Richard Jeffrey Newman

I read with great inter­est Collin Kelly’s post More than this: A larger place at the poetry table and tried to leave this as a com­ment, but I am guess­ing it was too long because I kept get­ting an error mes­sage, so I am post­ing it here. The part of the post I wanted to respond to was this:

So, I have ques­tions for all of you who read this blog: How we can get back to the plea­sure of the art rather than the jock­ey­ing for posi­tion, awards and writ­ing per­sonal attacks mas­querad­ing as “lit­er­ary crit­i­cism?” How do we set a larger place at the poetry table for those work­ing out­side the acad­emy? How do we make the art of poetry inter­est­ing and com­pelling to the next gen­er­a­tion that doesn’t want an MFA or teach­ing gig? How do we take the insu­lar and make it open?

Even­tu­ally, I think I need to turn this into a larger post, but for now I will just leave the com­ment as I orig­i­nally wrote it:

As an aca­d­e­mic – I teach at a large com­mu­nity col­lege in NYC, where I coör­di­nate our Cre­ative Writ­ing Project, in which capac­ity I have attended AWP for the last cou­ple of years – and a poet with a book (three, if you count my trans­la­tions), but with­out an MFA, and as some­one involved with a local poetry group, I con­fess I find the table metaphor prob­lem­atic. Not because I think it is inac­cu­rate per se, but because I think the notion that there is only one table that needs some­how to be enlarged is itself part of the prob­lem. I think it actu­ally allows what some­one upthread didn’t quite call the “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion” of the poet that is one result of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of MFA pro­grams to frame the prob­lem rather than cre­at­ing a frame through which to cri­tique “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion.” (And I guess I want to be clear that I mean “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion” as a descrip­tive and not a crit­i­cal term.)

There is no way around the fact that, as MFA pro­grams have pro­lif­er­ated, that pro­lif­er­a­tion has cre­ated a com­mu­nity of poets that needs to per­pet­u­ate itself, through pub­li­ca­tion, through jobs, through get­ting reviewed and so on; and there is also no way around the fact that, if you are not a part of this com­mu­nity, it can be very hard to get for your work the kind of atten­tion that peo­ple within the com­mu­nity are able to get for theirs – inde­pen­dently of the work’s qual­ity. More­over, I think the degree to which this pro­lif­er­a­tion has been national, to the degree that there is a national orga­ni­za­tion that embod­ies this pro­lif­er­a­tion – by which I do not mean to deny at all that AWP has made seri­ous efforts to reach out to non-MFA, non-academically affil­i­ated, etc. writ­ers – to the degree, in other words, that the job of a poet as defined by this com­mu­nity (as opposed to sim­ply being a poet, about which more in a moment) has become one with a national stage, I think the dynamic Collin points to is inevitable. Of course there will be a hier­ar­chy within the com­mu­nity of poets play­ing on this stage; of course there will be pol­i­tics and turf bat­tles. Why should the pro­fes­sion of poet be dif­fer­ent than any other profession?

I do not mean by this to bash MFA pro­grams or MFA grad­u­ates; I think the peo­ple who say that the land­scape of poetry in the United States has, over­all, been enor­mously enriched by them are speak­ing the truth – though I know there are ways to qual­ify that state­ment; but when I was in my twen­ties and just begin­ning to think seri­ously that I might be a poet, I read a quote by Robert Bly (I think it was, and I know I am para­phras­ing) who said that no poet should be pub­lished before the age of 30 or so. At the time, impa­tient to pub­lish as I was, I thought this was utter crap, but when I look back on my life as a writer, I am in a way very grate­ful that I didn’t pub­lish my first book until I was 44. It’s not just that my poetry was, by that time, truly ready for pub­li­ca­tion, for a pub­lic, in the deep­est and most lit­eral sense of that word, but I myself was also ready for that pub­lic in a way I could not have been 20 or even 10 years ear­lier. I remem­ber the moment I wrote in my jour­nal – I was 21 or 22 – the words “I am a poet.” It was one of the scari­est moments in my life, because I felt like I was com­mit­ting myself to a way of life, of see­ing and being in the world, not a job.

Again, let me be clear about some­thing: I am not char­ac­ter­iz­ing in one broad stroke all the peo­ple who have MFAs as career-oriented writer drones. My point is less about the indi­vid­u­als who get MFAs – who will or will not be “good” poets, what­ever the hell that means – than about what the pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion of the poet does cul­tur­ally to what peo­ple think it means to be a poet. That is one of the con­ver­sa­tions we need to have in order, I think, to get back to the plea­sures of the art.

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§ One Response to Response to Collin Kelly’s Post “More than this: A larger place at the poetry table”

• Collin Kelley says:

  August 24, 2010 at 10:50 pm

  Thanks for this thought­ful response and join­ing in the conversation!