[New-Poetry] MFA

[Anny Ballardini]

We all think we know better, me the first - and several times...
Anyhow this is a good one!

From: "TheOldMole" <tad at opus40.org>
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 7:12 PM


> 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
>>> ====================================================