[New-Poetry] MFA

[TheOldMole]

Remember back in the 1960s, when Charles Mingus, a great artist of 
extraordinary musical sensitivity, said something very similar about how he 
could always tell, by listening, whether a musician was black or white? 
Leonard Feather gave him a blindfold test, and Mingus failed it.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <jfq at myuw.net>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp; Views" 
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] MFA


> 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.
>>
>> ====================================================
>> David Graham
>> grahamd at ripon.edu
>> Home Page:
>> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
>> Poetry Library:
>> http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
>> ====================================================
>>
>>
>>
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