I'm Not Clowning, I'm Raving [by Jim Cummins]

I took a couple days off to check my humor levels.  When one speaks of MFA World one must make sure one's humor levels are up.  Most people, teachers or students, are pretty solemn about their position in MFA World; and the teachers especially don't like to have someone poke fun at their livelihoods, the source of their paychecks and ease, travel funds and professional develop-ment expenses. 

I was musing the other day about what a poet's learning curve was like maybe fifty years ago, in the 60s; I remembered the notion (actually, I remembered Robert Mezey telling me about it) of the poet's education, his or her "Grand Tour," that was prevalent then.  You lived in New York for a couple of years, soaking up the Village literary life especially, perhaps taking a master's at Columbia, as Larry Ferlinghetti and John Ashbery did, among others.  Then you spent a couple of years in the heart of the country, in Iowa City, taking an MFA there from the Writers' Workshop.  And then you completed your poetic education by spending another couple of years in Palo Alto and San Francisco, preferably on a Stegner fellowship, and studying with Yvor Winters (Thom Gunn famously did this).  As a working class kid, I found this leisure impossible to conceive of personally, but it did seem like a wonderful idea.  And not only were there fewer people vying for spots at these places, but there was also the sense (especially following WW II) that a writer existed prior to a writing program--that the writer came from somewhere else in society, already formed in a basic way, if needful of feedback and technical advice. 

Nowadays, maybe the biggest change from the old days is linked to the exponential growth of writing programs: writers are produced by the system.  They are born in undergrad creative writing classes taught by an older product of the system; they graduate with majors or minors in creative writing; they go immediately into graduate writing programs, then into jobs teaching creative writing; their writing lives are then lived in the maturity of networks, conferences, trips to friends' campuses for readings, management of their university resources in order to be able to invite the friends back to their own campuses, sabbaticals and leaves of absence funded by their universities, expenditure of travel and research funds, editing of journals and anthologies that include their friends within the system (and to show integrity, sometimes their enemies), service on panels and awards committees that give money and prizes to writers, almost all of whom reside inside the system, and service on search committees to hire other younger writers the system has produced.   

In his excellent book, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, David Myers quotes Don Justice, arguably the preeminent and most beloved teacher of poets, calling in 1984 the growth of writing programs a "pyramid scheme"--a Ponzi game, like Bernie Madoff's house of cards.  Myers lists 25 programs started by Iowa grads; these include: Skidmore, Eastern Washington, Colorado State, Western Michigan, Arkansas, Oregon, Montana, Massachusetts, Bowling Green, Penn State, Alabama, University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and others.  I could add: Indiana, Arizona, Utah, and Florida, where Iowa grads either started the program or were instrumental at the beginning; and of course there's venerable old Stanford, whose program was started by Wallace Stegner (an Iowa native) after his sojourn in the Workshop in the early 1940s.  (This last sentence is my own doing; any error in fact is mine, not Myers, though I think I'm in the ballpark.)

Myers also points out that the rise of writing programs parallels the availability of money.  State legislatures were willing to fund these new programs (the growth period I'm talking about is mainly late-60s through early 80s).  Why?  Partly, I'm sure, because the country still supported higher education somewhat back then, but mostly because their customers--potential students--were willing to pay for such a course of study.  So Iowa grads were seminal in the proliferation of writing programs, and they were motivated to do this because they wanted cushy jobs like the ones Marvin and Don had--believe me, I know, I was there: "cushy" was an oft-used adjective.  To feed these positions--like Audrey, the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors--we need students, whom we grow, or "enable," within the system, from their birth at 18 or 19 through a graduate program, each one a ten- or fifteen-year harvesting.  And what we're "teaching" them first and foremost is not to be writers, but to be academics (shudder)--bureaucratic careerists.

So you assume I think this is all terrible; not so.  I'm just saying it's a system, and we're all gaming it--teachers, students, administrators, legislators.  When we lose sight of that fact--for example, when we claim for ourselves the sanctity of positing literature as a higher calling--we depress the inclination to be aware of our manipulations, as well as our abilities for gaming.  We are all products of a saved vs. damned culture built on a schizoid faultline.  Our ancestors claimed piety and chosenness, as well as the right to operate a slave trade, install the institution of slavery, and commit genocide on the Indians.  It's practically in our genes to tend toward extremism, toward absolutism; four hundred years of our existence tells us it's in our best interests to lie to ourselves.  Now the poet down the block isn't just a Language poet or a New Formalist, he's a devil; our own position has to be defended in an extreme way.  Obviously, this decreases chances for a reasoned criticism of his work.  The poetry economy is almost entirely an artificial one; poetry generates almost no economic interest in the country outside the ten or twenty thousand people in the general poetic community.  There's enough money in the system to attract gamers, but the money isn't generated by poetry itself: it's artificially pumped into the system via universities, arts foundations, gifts (the Lilly gift to Poetry is a recent notorious example), etc.  This lends an aura of unreality to the poetry side of MFA World.

I kid the Language Poets on occasion (I know they can take it; they're good sports), but on one level theirs was an entreprenurial agenda meant to match well-educated middle- and upper-middle class white kids with academic jobs.  They hooked up with some theorists--Marjorie Perloff among the most prominent--who were pushing their own theory-driven agendas in academia during the 80s and 90s; and the theorists helped the poets establish academic creds and an academic audience.  More power to them; and this didn't prevent a number of really good writers to emerge from the Language chrysallis: I'm thinking of Lynn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and Michael Davidson, in particular, as far as ones I myself admire.  The problem with any powerful movement, though, is what is spawns.  Like the ten percent of interesting theorists who spawned the ninety percent of forlorn academics wandering through their dark night of the soul, while they teach Derrida at Lake Oswego State at Onomatopoeia, the Language group spawned a middlebrow "movement" in our MFA programs.  These students call themselves "experimental" writers--as if all language-use isn't experiment--and they seem to offer watered-down versions of Language poetry.  A friend of mine calls it "language display" poetry; another calls a subset of it "the narcissism of filigree."  They lack the rigor and vision of their predecessors, but have settled on their metier, I think, because it's perfect for gaming the current version of the system. 

Now here's the wonderful irony: the "current version of the system" is, of course, ourselves.  Our desire for the cushy has come full circle.  I think we all assumed the best and the brightest would inherit our mantles.  When one system battles another, real energy is unleashed: think of the late 50s, the Battle of the Anthologies, the Raw versus the Cooked.  What we've got now is just one system; there is no rival system.  The battle to supplant us is tepid, and from the inside: hothouse ideologues we've grown ourselves.  From the Cooked to the Raw to the Half-Baked.  Again, I aspire only to be the messenger here; I've opted out, which makes me a loser.  I no longer teach writing classes.  I don't want to know these people anymore; and from where I sit, they don't want to know me.  But I could be completely wrong; maybe what I think I'm witnessing from outside is really a "movement," an effort to cleanse the system from the inside, a peristalsis.  Now there's a thought. 

Comments

[Alex Grant]

Jim -
I've rarely read anything so simultaneously damning and perfectly-argued. Brilliant - I can't tell you how many times I said "Wow" while I was reading it. You're quite a writer, and your honesty is admirable...

[Jillian Brall]

Very honest and very right on!! Bravo. ..The games... I am no entrepreneur, not comfortable with self promotion, not competitive, not a social butterfly, not a network hound... I guess I am a "loser" also... But I have written poetry and fiction/non fiction and created art since I was a little girl and I will never stop... I may never be able to make a career out of it, but I have come to be okay with that; I know who I am. I do try to network and promote my work because it seems that that is what must be done if I want my work to be read/seen at all by anyone, especially now in this internet-based world, but it definitely does not feel natural to me, and the whole world of it reeks of subtle insincerity.

[erika moya]

Great article. It has become a system. That is why I love Gilbert- definitely not a career poet.

[Jim Cummins]

Thank you all for these comments. I was beat after I finished, and was kind of down because I thought it maybe sounded defeatist; and I don't feel that way at all, in life or art. Your responses picked me up; Alex, a nice little espresso. I assume you mean Jack Gilbert, Erika? He's always been a bit of a hero to me, too, since I read his Yale book long ago: fiercely honest (by his lights, which is all we can do) outsider. And Jillian: it took me longer than you to actually feel what you're saying here, though I "knew" it, of course, before. But you're right: it's the writing that counts; that's the freedom.

[DL]

Marvelous post, Jim. Question: What made Don Justice so special? As an Iowa alum yourself, perhaps you can say what combination of traits so endeared him to students across the range of tastes and styles?

[Karen Carissimo]

What a great essay. Brings back great and lousy memories from the MFA mire at USC. I remember being in fiction writing workshop with Hubert Selby. First day of class, a girl says "I wanted to be a writer until I came here." She was a terrific writer, a semester away from graduating, and just disappeared. Selby, a gentle guy, kept asking after her. In poetry class, James Ragan ran a great workshop. We kids piped down and listened. He had us read all the greats, to show us how far we had to go. His advice on learning to write well: Live. Wreck your life a few times, rebuild it, and travel. The comedian Shelley Berman, who still teaches at USC, was in the poetry workshop as a student. He was eighty at the time, renewing his acting career on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and wrote poems with humility and great awe for the art. He wrote with so much care, listened more than talked, and read poems aloud with so much emotion. We always spent the last hour of class at the bar, Shelley and his scotch presiding, cracking us all up until we were sober enough to drive the long stretches of LA freeway home. . .sorry to go on here. You just brought it all back.

[Heidi Lynn Staples]

Really really enjoyed reading this and agreed with much. I found it descriptive rather than defeatist. Thanks for writing it!

But I do think it's an overgeneralization to say that "what we're "teaching" them first and foremost is not to be writers, but to be academics (shudder)--bureaucratic careerists."

That orientation will vary from program to program, certainly. It wasn't my MFA student experience anyway. My program promoted a vehement almost anti-intellectual stance against the theorists you describe, which is a whole different situation. I'd argue that the 10% / 90% split probably happens with my MFA scenario as well, with a handful of writers doing the thing well and a heap not-so-well.

On a related note: Eavan Boland had an essay in Poetry mag a few issues back about the fact that a poet in the contemporary scene must have skills, particularly administrative and social skills, in order to promote the work effectively. She contrasts this with a generation or two back and claims these skills weren't required for national or international recognition as a poet.

[Jim Cummins]

Thank you, Karen and Heidi, for great posts; the idea of hanging with Shelley Berman is too great. You're talking about one of the first people I thought were really funny: ask him sometime if he remembers Myron Cohen. As for overgeneralizing: oh sure, I admit it. But the good always seems more rare to me than the ones who would suck its blood. For the record, I meant the programs are preparing students to take up academic jobs; c.f. Emerson's "Divinity School Address."

[Denise]

Thank you, Jim! You have well articulated what we all dread/fear about ourselves and our gaming.

[David Yezzi]

This is brilliant, Jim. Many thanks for it!

[Account Deleted]

Thanks, David. I appreciate it!

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To: Cummins, James (cumminjv)
Subject: [The Best American Poetry] David Yezzi submitted a comment to 'I'm Not Clowning, I'm Raving [by Jim Cummins]'.

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[Joanie Mackowski]

Hi Jim-- I'm late to the conversation but fascinated: I love the post. I wonder, though: Myers in _The Elephants Teach_ and also Perloff in an online riposte to something on EBJ ( http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/carnets ) both bring up the idea of creative writers (systematically produced or otherwise, as in Myers’ first chapter) being particularly good, effective, & even necessary teachers: if so, are they "gaming" the system or working hard at jobs they believe in, jobs which include teaching lit, lit history, & basic writing in addition to (and lately moreso than) leading "pure" replicas of the Iowa et al workshop model (& actually I doubt that these days any “hothouse replica” wd actually get a job: he or she better rather know how to teach what a sentence is & why such a thing can be useful…)? Is there really no there there (here)? Well I’m going to quote from the Perloff I mention above:
“[T]he situation [ie. that CW programs are “soft and trivial”] has drastically changed in recent years… [The creative writing program] now fills a need that English simply refuses to satisfy. I am talking about literary study, increasingly neglected as beside the point by the so-called Englit department in deference to the heady new world of Cultural Studies. Indeed, most assistant professors hired at even the top institutions like my own no longer have the slightest idea what literary analysis might entail. They've heard of an old-hat technique called "close-reading" -- a technique they know they don't want to use even though they have no idea what it might accomplish….”