[New-Poetry] MFA

[jfq at myuw.net]

This is true, however, generally speaking, most reputable MFA programs are full residency graduate courses that take two to three years and involve workshops wherein a group of writers with baccalaureate degrees sit around and critique eachothers work under the guidance of a more experienced instructor. such instructors are generally MFA's themselves and teach as a sideline to their own writing which is more often than not read by a very small audience even compared to the rather pathetic numbers of most literary fiction bestsellers.

When I'm making generalizations about MFAs, that typical program, workshop, and instructor is what I'm talking about.

The need to make generalizations comes about because I find that when I'm reading a poem in a new poetry magazine by a writer who I am unfamiliar with, about two thirds of the time I can tell if that writer has an MFA before reading his or her bio. by which I mean, I often read a poem that has a certain MFAness about it, and maybe 3/4s of the time when I get that feeling the writer has an MFA. Of course there are times when a writer without an MFA writes a poem with a sense of MFAness, and there are times when a writer with an MFA writes without MFAness, but the correlation is too strong for me to ignore. So I tried to look at what was typical of MFA programss that would give rise to MFAness (which, I should say, I dislike quite a bit), and what I came up with were the criticisms of the way poetry is studied in MFA programs below. I don't know how those factors correlate to MFAness, nor am 
I really able to isolate the qualities that give a poem its MFAness. Like obscenity, I know it when I see it, and it has thus far eluded all my attempts to quantify it.

That having been said, I think there are other ways of studying poetry. I am a proud autodidact. Others I know that I think came at poetry from an interesting place in their study of it studied comp lit, english lit, or linguistics. Some do Bachelors of English with a focus on creative writing and stop there, and I know a few people who've done that and been successful in avoiding MFAness in their writing. Others get involved in the local performance poetry scenes or theater, and get their education through a growing oral tradition around those groups. Some of those options are also open to MFA's, and I know a few MFA writers who balance their graduate work with other forms of poetry study who seem to avoid the MFAness poison. Which really i think is something that all poets should want.

Is all I'm saying.

On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, David Graham wrote:

>
> Not all MFA programs, instructors, or workshops are the same.  Since the MFA
> can mean anything from a 3 year/60 credit hour experience to a
> correspondence course with a few brief "residencies," many generalizations
> are suspect.
>
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