather your readers take “single institutional strategy” as some kind of aesthetic conservatism, when a) you know full well I wasn’t speaking whatsoever about aesthetics, and b) I was speaking of esprit de corps–the very thing you’re trying to plug into with this blog–and not the specter of fascism you want your readers to see. I mean, this is intellectual highway robbery, and you’re doing it right out in the open. I’d rather you came at the ideas head-on, rather than through snarky posts that intentionally abuse the ideas out of all coherence. If they’re as weak as you think, debate them.
Best,
Seth
P.S. The idea that one can be a poet without being a member of the social community of poets is a very, very old one. See Emily Dickinson. I think she came a few years before McKinsey. And she may even have predated Gioia.
Seth,
I’m not sure how quoting you verbatim, without annotations or commentary, can be construed as misstating your opinions. But you very certainly misstate mine: I am not a purist (aesthetic or otherwise), I don’t think that MFAs are universally corrupting, and I do not hate the middle class. (In fact I’ve defended the aesthetic legitimacy of self-consciously middle-class poetry in print.)
And perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t think I misread you at all. I understood perfectly well that you weren’t talking about groupthink or aesthetic conservatism, and I certainly wasn’t invoking the specter of fascism. What I object to–since you’ve now disavowed your first paragraph–is the sense that poetry needs more “esprit de corps–some sense of the value of the poet as poet, whatever his/her aesthetics.” Obviously it’s helpful to poets to have a real or imaginary community of which they’re a part, and just as obviously having such a community isn’t a strict necessity. But being a poet is not like being a member of a football team or a corporate working group. What we’re looking at these days is exactly opposite of the problem you suggest: an excess, not a dearth, of “the sense of the value of ‘the poet as poet.’” That’s why it’s so difficult to find honest (i.e. non-score-settling) negative poetry reviews and so easy to find expressions of poetic self-regard in our little magazines and poetry blogs.
Finally, I’m sure you would prefer that I would take on your ideas head-on–who wouldn’t?–and I have a little bit here. But honestly I didn’t think they were worth that kind of treatment. Of course you have every right to think out loud, and to change your mind, but if you’re going to publish your thoughts where the rest of the world can see them, then the rest of the world has an equal right to respond as we see fit. Life is not a college seminar, and easy dismissal is not always an inappropriate response. If you don’t want to be compared to Dana Gioia (whom I clearly don’t hate as much as you do) then don’t write like him, at least not in public.
All best,
Bobby
Hi Bobby,
Look–to be brief (I know we both want to wrap this up)–I was objecting to you quoting a paragraph which had a specific addendum tacked on to it that acknowledged that the paragraph could be misunderstood. To quote that paragraph in a vacuum was to explicitly excise my acknowledgment that my initial flawed statement (which I didn’t erase only out of a sense of honesty and intellectual integrity) could be misconstrued. That’s all. I don’t expect you to write reams about a blog-post on my website, or to engage in a Socratic dialogue with me here.
That said, I *am* glad you engaged me, and I you, at least as much as we have here. It makes clear (as I don’t think your original post did with this degree of clarity) what the source of our disagreement is. And I’ll say that, on some level, I see (have always seen) your point–community has its downsides, and you’ve pointed to some of them. The question (which neither of us has the interest or patience to debate here) is whether the benefits of community outweigh the drawbacks. I’d like to think two individuals could disagree on that without either thinking the other was/is ignorant of community’s (as the case may be) pluses and minuses.
One last note: in the way I’m intending to use it, you are, literally, a purist. You are envisioning the existence of the poet as something which must be–to a greater extent than presently, at least–cordoned off from outside influences. I would argue that we’ve seen quite a bit enough of that, and that there’s plenty of poetry being written today which makes one feel as though its author has never met a living person or broken bread outside a classroom.
You wrote, “being a poet is not like being a member of a football team or a corporate working group.” I agree, in many ways it isn’t. And yet, in some ways it is–for the single reason that you cannot put a large number of persons toward a single goal (Art, whatever that means, and in whatever myriad ways individual artists define it) without creating sociology. Football teams have a sociology, and so do groups of two or more poets. That doesn’t mean poetry is pigskin. It means you need people to make football, and you need people to make poetry.
In any case, the downside here is–apparently–I’ve lost your vote for NEA Chairman.
Take care,
Seth
Bobby and Seth,
Enjoyed reading your exchange, though I must admit that I nod off whenever “business of poetry” discussions get under way (and I’m afraid, Seth, that your post *does* sound a little like John Barr’s infamous and inane essay on poetry for the masses published a couple years back in POETRY).
A former teacher of mine once told me that “we need more readers and fewer poets.” A nice fantasy. The same teacher also said that the explosion of MFA programs has made this the most exciting time for poetry in America EVER. These two statements seemed contradictory to me. We’re definitely producing more poets than readers, but I don’t think this is the problem. MFA programs are a lot like PhD programs, as far as I can tell from my experience (limited) in both: they produce mostly unoriginal thought and a lot of competition for a very small plot of ground The strong survive, maybe sometimes for the better. Lucky ones get jobs (often those who are least exciting and most acceptable to the previous generation, now making hires).
Still, there’s something (it seems to me) natural about people being trained as literary historians/critics in fuggy air. Institutions are cultural receptacles, and the intellectual culture of institutions will always tend to be conservative (nevermind the lingo and hip glasses of the creatures there). Is it good for poetry? I don’t know. A question like that feels itslef like a product of the MFA industry. I don’t have anything much against Gioa or other evangelists, but their apparent belief in the healing powers of Verse and Versifiers have always confused me.
Hi Seth,
I don’t think our argument merely comes down to a difference over the relative value of community, but I think you’re probably right that it’s time to let this tired dog lie down again.
I can’t go out, however, without again protesting your description of me as a purist. Really: the last thing, the very last thing, I would ask for is poets who are cordoned off from outside influences. As I said above, I think it can be very useful (in all kinds of ways) for poets to find themselves a community to operate within. My position on this point is simply that a recognition and approbation of poets as poets, a kind of humanism for poets, is not something that ought to be encouraged. And one of the reasons for that–besides those I mentioned above and besides the fact that such a feeling will always be with us, no matter what we do–is precisely that it reinforces the sense (as does the MFA) that poets occupy their own little garden walled off from the rest of humanity (including their potential readership). I have the highest regard for the making of art, but I do not want the people who do it to be seen priests, privy counselors, or slaves with respect to the rest of the species. I suppose in a sense, I reject your limited (and therefore false) humanism for poets because I believe so strongly in the real thing.
And finally, I too am glad we had this discussion. To be quite honest I didn’t say more in my original post because I guessed there was a reasonable chance you’d show up here and give me a chance to explain myself further. Unfair? Maybe, but that’s how the game goes.
All best, and happy holidays,
Bobby
Hi Michael,
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a bunch of poets-as-educators (whether with MFAs or PhDs), I just wish that there were a whole lot more poets-as-everything-else than there seem to be. (Don Share thinks this perception is just a distortion of the blogosphere; I’m not so sure.) The question, as ever, is how a poet should make a living when she’s not making poetry. “Marry rich” is the (not entirely facetious) answer a friend of mine used to give her creative-writing students when they asked. I personally wish that I had applied for that Google internship I got an email about back in 1998. (The guy I know who did, my age, is retired now and spends his time flying ultralights over Switzerland.) Besides those, I’ve got no sure-fire ideas–if you do, let me know…
Bobby
Hi Bobby,
Hmm. All right, that’s actually a pretty good point. To be clear, it’s one I’ve always agreed with–what I mean is, I hadn’t quite considered how it interacted or could interact problematically with my feelings about MFAs. As a former public defender, I consider it absolutely vital that poets participate in society in ways that go beyond Art; I was bemoaning to a family member recently that it sometimes feels like (with some poets) the attitude is, “My poetry is all I have to give, so it’ll be the only thing I give.” I abhor that attitude, beyond finding it terribly saddening. If I had to give a snap reaction as to how your view–which I respect and tend to agree with–and mine can co-exist, it’s that MFA programs are brief, and writing lifetimes are long. Isn’t it something of a given that poets will integrate themselves into society, especially as neither you nor I are able, here, to think of a way for them to support themselves otherwise? I can’t tell you the terror second-year MFA students of my acquaintance (at Iowa, and elsewhere) are feeling; it’s like the floor’s dropped out from beneath them. For the youngest ones, who’ve never held down a job, some part of me thinks that’s a good thing. I guess I’m saying that the MFA is like the airlock between the pressurized atmosphere of the cabin and deep space. I don’t begrudge anyone lingering in that airlock for 21 months, because it’s all deep space from there on.
Take care,
Seth
P.S. Michael, it’s ironic, because I remember that essay, and remember disagreeing with nearly all of it(!)
Bobby:
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with poets-as-educators either. In fact, my professional ambition is to educate, and an important personal one is to write poems, so I would be the last to condemn someone in that position.
Like you, I lament the vocational aura that surrounds MFA programs, for more than one reason. First, I think that many people get the wrong idea from these programs about their chances of making a living in the real world. I think they are duped. One thing that has been missing from this conversation is that most MFAs are NOT free.
Moreover, the MFA industry has created a ferocious insider-outsider network through which pals help each other amass publications and write favorable reviews of each other and etc. And who can blame them? They all need jobs, they need to pad their CVs, and one turn deserves another (in this way, they are of course no worse than their counterparts in other sectors of the academy).
I’m also troubled by how little interest there seems to be in these programs in poetry written before, say, Dickinson. Not a lot of interest in topics of poetics generally. There is, on the other hand, a whole lot of interest in the culturally profitable knowledge of the zillions of publishing contemporary poets. This is one reason that everyone ends up writing poems that sing alike. It may also be why I often get the sense in a room full of poets that I’m in a New-Agey support seminar. The self-obsession can be difficult to bear.
Seth, I’m curious: do you think that MFA programs actually do anything that they claim to do, i.e., make people better writers by virtue of being among other writers? Or is it merely an “airlock” that lets them write a bit between islands? If only the former, I’d say they ought to be abolished, and most college deans would agree.
Oh, Michael–the notion that it is MFA programs that are behind cronyism (e.g. friends reviewing friends) is absolutely preposterous. Ron Silliman (no greater opponent of MFAs than he) says that the *entire publishing industry* should revert to a peer-publishing paradigm. Were these views, which would send rates of cronyism into the stratosphere, born in/of an MFA program? The cronyism in poetry is based on an economy of limited resources; poets (of all stripes and all aesthetics) want an audience, and don’t want to do anything (understandably) to their aesthetics to get it. So what do they do? Answer: anything they can to get read, including getting reviewed by friends and other, similar anti-Art tactics. Some of the most incestuous sub-communities in poetry are the most vehemently anti-institutional. So, please…
I don’t believe, actually, that most MFA programs explicitly advertise that they’ll make students better writers in two years. I’ve visited every MFA website in America as part of my research, and don’t recall that being a featured element of many programs’ advertising. What the programs say is that you will learn things that will help you in your path as a writer *over time*–which you do, whatever the extent of their value ends up being, as no knowledge of poetry is “bad” knowledge (and even “wrong” turns in one’s development teach one about one’s own aesthetic)–but they do not promise you will write better when you emerge than when you enter. Perhaps because they realize that 21 months is a blink of an eye in the span of a writing career. Perhaps because many programs explicitly advise students not to try to publish while in their program–for the explicit reason that the MFA is not a time to gain polish in one’s writing but rather to experiment with different ways of seeing poetry. Right now on Tom Kealey’s MFA blog we’re seeing many applicants and graduates bemoaning the *lack* of publishing classes in MFAs; while you might say this is a sign of wrong-headedness, you can’t have it both ways–if students are complaining about it, it’s because right now most MFAs are discouraging students from publishing or talking with faculty about publishing.
I guess what I’m saying is, why do MFA programs in these rhetorical conversations carrying qualities and features that seem to have no bearing in objective reality? I feel like we’re talking about the North Koreans here–we “know” they’re in the Axis of Evil, but we need CNN to travel to North Korea to do an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime documentary for us to know the first thing about them. MFA programs aren’t some exotic elephant; if folks who want to talk about MFA programs want to know about them, there are about 20,000 people out there–literally–one could ask.
Airlocks also give one time to experiment with, and to acclimate to, the feeling of weightlessness. They’re not merely holding cells. Someone on C. Dale Young’s blog recently pointed out that if visual artists have art museums and art galleries–and the existence of these doesn’t affect individual artists’ aesthetics–why can’t poets have MFAs? Neither is about “popularizing” an unpopular Art, merely giving it space in the culture to be as unpopular as it wants/needs to be. The only difference–perceived, not real–is that MFAs are schools (only of a sort, by the way; most program faculty explicitly say they can’t “teach” creative writing) which are intended to indoctrinate. They’re not; that’s the projection of fear into an untruth, like saying North Koreans are cannibals.
Best,
Seth
Seth,
I’m afraid there’s a whole lot of projection going on here. For the record, I have spent time in MFA seminars and I have a number of friends who’ve been through MFA programs, so I’m not quite as naive as you think. In any case, the workshop seminar is not the most difficult concept to wrap one’s head around: tear any strange threads off of every poem that enters the room; talk a lot about effective titles; talk about commas; talk about enjambment til it’s blue in the face.
I’m not sure how the long laundry list above emerged from my question, but your answer confirms my suspicion: at root, the best (most honest) defense of the MFA is that it is a vanity degree, perhaps useful for wriggling one’s way into the ever expanding and cheapening poetry publishing scene (I never said MFAers invented that scene, by the way). That’s fine, but let’s not pretend it’s something more than that.
Best,
Michael
By the way, the idea that the “art museum of poetry” is in the MFA program is absurd but telling. There was a time when serious poets looked for guidance in the poems of wiser (perhaps dead) minds.
Michael,
You got me. I can’t think of a single reason why *any* poet would want three fully-funded years to write, except vanity. You nailed it. Vanity.
I think I may have detected a some-of-my-best-friends-are-MFAers line of argument in that last response of yours. True fact: the many, many workshops I’ve been in didn’t run anything like how you’ve described. I’m put in mind of that famous “Seinfeld” episode in which Kramer is asked to write a sales report for a business he doesn’t even work for, and with no business training whatsoever. He gives it to the CEO and the CEO flips through it and says, “I don’t even know what I’m looking at here…it’s like you don’t know anything about business at all…” What I’m hearing you say about workshops is simply an indication of what a “bad” workshop looks like. But it’s no more representative of the pedagogical approach that is workshopping than bad verse is to our fundamental calling as poets. I agree with your tautology: bad workshops are bad. But what does that tell us about workshopping generally? Nothing, I don’t think.
No one said “the art museum of poetry is in the MFA.” What was said (and I feel like nuances are consistently being “lost” here in the responses, and I use those quotes advisedly) is that in the same way art museums tell us something about the relevance of art to American culture, but do *not* cheapen or guide the aesthetics of visual artists, MFA programs tell us something about the relevance of poetry to American culture but do *not*, ultimately, cheapen or guide the aesthetics of American poets.
S.
P.S. The notion of the MFA as a vanity degree is the true absurdity here. Right now I’ve got 49 terrified classmates at Iowa who are *more* than cognizant that they have a completely unmarketable degree and no clue whatsoever what to do with their futures. And yet, the current crop of MFA applicants has this same awareness–they openly discuss the fact that this degree won’t, in itself, do anything for them. I’ve *never* heard a single MFA applicant speak of the MFA as a “prestige” degree (and not many folks spend as much time talking to MFA applicants as me, Mike).
Mike,
In retrospect, that last response was a lot more negative, acerbic, and confrontational than I’d have liked. I’m letting my passion on this subject get the best of me. We disagree–a lot (and *on* a lot)–but that’s no excuse for me to be so disagreeable. My apologies. FWIW, I do hear what you’re saying, I just take the diametrically opposite view of (and interpret quite differently) the same phenomena you’re looking at. But again, I’m being too intemperate about it, and too contrary. The bottom line is that we just disagree on this. I imagine one of the reasons this is closer to my heart than one would expect is because I know what the MFA meant to me, and to my life, and has meant to others I know–and to their lives, and their poetry–and somehow I don’t feel like any of that ends up getting reflected in these conversations. Take care,
Seth
Seth,
I appreciate the tempered response, though I took in both of them in one sitting. I don’t mean to be a jerk, either, and it’s certainly easy in this medium to be get carried away or to read only what you want to read and reply in kind. (Your complaint about my lack of nuance is one I would like to level against you, too, and probably for the same reasons!)
My own experience in the MFA workshops of a very good MFA program was generally pretty bland. (I don’t have a degree.) I never could figure out exactly what we were doing, but it seemed to go almost always like this: read poem, awkward silence, a few compliments, then a few very mild suggestions. My question is, where is the scope here? What is the purpose? The seminar will never capture the organically developed atmosphere among groups of poets drawn together by some kind of shared aesthetic or revolutionary aim. How many great coteries of writers have developed inside the academy? (Obviously, the ragged edges around institutions seem to be ideal for this kind of ferment.) I’m not an anti-institutional crusader (I’m a PhD student, after all). But the mission of MFA programs is unclear to me.
The reason that I took issue with your comparison of the MFA program and art museums in America is that the much more obvious analogue would be visual art MFAs and writing MFAs. I’m not really certain, but I guess I imagine that one would spend a lot more time on technique at a visual art school than at a writing MFA. You can teach someone how to paint a figure, but not how to do something truly innovative. The same seems true for poetry. I would like to see more focus on prosody and the history of poetry. If I were an instructor, I would think of the poems in a workshop in the same way that an art teacher thinks of sketches of figures from their students. I’d make students write and fail a lot in forms that make them uncomfortable but bring a broader sense of poetry’s development over the long haul. History should humble all of us, and most poets I know (whether I love them or not) could stand to be humbled a little. As you no doubt are well aware, spending quality time with any great poet’s work will make clear how rare even a single great poem is. Anyone would be lucky to write two or three of them in a lifetime. Some freaks write thirty or forty, but how many of the 25,000 writers who will graduate from MFAs over the next decade are among them? 25? 10? 5? All of this may be terribly misguided, but I’d be curious to know in what ways you think that MFAs could improve. This is a question of signal importance, I think, because they certainly aren’t going away. I could not disagree more with you that MFA programs are not guiding the aesthetic of American poetry. That doesn’t mean that great writers aren’t coming out of these programs. They are. It just means that the vast majority of poems published sound exactly alike (in three to five different period-verse varieties). Honestly, do you really not relate to that complaint?
Maybe it’s not something to worry terribly much about. To my earlier point, we can all learn to paint something resembling a torso or hand or whatever, or to put a few images together cleverly. Interesting poets will do more than that, with or without the industry. But again: why not just abolish the MFA? Is it just a degree for the privileged among us who can afford to spend a couple more years in a comfortable university setting scribbling with the support of peers? That’s just not very compelling to me.
Best, Michael
Michael,
We agree on more than you might think. For instance, I definitely see a “sameness” of voice in contemporary American poetry. But I chart the beginning of this voice–or, perhaps, this *poem* (what I’ve alternately heard called the “PEMLOD” or the “Quietist” poem)–to the late 1970s/early 1980s, as Deep Image and Confessionalist poetry were on their last legs. What replaced them were some terrible poems by some very talented poets, what Tony Hoagland calls “narrative-discursive” poems, and a lot of young writers emulated such writers and continue to do so. But because the phenomenon started in the late 1970s/early 1980s, well before the MFA boom in the mid-1990s, I think the most we could say is that the MFA perpetuates this trend. Yet I think that even this is unfair, as it’s too early to judge; what I mean is, what if the MFA (with its focus on “craft,” though not, I don’t think, to the exclusion of all else) perpetuates such poetry in some young poets–who are at a stage when they are learning the “basics”–but also gives them to tools to explore their own voices as they get older? Most of the really horrid poetry I’ve read in my life (to be candid) was written by those in their 40s and 50s without MFAs. They’re simply emulating a style that’s a quarter of a century old; I think what a 21 year-old does with this style (not accepting for the moment that most MFAers come out with this style, at least not at the strongest programs) is as yet unclear.
My MFA workshops have often included wider-ranging conversations; I think often the poems are jumping-off points for a dialogue that ranges well beyond the context of the poem itself. But also, I can’t tell you how much I learned about poetry by studying its history in seminars with Swensen and Hoagland. Two semesters, and it changed everything for me.
You asked, “How many great coteries of writers have developed inside the academy?” Well, I guess I’d point to the New York School, which has its roots in Harvard University; or the Berkeley Renaissance, which had its roots in (not surprisingly) Berkeley. The Black Mountain school was developed in–natch–Black Mountain College. I would think the better question is, which 20th c. movements didn’t originate in an educational institution?
You asked, “why not just abolish the MFA? Is it just a degree for the privileged among us who can afford to spend a couple more years in a comfortable university setting scribbling with the support of peers?” I don’t know what you tell you. The MFA changed my way of thinking about poetry irrevocably (while leaving me a lifetime of learning ahead) and if anything I’ve been less “engaged” with the institution–I tend to make myself, intentionally, an outsider within institutions–than perhaps any of my peers. Look at it this way: every major poet I can think of had a mentor, or else a “Master” whose work guided their development. At the very least, MFAs can provide a setting for this sort of–otherwise fortuitous and rare–exchange. But they also teach the history of poetry, create communities of writers who have lifelong relationships, expose poets to writing by classmates (i.e. from someone *else’s* navel), and much more.
Best,
Seth
Well, we clearly disagree about what the MFA program has done to American poetry in recent decades, among other things. But it’s probably safe to say that our disagreements are matters of degree and emphasis, for the most part. I’ve been pressing you on whether the MFA should be abolished because I want a more convincing answer to the question of what it provides–not practically, in the form of connections and time to write, but in relation to the art. I still am missing that.
At any rate, it’s been enjoyable to argue about it. It’s been productive for me, especially in thinking about some of the differences between terminal scholarly and terminal arts degrees. Perhaps we can find occasion to do it again sometime.
Meantime, take care,
Michael