Learning to Write the MFA Poem

Since we've been talking about MFAs, don't miss "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," by poet Nin Andrews.

...even if she does say

"the truth is, I never learned to write one very well."

Here's how to do it.

Another take on the MFA debate…

Slate

has an interesting article pitting what it describes as America’s two writing cultures NYC and the MFA.

Here’s an excerpt:

MFA programs themselves are so lax and laissez-faire as to have a shockingly small impact on students' work—especially shocking if you're the student and paying $80,000 for the privilege. Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the '70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.

And another:

Poets have long been professionally bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation. Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The poet earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at an even higher level, from appearance fees at other colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that anyone outside a university library will read them. The consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular, arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood.

Read the whole article here

The Frey about the Flaw in the MFA Today

The writing community has been lighting up with sarcasm over the news that James Frey has been going to MFA classrooms, trying to sign up innocent young writers to his new get rich scheme in which they do their writing as work for hire, and get paid $250, plus the promise of "maybe some more dollars later if I sell it to the movies." James Frey, of course, is the writer who is most famous for the revelation that his lurid best-selling "memoir" A Million Little Pieces was shown to be mostly made up. Not a problem if he were a fiction writer, of course-- but the book was sold as an amazing true story.

John Scalzi is amazed that any considers this at all, and suggests that it's a deadly flaw in the MFA program-- the MFA programs pretend to concentrate on art, and doesn't suggest that students give a moment's attention to business. So, basically, in terms of their business accumen, MFA students are all sheep ready to be sheered by the first hustler to come along.

Scalzi's suggestion-- in An Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and Their Students) is pretty simple: look, guys, teach your students a little bit about the business of writing.

Elise Blackwell, of the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, makes a pretty weak defense of the MFA program, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her proposition is that the goal of MFA programs is “not to grow hothouse flowers, but to protect writers for two or three short years so that they [can] write a book without distraction.” (Yow. So, basically, the point of a MFA program is that you spend a bunch of money primarily so you have a good excuse for why you don't have a job?)

Scalzi responds here.

Mark Tiedemann comments further in Digital Muse.

The MFA Generation

John Gallaher, "Nothing to Say, and Saying it," has a great post from poet Franz Wright about the failings of the MFA generation.

"...the bar was so lowered that per year maybe hundreds or thousands of pieces of paper (if you paid your tuition, or were a good low-level instructor slave) are issued stating that somebody in his or her mid twenties is now a MASTER of the art of poetry. Then you get the insane self-consciousness of the internet going, and put it all together and you get a couple or few generations of the most abject mediocrity, not in thought—anyone can blabber intellectually—but in the art of the poem which is made of out solitary silent meditation, made out of everything that is the opposite of what you kids daily invest so much importance in. You poor dupes."

That's hitting 'em!

--the comments to the critique are mostly cheap shots at Wright, alas; pointing out that, although Wright may write a mean anti-MFA essay trashing his former students and colleagues, he never turns down a gig.

As for myself, although I can claim to be a master of many things, I'm afraid mastery of fine arts is not one of them. So I don't really have a dog in this fight, I'm just in it for the amusement of watching the bloodshed.

(For what it's worth, the commentary by Wright was in response to an earlier series of posts by Gallaher about blurbs, where (in the second one) he dishes on Wright. It's a series of posts worth reading, if for no other reason, than to hear to him ask the questions "1. Should all American poets have “the ramifications of a new global culture” as their direct subject matter? 2. If they don’t have “the ramifications of a new global culture” as their direct subject matter, is it because they find it partly “incomprehensible” and that they are partly “fearful”?" ... and to see him illustrate these questions with a series of completely irrelevant graphs. Now, that's some poetry!)

So, if you have some comments about the MFA generation, leave 'em here! Me, I'm off to rectify my failings by writing some poems about the ramifications of the new global culture.

--see also the earlier post: There's Too Much Money in Poetry!