Agreeing and disagreeing with Mark:
I've had experience of 3 (excluding the MFA programs not dealing with
poetry, e.g., at Rhode Island School of Design where I now teach).
The great majority of students in the MFA programs I have knowledge of
do not pay fees but work as teaching assistants for stipends between
$10,000 and $14,000 (my figures are 4-10 years old). I agree with
Mark to some extent in his analogy with the dole. I wrote 2 plays, a
short book, and a lot of bad poems on the dole in my twenties (but the
minute I got married I was cut off without mercy: I wasn't even
eligible for Fas schemes, Ireland's other training ground for artists.
It took me a hell of a long time to recover from the shock of being
cut off the dole -- so long I think they had revised the policy on
married women being ineligible for assistance). The dole has made
life possible for so many artists in Ireland, to a point, but there's
not much dole in America. MFA programs may be a 2-4 year rather
stimulating surrogate dole experience. Time to write. I found it
very valuable.
I don't really think Mark's example of John Clare as germane. I think
for a lot of poets the questions of how to be a parent, how to be a
citizen, how to be a useful member of a community, how to work at what
one is good at: these are real enough questions. I don't identify
that strongly with John Clare.
I don't agree either that an MFA purports to guarantee social cachet
and a middle-class income: I've never heard that claim at least.
And I wouldn't ask either Gertrude Stein or Andre Breton's opinion
about cooking cabbage. And if anyone attempted to discuss such a
subject with me at a social gathering I would walk away.
Mairead
On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 10:59:38 -0500, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm always hesitant to post to Britpo because I'm acutely aware that its
> value, certainly for me, is that it's not dominated by USians. But I think I
> can be helpful in this instance, as I've watched with increasing dismay the
> results of the academicization of the arts in the US.
>
> The topic comes up from time to time on all poetry lists. Usually any
> critique of the status quo is met by an extraordinary degree of evasiveness
> or hostility, as a threat to the daily bread, or at least the sense of moral
> rectitude, of many on the list.
>
> Here's a bit of what I posted last month to Poetryetc, minus the parts that
> are too referential to the context of that discussion. I posted something
> like the first paragraph to britpo earlier this week, but there's plenty of
> fresh meat beyond.
>
> Several things here. First, in the mouths of poets of my kind and
generation
> "academic" has nothing to do with intellectual; it
was, from the
50s into
> the 70s, a convenient name for the then mainstream, which
became
what
> Silliman calls "the school of quietude," despite the fact
that then as
now
> many non-quietudiness types, like Doug, held university positions.
One
could
> even be an acadmic poet without ever passing through the gates
> of
a
university.
The larger issue is, I think, not how some poets make a
> living and how
much
time it may take away from their writing, but the
> process of
professionalization and homogenization at work in MFA programs.
> The
result,
across the entire spectrum, has been a patholgical degree
> of
predictability--MFA-trained Language poets write more like
> Language
poets
than their langpo teachers, who managed to become poets
> without the
benefit of
several years of workshops, for instance. And the
> same is true for the
endless string of suburban poets filling the designated
> poetry spaces in
the New Yorkeror Poetry.
What gets attenuated is the
> discovery of craft and its use as a tool for
discovering the world, absent
> any experience working in the world beyond
the schools.
There's of course
> an enormous ambivalence built into this. I'm aware when
I
publish books that
> if they don't sell well to university libraries and
to
MFAs they won't sell.
> And I also think that it's great that you and
others
don't have to herd
> goats. The problem is that with every graduating
class
there are more
> half-baked late adolescents licensed to call themselves
poets, nine tenths
> of whom will never write anything even mildly useful,
who expect to be able
> to muzzle up to the trough and teach yet another
class how to write
> well-behaved poems of whatever kind, and mediocrity
becomes progressively
> the norm.
Years ago, when I applied to the MacDowell Colony my friend
> Richard
Elman,
who taught in the Columbia then-proto-MFA program, wrote
> a
recommendation
for me, which he let me read. I was struck by the phrase
> "though he
is
self-taught as a poet..." I told him that wasn't true--I knew
> dozens
of
poets and learned from several, I'd run reading series', edited
> a
magazine,
published my first book, read endlessly, etc. "Listen," he
said,
> "of course it's bullshit.
But it will get you in." It did.
OK, now back to
> this list. To the extent that the world needs poets at all it doesn't need
> them mass-produced, and we could certainly do without most of the blathering
> of licensed 25 year olds, who now publish each other and promote each
> other's work from the classroom or profit-making journals or publishing
> houses for which the MFA is an entry requirement for employment. And what do
> we do with all the tenured poets who would have stopped writing if they
> hadn't found a sustainable career as poets because they wouldn't have been
> sufficiently called to keep on? Someone recently commented something to the
> effect (forgive me for garbling) that everyone's a poet at 20, at 40 it's a
> different matter. Yes, but the rewards of the current system means that
> those who take the poetry career track at 20 are decreasingly tested as they
> approach maturity, and many remain unaware that the making of poetry
> requires constant internal testing and questioning. Within the universities
> a poet at 20 is likely to be calling himself a poet at 40.
> Since my return to New York from the wilds of San Diego I've found myself at
> several gatherings of young MFAs. They compared career notes and nothing
> else. When I was their age, after the requisite gossip and flirtation what
> got talked about was poetry, and information about each of our latest
> enthusiasms was passed about. Ties between older and younger poets were
> forged that acted as a sort of apprenticeship.
>
> I'm aware that one of the arguments for the MFA is that it levels the
> playing field--presumably even the occasional student too poor to afford the
> monstrously high fees (in the tens of thousands of pounds a year) charged in
> the US gets admitted on scholarship, and aspiring poets from
> poetically-impoverished places are spared the expenditure of energy and risk
> needed to make contact with other writers (in exchange for having their
> focus sharply restricted), whether through epistolary brashness or actually
> moving to say NY or San Francisco. But the reality on the ground, even more
> in Britain than in the US, is that these days a John Clare without an MFA
> would not be condemned to destitution--he'd live in council housing, be
> treated by the national health service, and feed himself either from a
> disability pension, or, in the case of those not so incapacitated as Clare,
> earn a minor but sufficient living, under modern rules of employment,
> complete with vacation time that in the US is for most people only a dream.
>
> What the MFA purports to guarantee (and there are far too many MFAs in the
> US to make that claim more than a cruel joke) is social cachet and a middle
> class income.
>
> Mark
>
>
> At 08:18 AM 2/6/2005, cris cheek wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> sorry. I didn't think it defensiveness on my part. More an offering of
> a conundrum, which sought to muddy the waters so that actual work could
> enter the frame of discussion by example. I did want to get to names to
> try to understand who was actually being referred to. Although I'll
> fully accept the charge of tired listing. I was, obviously wrongly,
> wondering if a conflation of working in academia and teaching criteria
> developed through personal practice might not be the point of
> conflation. Clearly, as in my own example, the majority of those on
> that list had lengthy histories of practice before teaching, although
> many also studied as undergraduates when young. The lists were quite
> deliberately intended to include some 'ringers' and deploy
> inconsistencies in order to find out to whom the mesh between academic
> verse and avant &c was referring. Also to include for example two
> generations of those broadly considered lang-po in the US context and
> whatever (linguistically innovative if that works) likewise in the
> British ones.
>
> I do agree that the grounds from which many newer, younger (whatever)
> poets are emerging are creative writing courses and their orbital
> activities in further education. Many of the latter are now in
> universities (on both sides of the pond) - and they are nothing if not
> quick to spot financial opportunities (the universities i mean).
> Creative Writing courses have become a cash cow and increased in number
> over the past few years dramatically. I'm not saying this is a good
> thing per se either, but it is undeniably so. Generally, which of
> course i use advisedly, many of those who are graduating from these
> courses are going on into MA and even PhD pursuits.
>
> It *does mean that poets have been acculturated to producing critical
> materials and reflexive writing in close relation to or even as part of
> their emergent writing practice. So critical tools, vocabularies,
> perspectives, strategies (from philosophy, literature, cultural
> studies, performance studies, media studies, bio-informatics . . .) are
> becoming integral to a poet's experience of language. Reading and
> Writing both are certainly changing and with the growing number going
> on into further education the readership is changing also.
>
> One reason, perhaps, why taste tzars such as Don Patterson are getting
> publicly jittery is that the texts available for further education are
> becoming increasingly numerous from those kinds of poets whose
> practices and critical perspectives are lang-po and ling-inno-po (among
> the many variant po in evidence) grounded, partly since it is those
> poetries whose poetics most form an energisiing mesh with other
> critical discourses as listed in brackets above. You know, it's pretty
> simple. To whom is one going to refer to and to differ from (classic
> avant-garde strategies). That does accept the existence of quite
> differing readerships, but that's surely nothing new. What might be
> warranted is a kind of new punk poetry to counter too much of the
> dominance from today's scriptoria.
>
> Being on such courses do allow for reading of poetries that offer more
> resistance and are less easily absorbed (PERHAPS, perhaps). Many
> readers, not allowed such luxury of shared interpretations (outside of
> the experience of belonging to a book group) cannot give over their
> waking hours to such sustained mulling (perhaps, perhaps).
>
> The flavor of a particular program is strongly inflected by its key
> poet(s). It'll be interesting, to take one obvious example, to see how
> writing emerging from Buffalo change over to the coming years, between
> Charles Bernsein's and Steve McCaffery's authored climates of research
> and umbrellas of enthusiasm. Another example is the shift from Burt
> Kimmelman and Sylvester Pollet to Ben Friedlander and Steve Evans at
> Orono (even though Burt and Sylvester remain, Ben and Steve are
> bringing other energies and enthusiasms into play). It isn't exactly
> big thinking to point this out I realise that. One might take the
> current clutch of young poets active around Birkbeck as another example
> over here or the past decade of fierce enquiry at Dartington. I do
> think this is going on in the UK as much as in the US now. The scale
> and intensity differ for sure but with Dartington, Exeter, Edge Hill,
> Warwick, Bangor, Southampton, Roehampton, Royal Holloway, UEA,
> Manchester Metropolitan, Salford . . . and many others the burgeoning
> US model of the Writer's House is likely to follow on.
>
> Staying in education, living off small research studentships and so on
> has (perhaps perhaps) supplanted the dole as one way to develop a
> writing practice in the largely commercially non-viable worlds of
> contemporary poetry (given rare exceptions). There are real problems
> too. One is that writing can become too pedagogically inclined, writing
> what students might usefully study as example. Another is that of
> getting sucked into teaching without ever having much experience of
> outside, in other words skipping that vital phase of resistance and
> struggle, developing a practice outside the institutions. I've
> certainly witnessed examples like that in the US in recent months and
> maybe that produces the efficient and yet smug poetry that you might be
> trying to get at?
>
> love and love
> cris
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