Goodonyou Mairead, but remember that your experience is rather atypical.
Most MFA candidates come to the program immediately or very soon after
unbroken schooling from 5 years old on.

I'd like to believe that you're right about stipends for MFAs, but it's not
my understanding. It would be a little frightening, in fact, if true--23
year olds with no previous grdauate educatuion or experience outside of
schools are hardly my idea of qualified teachers.

I picked Clare as a worst-case scenario example--poor and schizophrenic is
probably more difficult even than motherhood.

The programs make their claim by their very existence, and it seems to be
what the MFAs I know expected upon entry. Otherwise it's a singularly
inefficient spiritual journey.

Mark


At 05:34 PM 2/9/2005, mairead byrne wrote:
>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