Ouch it's early and already as hot as one of those burritos as big as your
head they have uptown here, so these sentences might well be fried. There's
much Mr. Bro neglects to mention about creative writing programs in the US
(more than 300 of them exist now at the MA or MFA level I think) though I
recognize all that he does say.  But one point is that there is a cost of
professionalization per se--codes are developed, hierarchies, organizations
such as the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), which publishes a journal
and holds conferences, etc.  Inbreeding and back-scratching follow.  This
is why I have to laugh when so-called mainstreamers complain about
so-called avant-gardists publishing one another, because exactly the same
thing happens among AWP poets, the only difference being that their books
have bigger budgets and that built-in readership of 300 plus creative
writing graduate programs.  These cw programs often imagine themselves the
last wall against the assault of theory and cultural studies on
"literature" and in many cases they are indeed quite isolated from the
larger English departments that house them, their relationship to those
larger department historically hostile.  Though that is changing now as
enrollments in literature sink fast and departments are saved by the easy
and thus popular creative writing courses and the "service courses" of
composition studies.  (At a few universities there have been efforts to wed
the two under the label "writing" but the functionalism of composition
studies does not sit well with "creative writers," and compositionists also
are vested in "theory.")  Language poetry exploited a split between
poetry-academics and the poetry-pros in the cw programs; many of those
tenured in cw programs were hired during the boom years of the 1960s, when
they were reading Wilbur and Dickey and not Olson and Baraka.  (All of this
matters and mattered to the success of that langpo critique, which was
partial but not negligible.)  The machine can be slowly retooled while
remaining, nevertheless, a machine.  That is, you can now study with Lyn
Hejinian at Iowa, though one wonders how much is changed by that fact.
(This is not about Lyn.)


Oh I need to unpack that and there's much more to be said about all of this
but a man's on the phone telling me a photo needs to be shot again so I
must run off and give him a book.  I'll try to sort some more of this later
if I have time.

Keith Tuma




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