[Nettime-bold] An Academic INSIDER Exposes the Incestuous World of Academic Magazines &Workshops! DAN ADDS HIS 17 CENTS!

[Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@att.net>]

Forward around to anyone who you think may be interested!

http://www.cosmoetica.com/S&D.htm#D4-BS1

The Poetry Workshop and its Discontents:

A Report from the Dark Underbelly of Academic Creative Writing

Copyright © by Briggs Seekins, baseekins@netscape.net , 4/11/01

D4-BS1 Replies

  In May of 1995 I accepted a three-year University Fellowship from
Syracuse University, to pursue
a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. I was a combat
veteran of the Gulf War and I had
used the Army College Fund to earn a BA in Philosophy. I was a working
class kid who had
resolved to avoid working for as long as possible. And now, for the next
three years, I would be paid
a little over ten thousand dollars a year to write poetry and to take
classes in prosody and literary
history. I felt like I had won the fucking lottery.
  And I hoped that I was gaining something even more important than the
financial support and the
time to write; I hoped this would be my ticket into the “big leagues” of
American poetry. Since my
childhood, I had liked reading and writing more than anything else, but
prior to attending college, I
could never have imagined that any such thing as an MFA program existed.
Like many civilians, I had
assumed that all writers, even poets, supported themselves primarily
through book sales and free
lance checks—this despite the fact that I had never bought a book of
poetry, and did not know
anybody else who had ever bought a book of poetry. But during college I
began to read quite a lot of
contemporary American poetry and I noticed that virtually all of the
poets I was reading had attended
graduate programs in creative writing, and that they taught creative
writing. I became aware of a
complex web of graduate programs, literary journals, grant committees,
writing conferences and
artists’ residencies, and I began to realize that having a career as a
writer was dependent upon
inserting yourself somehow into that complex web. And without the
financial resources and family
connections necessary to land an internship somewhere in the publishing
industry, my only real option
was to attend a prestigious graduate program in creative writing.
  If you had asked me at the time: “Why are you getting an MFA?” I would
have given the proper,
high-minded answer: “Because I love poetry and want to spend more time
honing my craft and
perfecting my art.” I was a good student, after all, and I actually did
love poetry. I had even read
quite a bit of poetry, which is quite often not the case with MFA
students. I really did want to
become a great poet. I wanted to write poems that would make people feel
the same way I had felt
the first time I read Rilke or Keats.
  But even more than that, I wanted to become a successful poet. I was
an American, after all, and I
wanted my own version of the bourgeois American dream, even if my own
version of it was
decidedly literary. I wanted to have poetry books with my photograph on
the back. I wanted to be
admired by pretty, bookish women. I wanted to give readings in
bookstores and on campuses. I
wanted to be a sophisticated, liberal intellectual who drank wine with
other sophisticated, liberal
intellectuals, while talking expansively about literature and life, and
last week’s New York Review of
Books.
  To my readers who are sneering as they read that last paragraph, I can
only say that I join you in
sneering. My “literary” aspirations were petty and mediocre and my ideas
about high culture were
naïve and politically uninformed. During the four years between my
discharge from the army and my
admission into Graduate school, the life of an academic poet had
appeared before me, seeming as a
glamorous reprieve from the much more mundane possibilities I had
previously envisioned for myself:
working at the post office; becoming a social worker; teaching high
school English and coaching
wrestling.
  And I actually believed that attending graduate school was a necessary
step in becoming a “real”
poet. To be accepted into a highly regarded MFA program felt like a
tangible stamp of
legitimacy—an important institution was officially recognizing me as a
poet. They were even giving
me money. And attending a good MFA program seemed like an important
first step in accruing even
more stamps of legitimacy. Intellectually, I realized it was mendacious
to equate institutional “stamps
of legitimacy” with actual artistic merit. But emotionally, I craved
that sort of institutional legitimacy. I
was that odd sort of young person that American society often creates—my
entire life I had been
poor, but thanks to my education and to the media, I had learned to
identify most strongly with the
anxious ethos of the middle class. I wanted financial security and
social prestige. I wanted some sort
of official recognition of the fact that I was indeed a poet, a real
poet....


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