Life is a farce if you do not serve truth.
—Hilma af Klint
—Hilma af Klint
Is art something that can be taught and systematized, or is it an event, an eruption that defies closed-form learning? It would appear the subtle distinction between “art” and “craft” is that one can rewire the brain, the other matches the wallpaper, and the brightest minds argue true art is not a craft learned by rote, but an adventure into the unknown, closer to a mystical or existential occurrence, that completely overtakes the artist. The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, for instance, talks about poetry as a force of nature and conscience, not a profession. She believes the poet is called to their task, almost in a prophetic mode, something a mere credential can never confer. For her, a poem is an event that happens to the poet as much as it is made by the poet. One doesn’t simply apply tips and techniques to generate genuine poetry, rather the poem arrives and transforms, it is the outcome of “inspiration” in the old, unquantifiable sense, a thing born of suffering, ecstasy, constraint, memory, that surfaces, in time, from the unconscious. Poetry, that most “useless” of human endeavors, useless in the way love and philosophy are useless, i.e. beyond utilitarian measure, reminds us how close art is to a miracle.
Adrienne Rich jeopardized her career to reveal bitter, uncomfortable truths in her writing, because to her the integrity of vision mattered above all else. Herself a product of an earlier era of American poetry and later a teacher, she insisted on authenticity and risk in poetic language, qualities that can’t be mass-produced. Her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and others speak to the idea of writing as a means of awakening, of finding a real voice that challenges the status quo. “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language,” she says, “which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”[1] In this cosmological view, how could expansive, explosive art be reduced to a list of dos and don’ts? The tension between teachable craft and unteachable art has always haunted creative writing education, and the essence of a great poem, its magic, its necessity, might be precisely that which cannot be articulated in a classroom, but can only be experienced.
Established poets from outside or at the margins of the Master of Fine Arts initiative have been openly scornful of the glossy sameness they perceive. Franz Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, launched a memorable broadside against what he called the “MFA generations.” He suggested that in comparison to the achievements of mid-20th-century American poetry (the era before MFA programs became ubiquitous), the newer poetry was feeble, and contemporary workshop-trained poets were so insubstantial that their work was unfit even for toilet use. Franz Wright’s hyperbole may sound extreme, and he was promptly blacklisted from further readings and literary engagements, but it speaks to a frustration that poetry, once a wild and authentic art, has been domesticated into tepid exercises. His father, James Wright, emerged in the 1950s without the benefit of workshops, on the strength of his own transformative free verse that came from a place of deep personal introspection and a break with convention—in fact, his departure from formal verse to a more open style in the 1960s was decidedly anti-institutional in spirit, just like the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, and many of his other contemporaries who flourished in countercultural or non-academic settings. The point being a non-poet can’t be turned into a poet by training, just as a true poet can’t be unmade by lack of training. It’s an all-or-nothing, fated condition, standing in stark contrast to the MFA tenet which implies that, given enough application and feedback, anyone can be taught to write well.
Adrienne Rich jeopardized her career to reveal bitter, uncomfortable truths in her writing, because to her the integrity of vision mattered above all else. Herself a product of an earlier era of American poetry and later a teacher, she insisted on authenticity and risk in poetic language, qualities that can’t be mass-produced. Her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and others speak to the idea of writing as a means of awakening, of finding a real voice that challenges the status quo. “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language,” she says, “which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”[1] In this cosmological view, how could expansive, explosive art be reduced to a list of dos and don’ts? The tension between teachable craft and unteachable art has always haunted creative writing education, and the essence of a great poem, its magic, its necessity, might be precisely that which cannot be articulated in a classroom, but can only be experienced.
Established poets from outside or at the margins of the Master of Fine Arts initiative have been openly scornful of the glossy sameness they perceive. Franz Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, launched a memorable broadside against what he called the “MFA generations.” He suggested that in comparison to the achievements of mid-20th-century American poetry (the era before MFA programs became ubiquitous), the newer poetry was feeble, and contemporary workshop-trained poets were so insubstantial that their work was unfit even for toilet use. Franz Wright’s hyperbole may sound extreme, and he was promptly blacklisted from further readings and literary engagements, but it speaks to a frustration that poetry, once a wild and authentic art, has been domesticated into tepid exercises. His father, James Wright, emerged in the 1950s without the benefit of workshops, on the strength of his own transformative free verse that came from a place of deep personal introspection and a break with convention—in fact, his departure from formal verse to a more open style in the 1960s was decidedly anti-institutional in spirit, just like the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, and many of his other contemporaries who flourished in countercultural or non-academic settings. The point being a non-poet can’t be turned into a poet by training, just as a true poet can’t be unmade by lack of training. It’s an all-or-nothing, fated condition, standing in stark contrast to the MFA tenet which implies that, given enough application and feedback, anyone can be taught to write well.
© Daniel Carden Nemo
In the last 50 years, the American MFA creative writing system has burgeoned into a veritable industrial system. What began as a handful of university programs has become an expansive network entangled with publishing houses, literary journals, anthologies, contests, a machine that produces thousands of credentialed writers each year. The creative writing sector sells the promise of literary success through formal training, and it has become big business. According to a 2016 study published in The Atlantic,[2] MFA programs contribute over $200 million a year in revenue to American universities, and with more than 350 graduate writing programs in the U.S. now, up from just 52 in 1975, each vies for aspiring writers’ tuition fees. The sheer scale invites comparison to other lucrative professional pipelines, like Big Pharma’s entanglement with medical institutions, where an ostensibly noble pursuit is deeply interwoven with profit motives and institutional self-preservation. In this case, the MFA-publishing complex may appear as a symbol of the degree standing in for the substance of art or, at worst, as an organized syndicate with its own rules of admission and advancement, loyalty and gatekeeping.
Stanford professor Mark McGurl argues that the rise of creative writing programs in postwar America has been “the most important event in postwar American literary history.”[3] Entire generations of writers have passed through the machine. The very locus of literary culture has shifted onto campuses and into writing workshops, giving birth to a literary-industrial complex fueled by a credentialist ethos which trades in hope and validation: aspiring writers invest tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives for the chance to earn a badge that might grant them entry into the guild of published authors, as there is an implicit promise an MFA will improve one’s writing or at least one’s chances in the publishing marketplace. Yet recent quantitative analysis suggests that the differences between MFA-trained writers and others are minimal. The same study in The Atlantic[4] used computational text analysis on hundreds of novels by MFA graduates and non-MFA authors, looking for any stylistic or thematic signatures of MFA influence. The results were, as the authors put it, “disappointing. […] It was extremely difficult to separate the MFA and non-MFA writing groups in any meaningful way.”
Stanford professor Mark McGurl argues that the rise of creative writing programs in postwar America has been “the most important event in postwar American literary history.”[3] Entire generations of writers have passed through the machine. The very locus of literary culture has shifted onto campuses and into writing workshops, giving birth to a literary-industrial complex fueled by a credentialist ethos which trades in hope and validation: aspiring writers invest tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives for the chance to earn a badge that might grant them entry into the guild of published authors, as there is an implicit promise an MFA will improve one’s writing or at least one’s chances in the publishing marketplace. Yet recent quantitative analysis suggests that the differences between MFA-trained writers and others are minimal. The same study in The Atlantic[4] used computational text analysis on hundreds of novels by MFA graduates and non-MFA authors, looking for any stylistic or thematic signatures of MFA influence. The results were, as the authors put it, “disappointing. […] It was extremely difficult to separate the MFA and non-MFA writing groups in any meaningful way.”
But if an MFA doesn't markedly improve one’s writing, what is it actually providing? The answer may be connections and cachet. The Atlantic study concludes: “Only 7 percent of MFA graduates are fully funded, which means 93 percent are investing some portion of their own money to sound like everyone else.”[5] The emphasis shifts from developing a unique voice to “gaining entrance to the club,” inserting oneself into a literary social network in a simulacrum of creativity—a select signal, a credential that one has been vetted by the academy and thus by the contemporary literary establishment. In the publishing world, this credential carries real weight. Literary agents and editors do take note of MFA alumni status, with one agent admitting, “we look favorably on anyone who has an MFA, simply because it shows they’re serious about their writing.”[6] Seriousness, in this sense, is conflated with having paid tuition fees within the system.
Chad Harbach’s collection MFA vs NYC frames the current American literary scene as divided into two cultures: the university-based MFA sphere and the New York City publishing world.[7] But even Harbach acknowledges this binary is porous and synergistic. By now, “we are all MFAs,” he says, meaning that the workshop-born formalism permeates even writers who never set foot in an MFA program. The influence of the MFA paradigm “bled downward” into undergraduate programs and infiltrated the very air of contemporary fiction. If you're writing in America today, you’ve likely absorbed the norms of the workshop through osmosis: through creative writing classes in college, through reading recently published fiction penned mostly by MFA graduates, through the editorial preferences of journals staffed by MFA holders, etc. The entire literary marketplace has been saturated by the MFA’s styles and values, creating a microclimate where certain kinds of writing are the currency, a closed loop of validation. As poet and critic Anis Shivani summarizes, “the modern-day MFA program forms the writing of the American market today,”[8] a vicious circle in which MFA programs feed the publishing industry with authors who conform to certain standards, and the publishing industry in turn validates those standards by rewarding MFA writers. It’s an almost feudal economy of letters, complete with its own fiefdoms (programs), vassals (students), and lords (faculty and publishing staff).
Anis Shivani’s review of the MFA system is nothing if not incendiary. He doesn’t mince words in likening creative writing programs to a “medieval guild”—closed, subversive, undemocratic, inherently conservative. In a guild, one must be an apprentice to enter the trade. Likewise, to be a “real” writer these days, one is expected to apprentice in an MFA. “If you’re not a part of it, you’re left hanging in the wind,” Shivani writes, highlighting how insular the creative writing world has become. He points out that the guild encourages output that leans toward a “domesticated narrative… toward the confessional, memoiristic, autobiographical, narcissistic, and plainly understood.” It rewards those who play within a narrow sandbox, the aesthetic gatekeeping occurring on two fronts, formal, as in a narrow range of acceptable styles, primarily polished realism in fiction alongside a kind of workshop lyric in poetry, and thematic, as in a narrow range of approved subjects, mainly inward- or identity-focused.
Chad Harbach’s collection MFA vs NYC frames the current American literary scene as divided into two cultures: the university-based MFA sphere and the New York City publishing world.[7] But even Harbach acknowledges this binary is porous and synergistic. By now, “we are all MFAs,” he says, meaning that the workshop-born formalism permeates even writers who never set foot in an MFA program. The influence of the MFA paradigm “bled downward” into undergraduate programs and infiltrated the very air of contemporary fiction. If you're writing in America today, you’ve likely absorbed the norms of the workshop through osmosis: through creative writing classes in college, through reading recently published fiction penned mostly by MFA graduates, through the editorial preferences of journals staffed by MFA holders, etc. The entire literary marketplace has been saturated by the MFA’s styles and values, creating a microclimate where certain kinds of writing are the currency, a closed loop of validation. As poet and critic Anis Shivani summarizes, “the modern-day MFA program forms the writing of the American market today,”[8] a vicious circle in which MFA programs feed the publishing industry with authors who conform to certain standards, and the publishing industry in turn validates those standards by rewarding MFA writers. It’s an almost feudal economy of letters, complete with its own fiefdoms (programs), vassals (students), and lords (faculty and publishing staff).
Anis Shivani’s review of the MFA system is nothing if not incendiary. He doesn’t mince words in likening creative writing programs to a “medieval guild”—closed, subversive, undemocratic, inherently conservative. In a guild, one must be an apprentice to enter the trade. Likewise, to be a “real” writer these days, one is expected to apprentice in an MFA. “If you’re not a part of it, you’re left hanging in the wind,” Shivani writes, highlighting how insular the creative writing world has become. He points out that the guild encourages output that leans toward a “domesticated narrative… toward the confessional, memoiristic, autobiographical, narcissistic, and plainly understood.” It rewards those who play within a narrow sandbox, the aesthetic gatekeeping occurring on two fronts, formal, as in a narrow range of acceptable styles, primarily polished realism in fiction alongside a kind of workshop lyric in poetry, and thematic, as in a narrow range of approved subjects, mainly inward- or identity-focused.
A disproportionate number of awards and honors go to those in the “guild.” Take a look at the recent winners and finalists of major literary prizes and you’ll find MFA degrees and creative writing faculty positions littered across their biographies. One analysis of the National Book Awards over the past decade notes that “almost all of [the honorees] are products of what has come to be known as America’s ‘MFA Industrial Complex.’ They all tend to matriculate at the same elite colleges, acquire advanced degrees in English or Creative Writing, and then go on to teach in the same circle of elite schools.”[9] As the report reveals, from 2010 onward, nearly every National Book Award winner in fiction had an MFA or taught in an MFA program, while judges of major awards are frequently MFA professors or alumni themselves, reinforcing a cycle of recognition that favors those within the system.
What a dramatic shift this has been! In mid-20th century America, so many great authors emerged with minimal academic credentials, some never even finishing college or high school. Hemingway, Faulkner, Capote, Steinbeck, and Harper Lee all launched monumental literary careers without MFAs or PhDs. As late as the 1960s, one could cite a Whitmanesque ideal of the writer as a free agent, learning craft from life itself or from loosely arranged bohemian circles. But in the ensuing decades, literature in the U.S. underwent a kind of professionalization and now the writer is expected not only to have degrees, but also to navigate an ecosystem of colonies, fellowships, conferences, and journals attached to universities. The publishing networks are entangled with the MFA programs: professors at MFA programs edit literary magazines, run small presses, sit on award committees; their students get published in those magazines or win their contests; those credentials help the students land agent representation and book deals; successful alumni in turn feed back into the system as faculty or prestigious workshop guest speakers, and their publishing successes serve to provide evidence of the excellence of their universities’ MFA programs in a self-sustaining spiral. It’s an elaborate symbiosis that can appear, to a non-member, worryingly nepotistic. The MFA-publishing complex forms its own barriers to outside competition, and the tariff is imposed on voices that lack the approved credentials.[10] Protectionism is at work, domestic producers (MFA writers) are shielded, however subtly, from the full brunt of “foreign” competition (writers outside the fold).
Another paradox of the MFA industrial complex is how it intertwines with contemporary drives for diversity and inclusion, yet in a somewhat superficial way. Numerous MFA programs and the literary magazines they feed are eager to promote voices from historically marginalized communities, which on the face of it is a laudable corrective to the old, exclusionary canon. However, this push can sometimes feel like box-ticking or “quota-filling,” especially if the underlying aesthetic conformity remains unchallenged. Elif Batuman’s remark[11] about “real or invented sociopolitical grievances” being used as the ticket to writerly identity has never been more true. In some workshop circles, writers might feel that to be taken seriously their work must perform a certain kind of identity or victim narrative—essentially, that one’s personal demographic or trauma is the currency to justify one’s art. What this does is lead to performative politics in literature, where the depth and complexity of engagement with socio-political themes are less valued than their topical correctness. Meanwhile the quality of the writing, its linguistic vitality, its conceptual originality, its truthfulness may be given a pass so long as the author fits a desired profile or the work aligns with prevailing progressive sentiments. And so, literary magazines and presses, mostly run by MFA-affiliated personnel, publish work that is politically “on message” or that adds to a showcase of demographic variety, but that might be mediocre as literature or struggle for clear meaning. Writers outside these categories, or those who don’t foreground identity in their work, can feel doubly sidelined, by not belonging to an in-group like the MFA network or to a celebrated identity group. Such facts are seldom stated openly for fear of sounding reactionary.
What a dramatic shift this has been! In mid-20th century America, so many great authors emerged with minimal academic credentials, some never even finishing college or high school. Hemingway, Faulkner, Capote, Steinbeck, and Harper Lee all launched monumental literary careers without MFAs or PhDs. As late as the 1960s, one could cite a Whitmanesque ideal of the writer as a free agent, learning craft from life itself or from loosely arranged bohemian circles. But in the ensuing decades, literature in the U.S. underwent a kind of professionalization and now the writer is expected not only to have degrees, but also to navigate an ecosystem of colonies, fellowships, conferences, and journals attached to universities. The publishing networks are entangled with the MFA programs: professors at MFA programs edit literary magazines, run small presses, sit on award committees; their students get published in those magazines or win their contests; those credentials help the students land agent representation and book deals; successful alumni in turn feed back into the system as faculty or prestigious workshop guest speakers, and their publishing successes serve to provide evidence of the excellence of their universities’ MFA programs in a self-sustaining spiral. It’s an elaborate symbiosis that can appear, to a non-member, worryingly nepotistic. The MFA-publishing complex forms its own barriers to outside competition, and the tariff is imposed on voices that lack the approved credentials.[10] Protectionism is at work, domestic producers (MFA writers) are shielded, however subtly, from the full brunt of “foreign” competition (writers outside the fold).
Another paradox of the MFA industrial complex is how it intertwines with contemporary drives for diversity and inclusion, yet in a somewhat superficial way. Numerous MFA programs and the literary magazines they feed are eager to promote voices from historically marginalized communities, which on the face of it is a laudable corrective to the old, exclusionary canon. However, this push can sometimes feel like box-ticking or “quota-filling,” especially if the underlying aesthetic conformity remains unchallenged. Elif Batuman’s remark[11] about “real or invented sociopolitical grievances” being used as the ticket to writerly identity has never been more true. In some workshop circles, writers might feel that to be taken seriously their work must perform a certain kind of identity or victim narrative—essentially, that one’s personal demographic or trauma is the currency to justify one’s art. What this does is lead to performative politics in literature, where the depth and complexity of engagement with socio-political themes are less valued than their topical correctness. Meanwhile the quality of the writing, its linguistic vitality, its conceptual originality, its truthfulness may be given a pass so long as the author fits a desired profile or the work aligns with prevailing progressive sentiments. And so, literary magazines and presses, mostly run by MFA-affiliated personnel, publish work that is politically “on message” or that adds to a showcase of demographic variety, but that might be mediocre as literature or struggle for clear meaning. Writers outside these categories, or those who don’t foreground identity in their work, can feel doubly sidelined, by not belonging to an in-group like the MFA network or to a celebrated identity group. Such facts are seldom stated openly for fear of sounding reactionary.
To be sure, nepotism and logrolling are long-standing concerns in the literary world, and the MFA system hasn’t eliminated them, it has arguably just channeled them. Same as “Big Pharma” pharmaceutical companies cozy up to doctors and researchers through funding and shared institutional affiliations to promote certain drugs, so do MFA programs, literary journals, and presses by forming a web of mutual back-scratching. A whisper network operates where agents and editors pay more attention to writers recommended by MFA faculty they know. Let’s say a professor at a writing program edits an influential review that consistently publishes that program’s graduates, or another professor runs a book contest and the winner happens to be an ex-student from a colleague’s program; none of it is shocking or necessarily villainous, perhaps only human nature and social capital at work, but it does start to resemble a formula of literary success: one’s chances improve greatly by being in the right circles.
No wonder then Shivani explicitly calls the MFA system “rigged” in favor of insiders.[12] The data from awards backs it. The National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, the grants—many go to the MFA-affiliated. A Quillette analysis points out the National Book Foundation’s recent honorees are “a surprisingly homogenous group” in all but skin-deep traits.[13] They share the same educational DNA. The article lists year by year how MFA holders and creative writing faculty dominate the awards, whereas in the 1950s and ’60s such figures were a minority among winners. Literary prizes, publishing contracts, teaching posts, etc., now form a self-replenishing circuit, largely closed to the uncredentialed talent. It feels “undemocratic”, to use Shivani’s descriptor,[14] even as programs loudly proclaim a democratic ethic in the idea that “everyone has a story” and “anyone can learn to write,” while they operate as part of an exclusionary guild. The dissonance between an inclusive rhetoric and an exclusive reality seems to be what underpins the whole system.
The MFA complex appears to thrive on a kind of simulated meritocracy. It gives the simulacrum of fair, open competition, through blind submissions to magazines, contests, admissions processes that claim to assess only talent. However, behind the scenes, there is a code. The work that gets through tends to bear certain hallmarks, be it a workshop glaze or a conformity to current cultural expectations, and the author often has the “right” background. There is an omertà of sorts, an unspoken pact that discourages talking openly about how the system might be unfair. To publicly question the virtue of MFAs is seen as sour grapes or heresy. Remember how robust the defenses were whenever the “Is the MFA worth it?” debate flared up on literary internet circles, or when the Los Angeles Review of Books ran a piece entitled “Against the MFA Contrarians,” practically defending creative writing programs against their detractors—the mere wording of that essay’s title indicates the extent to which MFA programs have become an establishment to defend.
The thing is that when art is treated as a commercial or academic certification, something vital is lost. To say poetry is an event, not a teachable activity or learnable craft is to assert that each true poem is a singular occurrence, unrepeatable and unprogrammable, something that breaks rules and established views, that perplexes audiences and creates a new truth. The most stunning ones arrive unpredictably and, at times, undesirably. Those are the very works that advance art. MFA programs, with their emphasis on reproducible skills and peer consensus, on monetizing and commodifying art, inadvertently repress such events. Anis Shivani argues that the contest system for first books, dominated by academic judges, results in “a halt to aesthetic progression,” “a corruption of the poetic process itself,” and “an encouragement of mediocrity and ambition, since by definition anything that stands out is less likely to get through [...] Only strong poets can recognize and admire other strong poets. It's not probable that the apprentice at the lower level is going to get blown away by radically new work; it's more likely that he'll get intimidated and put it aside.”[15] Although there are many talented poets and writers who emerge from the MFA paradigm and who themselves resist its more stultifying tendencies, the poetic process gets corrupted when poets write to achieve status or recognition instead of doing so from inner necessity. The issue lies with the closed-loop system and the ideology it imparts, that literature is a career path with professional hoops to jump through rather than an artistic event. Which makes us ask: what is lost in the transmutation of art into a lucrative assembly line craft? Perhaps the very elements of mystery and truth that make art art, and quite possibly more.
No wonder then Shivani explicitly calls the MFA system “rigged” in favor of insiders.[12] The data from awards backs it. The National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, the grants—many go to the MFA-affiliated. A Quillette analysis points out the National Book Foundation’s recent honorees are “a surprisingly homogenous group” in all but skin-deep traits.[13] They share the same educational DNA. The article lists year by year how MFA holders and creative writing faculty dominate the awards, whereas in the 1950s and ’60s such figures were a minority among winners. Literary prizes, publishing contracts, teaching posts, etc., now form a self-replenishing circuit, largely closed to the uncredentialed talent. It feels “undemocratic”, to use Shivani’s descriptor,[14] even as programs loudly proclaim a democratic ethic in the idea that “everyone has a story” and “anyone can learn to write,” while they operate as part of an exclusionary guild. The dissonance between an inclusive rhetoric and an exclusive reality seems to be what underpins the whole system.
The MFA complex appears to thrive on a kind of simulated meritocracy. It gives the simulacrum of fair, open competition, through blind submissions to magazines, contests, admissions processes that claim to assess only talent. However, behind the scenes, there is a code. The work that gets through tends to bear certain hallmarks, be it a workshop glaze or a conformity to current cultural expectations, and the author often has the “right” background. There is an omertà of sorts, an unspoken pact that discourages talking openly about how the system might be unfair. To publicly question the virtue of MFAs is seen as sour grapes or heresy. Remember how robust the defenses were whenever the “Is the MFA worth it?” debate flared up on literary internet circles, or when the Los Angeles Review of Books ran a piece entitled “Against the MFA Contrarians,” practically defending creative writing programs against their detractors—the mere wording of that essay’s title indicates the extent to which MFA programs have become an establishment to defend.
The thing is that when art is treated as a commercial or academic certification, something vital is lost. To say poetry is an event, not a teachable activity or learnable craft is to assert that each true poem is a singular occurrence, unrepeatable and unprogrammable, something that breaks rules and established views, that perplexes audiences and creates a new truth. The most stunning ones arrive unpredictably and, at times, undesirably. Those are the very works that advance art. MFA programs, with their emphasis on reproducible skills and peer consensus, on monetizing and commodifying art, inadvertently repress such events. Anis Shivani argues that the contest system for first books, dominated by academic judges, results in “a halt to aesthetic progression,” “a corruption of the poetic process itself,” and “an encouragement of mediocrity and ambition, since by definition anything that stands out is less likely to get through [...] Only strong poets can recognize and admire other strong poets. It's not probable that the apprentice at the lower level is going to get blown away by radically new work; it's more likely that he'll get intimidated and put it aside.”[15] Although there are many talented poets and writers who emerge from the MFA paradigm and who themselves resist its more stultifying tendencies, the poetic process gets corrupted when poets write to achieve status or recognition instead of doing so from inner necessity. The issue lies with the closed-loop system and the ideology it imparts, that literature is a career path with professional hoops to jump through rather than an artistic event. Which makes us ask: what is lost in the transmutation of art into a lucrative assembly line craft? Perhaps the very elements of mystery and truth that make art art, and quite possibly more.
*
Disclaimer: This critique of the MFA industrial complex is not a rejection of learning, community, or MFA holders (as shown by the numbers of MFA students and graduates that Amsterdam Review publishes regularly), but a warning against the ossification of literary life into a professional caste system. Equally, it isn’t a call to abolish writing programs, rather to recognize their limitations and corrosive side-effects. The MFA system can cultivate craft, but it too easily strangles artistic impulse. It can open doors for some, but it closes them for others who can’t or won’t play by its rules. As Deleuze and Guattari say in their collaborative work, A Thousand Plateaus: “We miss our finest encounters, we avoid the imperatives that emanate from them: to the exploration of encounters we have preferred the facility of recognitions.”
Works cited
[1] Grahn, Judy. The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn, 1964–1977. Introduction by Adrienne Rich, Diana Press, 1978.
[2] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[3] McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.
[4] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[5] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[6] Delaney, Edward J. “Where Great Writers Are Made.” The Atlantic, Aug. 2007, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/08/where-great-writers-are-made/306032/
[7] Harbach, Chad. “America Now Has Two Distinct Literary Cultures: Which One Will Last?” Slate, 3 Nov. 2010, slate.com/culture/2010/11/mfa-vs-nyc-america-now-has-two-distinct-literary-cultures-which-one-will-last.html
[8] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[9] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[10] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[11] Batuman, Elif. “Get a Real Degree.” London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 18, 23 Sept. 2010, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree
[12] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[13] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[14] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[15] Shivani, Anis. “Poetry Book Contests Should Be Abolished: Why Contests Are the Stupidest Way to Publish First Books.” HuffPost, 6 Jun. 2011, www.huffpost.com/entry/poetry-book-contests_b_858819
[1] Grahn, Judy. The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn, 1964–1977. Introduction by Adrienne Rich, Diana Press, 1978.
[2] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[3] McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.
[4] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[5] So, Richard Jean, and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/
[6] Delaney, Edward J. “Where Great Writers Are Made.” The Atlantic, Aug. 2007, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/08/where-great-writers-are-made/306032/
[7] Harbach, Chad. “America Now Has Two Distinct Literary Cultures: Which One Will Last?” Slate, 3 Nov. 2010, slate.com/culture/2010/11/mfa-vs-nyc-america-now-has-two-distinct-literary-cultures-which-one-will-last.html
[8] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[9] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[10] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[11] Batuman, Elif. “Get a Real Degree.” London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 18, 23 Sept. 2010, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree
[12] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[13] Mims, Kevin. “The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down.” Quillette, 7 Jan. 2020, quillette.com/2020/01/07/the-national-book-foundation-defines-diversity-down/
[14] Shivani, Anis. Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies. Texas Review Press, 2011.
[15] Shivani, Anis. “Poetry Book Contests Should Be Abolished: Why Contests Are the Stupidest Way to Publish First Books.” HuffPost, 6 Jun. 2011, www.huffpost.com/entry/poetry-book-contests_b_858819
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Daniel Carden Nemo is a writer, poet, and translator. His work has been long-listed for the Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum) and has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, RHINO, Full Stop, Magma Poetry, Sontag Mag, Exchanges, and elsewhere. For more, go to danielnemo.com or subscribe for free to hataaliinotes.substack.com.
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