An Open Letter to Poets Who Hate the Creative Writing MFA

It’s not hard to find an expert on Master of Fine Arts programs in creative writing—if you’re looking, that is. Check your local bookstore, or any online marketplace, and you’ll discover that there are only three books on the market that address this particular field of graduate study, almost certainly the fastest-growing field of study in the United States. And only one of these books profiles even a single MFA program in detail. Log on to Google and you’ll witness a similar phenomenon: There are only four high-traffic community blogs, anywhere on the internet, that cater specifically to current MFA students or MFA applicants. Check out the national magazines and the numbers are even grimmer—only one comprehensive ranking of full-residency MFA programs has ever been published in print. And yet applications to the top 50 MFA programs in creative writing are up 25% to 150% since last year. If anyone at the New York Times Education Desk were aware of this you could probably expect an article on the surge in MFA applications sometime in the next week. For any field of graduate study to see an increase of such magnitude in just twelve months is astonishing and surely historic; yet equally astonishing is how little time it would take anyone interested in this phenomenon to answer the “how” or “why” of it. If you want to know—if you really want to know—it only takes a magazine article or two, or a blog or two, or a single used copy of a book, to get you your answer.

Poets in particular love to talk about MFA programs, usually in tones appropriately categorized as apocalyptic and with a level of prior research knowledge that could only be expressed as a negative integer. MFA programs will destroy American poetry, we are regularly told. Ron Silliman recently likened these graduate courses of study to “polio” (he later apologized, on the grounds that the comment was unintentionally insulting to physically-challenged persons). Linh Dinh sagely informed the readers of Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation, that MFA students and applicants were “suckers” and that MFA programs constituted a “racket” run by, in many instances, “careerist creeps.” A recent Pulitzer Prize-winning poet translated the acronym for the degree into a three-word epithet involving mothers that can’t be repeated here—and then posted this felicitous discovery on Facebook. This is only a glimpse of the general tenor of MFA-related discourse among poets; in fact, poets have been waxing apoplectic about MFA programs for years now, and what’s more, in numbers. What the above detractors and nearly all their predecessors have in common is that they didn’t write any of the books on MFA programs alluded to above. They don’t participate in online MFA-applicant communities, either, though such communities now boast a daily readership in the thousands. Nor do these detractors appear to have read much—or anything, really—about MFA programs in national magazines. Or anywhere else. In fact, they didn’t even attend MFA programs themselves (and argue, implicitly, that they don’t know any truly innovative poet who did, so we can assume they either have no friends with an MFA or else no friends with identifiable talent). Yet the poetry community has hustled far more than is usual for the artist class to give these folks whatever microphones are available. Poets love their doomsayers.

So how often, one might ask, do major contemporary American poetry fora (like Harriet) publish commentary about MFA programs by MFA faculty, MFA graduates, current MFA students, current MFA applicants, or MFA experts? About as often as contemporary poets write paeans to happiness, one might say. Good news is substantially less interesting than bad news, whatever the topic or the medium.

So, the good news: The national network of MFA programs is well on its way to becoming the largest and best-funded patronage system for artists in the history of Art. To liken the MFA to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944—also known as the G.I. Bill—would at present be only moderately rather than thoroughly ludicrous. And in ten years’ time it may well be something approaching entirely apt. To provide some of the history MFA detractors don’t know or don’t care about and therefore can’t or won’t provide their readers: Twenty-five years ago, when there were only a few dozen MFA programs, rather than the two hundred there are now, it was possible and perhaps (at a real stretch) reasonable for MFA programs to employ the “professional-school” model of education funding because competition for teaching jobs was keen but not—as now—literally unthinkably fierce. A single book might possibly land one a full-time job with some regularity, and MFA programs were enough of a boutique concept that they were more likely to be recognized and favored by those with the present financial means to pay for them. Also, there was minimal oversight of the field, so no watchdog institution stood ready and willing to call foul. (Spoiler: That’s still the case.) The professional-school funding model is one in which the student pays his or her own way, because the program, the theory goes, is preparing the student for a paying job in the field immediately or near-immediately upon graduation.

In 2010, the conventional wisdom is worlds away from what it once was: Trawl online communities or published articles pertaining to the creative writing MFA and you’ll see repeated, endlessly, experts and aspiring poets’ and writers’ belief that the MFA, as a terminal degree, should be fully funded just like other terminal degrees; that unfunded offers of admission should be turned down with the same alacrity by poets and writers as they are scorned by aspiring doctoral students in physics and chemistry; that as there are no jobs for MFA graduates available, broadly speaking, and as the MFA is not, by itself, anything like sufficient qualification for full-time employment at a university, anyone who graduates from an MFA should expect to find some other kind of employment unless and until they publish widely enough to merit consideration for a professorship (assuming they want one); that because the MFA is not a time-sensitive degree, one ought to feel comfortable applying to MFAs in successive years until one receives a fully-funded offer of admission; that in light of the foregoing, one ought not go into debt for an MFA program; and that MFA programs that still rely on the professional-school model of education funding are increasingly likely to be scorned by applicants and thus widely considered less august as institutions. Anyone who follows MFA programs with any regularity knows that all this is only a small piece of the current conventional wisdom about the degree—it might also be said that students today are more interested in finding a community than receiving hierarchical instruction, more interested in having time to write unmolested by the workaday world than gaining teaching experience—but for present purposes the distinctions made above suffice to set the scene.

The facts on the ground do not belie this conventional wisdom—they confirm it. Approximately forty programs now fully fund three-quarters or more of their incoming students. Roughly two dozen more fully fund between a third and three-quarters of matriculants. (It can rightly be said, now, that there is no evident cause for an aspiring novelist or poet to apply to any program where full funding is not a distinct possibility.) More and more programs are three years in duration instead of two, and allow students to fulfill a majority of their credit requirements with internships, independent study, thesis hours, and workshops. Across the board—nearly without exception—programs that do not fund their students well are seeing drops in their national ranking. The best-funded programs are—again with startling consistency—seeing the nation’s highest increases in applications and notable increases in prestige. And just as the G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of soldiers to pursue their higher-education ambitions largely on the public dime, so too are public-school MFA programs, especially those not on the coasts, increasingly the most likely to be using their largely-government-sponsored endowments to fund MFA programs that pay young poets and writers simply to write (and perhaps teach two or three hours a week for thirty weeks a year; not bad, when the rest of the nation is busting its hump sixty-plus hours forty-nine weeks a year). Every current trend in MFA admissions suggests that the unfunded MFA is a dying breed, and that the notion of the MFA program as preparation for immediate post-graduate professional employment is wholly obsolete—yet to hear MFA detractors tell the story absolutely nothing has changed in graduate study in creative writing in the last half-century. That it is these ill-informed Nostradamuses who are being given the largest microphones is a tragedy; the nation’s young poets and writers deserve better. They deserve a public dialogue about MFA programs that depicts the MFA application experience—and the in-program MFA experience, and the MFA-as-cultural-phenomenon experience—as they themselves have understood and lived it, and as can reasonably be projected out into the future with even a rudimentary understanding of Where We Are Now.

The present conversation over the propriety and efficacy of MFA programs presumes much and explains little. We are told that MFA programs are the “but-for” cause of a massive de-fanging of American poetics, yet no case studies, anecdotes, or exemplars are ever provided, nor could they be—the same poets might well have developed in the same way without an MFA, which is (coincidentally) precisely the position of the MFA programs themselves, as despite crowing over the successes of their graduates these programs are also quite clear that they can’t and don’t teach anyone “how to write.” Often, MFA detractors like Donald Hall fall back on the comparison of unlike things: The work of inexperienced twenty-two year-old MFA students is compared, incredibly, to that of the Masters, and then when it is found (shockingly) to be wanting, the MFA and the MFA alone is blamed. (Instead, we might compare a random set of twenty-two year-old untutored and isolated poets with a similarly-aged and similarly-sized set of poets attending programs of study more difficult to gain admission to than Harvard Law School, where they are now being taught by, say, Peter Gizzi, Cole Swensen, Dean Young, or Alice Fulton; or, we might compare a large number of older poets without MFAs, and a large number of older poets with MFAs, and see whether a single twenty-one-month immersion in the Academy many years or even decades ago ruined any of the latter group for the rest of their writing lives. Of course, only a handful of MFA programs have even been around long enough for historic comparisons of this sort to be made. Unless Donald Hall thinks such disparate Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduates as Dan Beachy-Quick, Joshua Clover, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, Matthea Harvey, Philip Levine, Alice Notley, Bob Perelman, D.A. Powell, Mark Strand, and Rachel Zucker are all writing identical “McPoems”?)

It is implied, then, that the Academy is a hotbed of cronyism—yet it was Academy-sponsored first-book contests which became the “first adopters” of “blind submissions” and rigid CLMP ethics standards, even as the non-Academy publishing scene has for decades taken evident pride in basing publishing decisions (i.e. aesthetic decisions) in significant part on social relationships and group dynamics. While it’s not clear that any sub-community of contemporary American poetry has yet found an open path toward “meritocracy”—and while it’s not even clear what a meritocracy in Art would look like or mean, apart from a commitment to fair and transparent process (e.g., blind submissions, no cronyism or nepotism, and comprehensive published guidelines)—the Academy is certainly as far down this road as anyone else is. Nor is there any indication that Academy sub-communities are any more exclusive (as in, “excluding”) than non-Academy sub-communities: The proof of this is that anyone seeking admission to one of the nation’s two hundred MFA programs can, with sufficient time and effort, do so, whoever they are, whereas breaking into the hipster scene in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco requires social skills as much as artistic ones. And certainly there are even smaller sub-communities outside the Academy that are even more hostile to those they perceive as being unlike them in any of a series of specified ways. In contrast, the Academy offers young poets and writers all across the country, whatever their background, access to an increasingly diverse community of peers—in places like Lawrence, KS; Richmond, VA; Laramie, WY; Corvallis, OR; and San Marcos, TX—whereas non-Academy communities, particularly those with publishing organs, are located primarily in major urban areas where young people find it difficult to get a decent job or afford decent housing (often forcing those who seek out such communities to spend more time bussing tables than writing poems; a sixty-hour work-week doing back-breaking labor in New York City is a far cry from teaching a single, two-hour-a-week section of composition in, say, Ann Arbor or Madison). In short, when we are assured, in sage tones, that avoiding an MFA altogether is clearly and unambiguously better for the psyche and wallet and talent and sense of belonging of the young poet, such assurances are always conspicuously and dare I say suspiciously light on details.

The MFA hasn’t killed, won’t kill, and can’t kill the ingenuity of the American poet, and those who’ve thus far stood on the sidelines and cast stones as much or more at the next generation of poets as they have at MFA faculties and administrators should consider putting their time and energy where their words have been and are. Yes, there are some MFA programs that continue to exploit their applicants and their students; in many instances, these programs are partially staffed by friends and acquaintances of those who’ve to date reserved their ire for the twenty-somethings who innocently apply in the thousands to such programs every year. Want to help the next generation of poets rather than merely excite the air with your hands and mouth (and in so doing denigrate their ambitions)? Urge your friends and acquaintances to tirelessly seek out even a fraction of the funding for their students that their employers currently find for faculty salaries. Urge more experimental poets and writers, not fewer, to find jobs in the degree programs that now act as patrons to thousands of poets and writers every year—as if poets and writers will in the future find their communities in, and receive daily inspiration from, their peers and mentors at MFA programs, instead of railing against this circumstance to no evident effect why not make sure the education these poets and writers are receiving is worthy of their promise and their courage in pursuing an artist’s life? Perhaps you could pass round a contract amongst your friends and acquaintances saying that none of them will accept employment at any university program that makes a majority of their incoming students go into deep debt for a non-professional, non-marketable art-school degree. Perhaps you could offer a word of kindness, publicly, for a program like the University of Texas at Austin, which annually gives a bevy of poets and writers more than $27,000 apiece in non-teaching fellowships. (This is exactly the sort of government largesse that many MFA detractors regularly seek for themselves in the form of government grants, suggesting that the shirt-rending over MFA programs has less to do with whether such programs serve writers well, and more to do with an historic and aesthetically-based opposition to the Academy—an opposition that was more grounded in fact when Allen Tate, not Lyn Hejinian, was one of the nation’s most revered creative writing professors). Perhaps you could engage actual MFA applicants in conversation in the handful of easily-located communities where they dwell online. Or read a book or a magazine from the last ten years that speaks to the MFA phenomenon. Or sponsor roundtables in your online magazines in which MFA detractors are put in dialogue with MFA advocates rather than allowed to shout them down or (far more likely and more often) crowd them out entirely. Perhaps greater intellectual honesty—like not failing to mention the prior MFA study of some of the experimental poets you most admire, or conceding that the old European patronage system was far more destructive to Art than the new one Americans have devised, or recognizing that young American poets have been paying for poetry instruction ever since the first university initiated a Creative Writing track in its English major—is what’s really called for here.

Or perhaps it’s merely a matter of common sense: If a poet spends sixty years writing, what harm does two or three years under any particular poet’s on-again off-again tutelage do, and/or how is such tutelage different from non-Academy mentorship, and/or why would anyone assume that any independent-minded poet is going to offer up his or her individuality as a artist on the altar of this-a-one or that-a-one? If you wouldn’t, why would anyone else? Poets who attend MFA programs are as stubborn and egotistical and arrogant as those who don’t, surely. In any case, whatever you choose to do—whether you are an MFA detractor, the publisher of such detractors, or a current higher-up in a program that may be ill-serving the financial futures of its incoming students—do not continue to do what it seems many of you are doing now: Speaking from a studied ignorance and/or an instinctive defensiveness, and accepting any and every invitation to hold forth on things of which you have, it must be said, much opinion but little understanding. The singer-songwriter Jewel one day decided to become a “poet” (cf. A Night Without Armor), and you, it sometimes seems with equal forethought and preparation, have cast yourself in the role of someone with an understanding for how the MFA phenomenon has developed and is still developing in America. Whether this is a convenient truth for you or not, the fact remains that the American poetry community is early in the third decade of a fifty-year revolution, one which will change forever how American poets live and write and are invested in and are encouraged. You can start spending your time and energy and money fighting for positive change within this emerging but still imperfect cultural framework, as many others are now doing, or else continue to stand in the schoolhouse door. It’s your choice—and, until cooler heads at the larger fora prevail, apparently your microphone as well.