Let Us Once Again Praise Creative Writing Workshops
More than once while working on the essay that follows, I asked myself Why are you doing this? That is, why defend, once more, the value of creative writing workshops and programs? Originally, I’d set out to write a simple, personal celebration of three poets and long-time teachers of creative writing, myself among them, who have met for almost two decades to share their work — nurturing, challenging, and immeasurably improving hundreds of their poems written since 2002. While thinking and sketching out some sentences about our trio, I remembered and reread a 2009 New Yorker article about university-sanctioned creative writing — “Show or Tell,” by Louis Menand, the most recent piece of its kind I know of. The article’s routine tagline — Should Creative Writing Be Taught? — both angers and enervates. I’ll anatomize the bad faith of Menand’s argument soon enough, but a nutshell is warranted. A thicket of contradictions, “Show or Tell” begins with a caricature of the discourse in a hypothetical poetry workshop, making casuistic claims about the pedagogy that straw-scenario purports to exemplify. Then, in three final paragraphs, a paean to Menand’s undergraduate workshop experience ensues, praising the very workshop model left pummeled on the mat by scores of low blows. The trajectory of the case the article makes resembles a long bad marriage followed by a split-second annulment. So, the impulse to refute competed with the urge to celebrate, and now “Show or Tell” forms my essay’s hub of attention, although I still circle out, as I’d originally wished, into homage.
We all know the prosecution’s case against creative writing workshops — undergraduate or graduate — and the MFA or PhD programs that lay claim to the latter’s credibility: they debase aesthetic virtues by favoring support-group affirmation over critical rigor; they create a false democracy of indiscriminate taste (or a true autocracy of homogenized taste); they privilege the “well-written” work of accessible content but of moderate ambition — “craft” at the expense of “vision” — and finally (maybe I imagine this last one), they encourage the talentless by paying unwarranted attention to their absence of talent. Those are the primary critiques of what might be called the “pastel” workshop. Another case against classes devoted to students’ creative writing ascribes to workshop discourse the cruelties of military hazing. According to this argument, what goes on around the seminar table amounts to — or devolves into — a pile-on of subjective, often projective, critical hatchet-jobs, the unfortunate author of the piece under discussion stunned silent — a silence required by the workshop’s “gag rule” — much like the hapless defendant standing rigid in the dock at a show trial. In each scenario, where are the instructors? Both cases against the workshop model shunt them to the margins; in the former, they function like the facilitators of therapy circles; in the latter, they’re more like docile witnesses to a mass mugging. No honest teacher of creative writing would deny that workshops are sometimes taught — or passively inflicted — this terribly. By the same token, in some remote U.S. school systems, Intelligent Design still masquerades as Evolutionary Biology. But, mercifully, in most instances, the mask is not the face — not in the biology classroom, and not in the workshop.
In “Show or Tell,” Menand conflates both fabrications, while reviewing Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a history of creative-writing and American fiction. I’m a poet, a founder of an MFA program in creative writing, and a devoted admirer of Menand’s New Yorker pieces, so I devoured “Show or Tell” immediately after the issue slid through my mail slot. In the ensuing eleven years, the article garnered some, but not many, online reactions. I haven’t searched out print responses, but it certainly appears that “Show or Tell” hasn’t met with energetic accord or repudiation, as had occurred when The Atlantic Monthly published Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?” in 1991, or when Joseph Epstein asked the Agatha Christie-like question, “Who Killed Poetry?” in Commentary in 1988. Indeed, it’s been pretty much quiet on the workshop-debate front, unless I’ve missed some important dispatches from the battlefield. Maybe one needs to address the dispute in the form of a question to stir up much controversy. Here, I’m less interested in controversy than in setting a very crooked record straight.
Considering the subject of the book under review, something’s already skewed by Menand’s focus on an imaginary poetryworkshop in his first paragraph. Given the New Yorker’s generalist audience, it’s reasonable to assume that the uninitiated were expected to accept the following treatment — the word’s connotations as story idea and conduct toward another both apply — as an accurate depiction of the typical poetry workshop. The paragraph ought not to be abridged:
“Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense — a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process — a person with an academic degree in creative writing — or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.”
After thirty-seven years of teaching poetry writing in all kinds of settings — graduate, undergraduate, community-based forums, one-on-one distance-learning, writing conferences, and in my living room — I’ve never once seen a workshop participant, other than the teacher, “teach” another participant how to write a “publishable” poem. (The word “publishable” belongs in the pub after class, not in the classroom.) Moreover, workshop protocol may indeed stipulate many procedures and behaviors, from written comments by students on each other’s work to technique-focused prompts to the above-mentioned “gag rule,” whereby authors of the poems under discussion remain silent for some, not all, of the time devoted to their poems, listening (one hopes). But no workshop I’ve taught or visited has ever required that the instructor refrain from instructing. The kind of teaching and learning Menand appears to endorse — “a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script” — is of course a lecture class. Some lecture classes are magical. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether “transmitted” and “script” promise much enchantment in the lecture Menand imagines. In any case, in the auditorium or around the seminar table, whether guiding from the front or from behind, a good teacher gets students where they didn’t know they wanted to go.
It’s popular these days to praise the marriage of theory and practice as crucial to developing any intellectual or creative skill. What constitutes “theory” for creative writing graduate students aspiring to teach the art they practice? “Theory” seems a bloodless term for the first principle of writerly training: creative reading in the art and traditions of the genre the student has chosen. From 1976 through 1978, at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, I read — deeply and, despite my limitations as a 23-year old, as creatively as I could — Dante; Shakespeare’s sonnets; key passages from Wordsworth’s The Prelude; Coleridge’s Conversation Poems; Keats’s odes; large helpings of Dickinson (in the 70s, no one yet knew enough to read her fascicles as chapbooks); Stevens’s Harmonium and many of his late meditations; the early narratives of Frost; the breakthroughs in free verse accomplished by Pound, Stevens, H.D., and Williams; poem after poem by the generation of Lowell. Here, I’m just referring to curriculum, not to the new books of contemporary poetry we looked out for constantly. I’m also aware of, and chastened by, the ethnic and gender uniformity of the poets I’ve adduced. I try to reflect upon the hard truth of that homogeneity later in this essay, but in no way can I forgive it — whether or not I hold the 23-year-old culpable.
Donald Justice shepherded us — often syllable by syllable — through the metrical and rhythmic resourcefulness of these masters. William Matthews served as our Virgil into and out of Dante’s Inferno; inspired us to persist with Stevens’s late long poems; instructed us to imitate epigrams by Horace and Martial; toured Marvell’s “The Garden” with us; and helped us pay deeper attention to Elizabeth Bishop’s just-published Geography III (many of us having already pored over its ten poems like a Midrash). Bill also smuggled into our seminars prose brilliances like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. My first deep immersion into the Rilkean tones of poets like … well, Rilke himself — along with Randall Jarrell and (this was a real epiphany) certain passages from Larkin — occurred via the rich sonic textures of Jon Anderson’s indelible readings of these poets. (Some argue that credibly reading poetry out loud represents the happiest marriage of theory and practice for the creative writing student.) A poetry generalist with wide (though again, not ethnically diverse) sympathies, Jon invited us — through the gift of his voice — into unforgettably intimate encounters with permanent poems by John Clare, James Dickey, Philip Larkin, John Logan, George Seferis, and plenty of others I could remember, but don’t at the moment.
And what about the “internships” that lead to teacherly chops? For the aspiring poet and teacher of poetry, what better field placement can there be than assimilating the subtle, helpful, and uncompromising critiques of one’s own drafts, as well as one’s classmates’ drafts, by poets of rare accomplishment like Jon, Marvin Bell, Louise Glück, Don, and Bill? The Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1970s had no focused pedagogy courses, but hour after hour spent with masters of the art who teach its practices from the inside — no better teaching apprenticeship occurs to me. I studied creative writing pedagogy with the poets named above, in workshop. I’ve stolen from them since the first evening I trembled into an MIT classroom, in 1983, to teach “Reading and Writing Poems.” Incidentally, Menand’s purported “theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem” sounds a lot more credible if one factors in some of the unpublished fellow students whom I “performed” with at Iowa: Sharon Bryan, Sandra Cisneros, Stuart Dischell, Rita Dove, James Galvin, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregerson, Joy Harjo, Dennis Hinrichsen, Jane Miller, et al. One can also recognize in that list of poets some of the vanguard who would ultimately contribute to the take-down of the white male literary supremacy holding sway at Iowa and most other MFA programs in the 1970s. Reading the work of fellow students like Cisneros, Dove, and Harjo inaugurated my education in poetry from traditions outside my race and ethnic circle. All that said, Iowa — indeed, American writing — has been a myopic men’s club until very recently, and the blindness persists.
With his characteristically disarming gifts for understatement and deploying the luminously ordinary detail, Seamus Heaney surely made the best case for the teaching poet — and for creative writing as a legitimate aesthetic and academic discipline — in his essential essay, On Poetry and Professing:
“. . . if poetry is to be professed within the educational system, it makes sense that this should be done occasionally by the poets themselves; as long as they understand the fundamental difference between their function as educators and their function as artists, no harm need be done and a lot of good may even flow from their involvement …
The great advantage a poet has is the fact that he or she is likely to possess a credible personal language — and obviously by this I don’t mean colorful “poetic” speech. I mean, rather, that there will be no gap between the professional idiom and the personal recognitions: the way the poet speaks in the corner of a bar, gossiping about the faults and strengths of a poem that has just appeared in the Irish Times, will tend to be the way he speaks to the students in the lecture room … Furthermore, in spite of what might be generally assumed, poets are likely to be hard on fancy stuff, on soft-focus “feeling” and hyped-up rhetoric; they know the dangers of archness and inflation and self-deception to which their ventures are prone, and they are predisposed to be on the lookout for these flaws in the writing of others if not in their own.”
Again, no one disputes that the dysfunctions Menand savages in his first paragraph exist. Indeed, much worse exists or — I ardently hope in 2020 — more often than not, existed. Serious — by today’s standards, criminal — pathologies infected my own graduate school alma mater. Maggie Doherty’s 2019 article in The New Republic, “Unfinished Work,” lays them bare, and documents the pervasive sexism and racism that went unacknowledged during the very years I attended. Menand devotes three paragraphs late in his article to “so-called multicultural literature,” undoubtedly more alert to the complex dynamics between creative writing and cultural and racial identity than I was at the time.
As a sharp diagnosis of the harm done when creative writing instruction falls into the wrong hands, Heaney’s unsparing eloquence once again says what needs to be said:
“Not to confuse the artistic with the educational, however, is the main caveat for the writer as professor. The worst thing that such confusion leads to is arrogant and ridiculous behavior by the writer in relation to the student: the writer who thinks that excellence in the art excuses ill-manneredness or ill-preparedness in the classroom is offending the human as well as the professional imperatives. I have seen talented men and women so encased in the shining armor of moi that they have utterly failed to connect with the group in front of them. This can be merely a case of idiocy and wasted opportunity, but it becomes grievous when the authority which their position confers is used by the poet/professors to overbear the potential and to destroy the confidence of neophyte readers or writers … We have been rightly alerted to all forms of sexual harassment in these contexts, but there can be such a thing as vocational harassment, where the student’s hopes and aspirations are unthinkingly assailed. Of course, a fair and honest estimate of the student’s gifts — good or bad—has to be communicated, but the communication must be done with respect and a care for the emotional tissues.”
Literary journalism, even great literary journalism — which the passages from Heaney’s essay inarguably constitute — rarely gets close to choking me up. A seasoned — indeed, weathered — instructor of creative writing, I reread these words often — to myself and most importantly, to my students — and unfailingly edge toward that reaction.
But the aberrations Heaney warns against, Menard posits as standard operating procedures. “Creative writing programs are designed …” his first paragraph begins, and then proceeds to enumerate the elements of that design, as manifested in a list of misconducts given free rein in the typical workshop: 1) ritual scarring; 2) unlicensed group therapy; 3) unscripted performance 4) force; and, perhaps most bizarrely 5) the dismemberment of poems by strangers (strangers?). Presiding over all this psychological mayhem — or quaking in a corner, eyes on floor or door — stand, sit (or sleep?) the uninstructed, non-instructing instructors, whose insipid artistic credentials and dearth of pedagogical preparation give rise to a poisoned cynicism about the axioms of the very discipline they’re meant to teach. It’s an embarrassment of the obvious to counter Menand’s vilification by pointing out that his list of delinquencies exemplifies the sort of malpractice that any good creative writing teacher knows that any good workshop prohibits. To assert, as Menand does, that these assumptions and behaviors denote the norm is a bit like adducing the pseudo-medicine of Vladimir Zelenko and Judy Mikovits as typical of the immunology Anthony Fauci practices.
The article that follows Menand’s first paragraph is a weird affair, only glancingly addressing, and in no way answering, its teaser question: Should creative writing be taught? “Not everyone who teaches creative writing agrees about the irrelevance of the job,” Menand concedes, but the most current witness for the defense is the long-retired John Barth. Not a single currently practicing creative writing teacher receives space to make a developed case. Moreover, in a quaintly dated maneuver, Menand cites as normative the two creative writing bromides — “show, don’t tell” and “find your voice” — that make most experienced creative writing instructors wince. In the first session of my own workshops, I dispense with the “voice” fetish by telling students it’s a distractingly vague metaphor for the commingling of language events—diction, image, rhythm, syntax, line, and enjambment — out of which rises that elusive quality of poetic style called “tone.” These days, I find that students refer less often to their “voice” than to their “style” — usually to school me in the ways I misunderstand it. I tell them, respectfully but unequivocally, that they don’t have a style; that the program they’ve committed themselves to — requiring constant and catholic reading and what Louise Glück calls the “endless labor” of poetic composition — invites them into a painstaking process, whereby a style may gradually reveal itself. The “show, don’t tell” truism isn’t so easily dismissed, in part because it’s to some extent, perhaps even largely, true: how many great poems don’t, in some way, appeal to our senses, especially if “showing” embraces not just the mental pictures evoked by imagery, but the body’s engagement with a poem’s sonic textures. It’s actually the simplistic dichotomy between perception and reflection — inhering in “don’t,” and the “or” in Menand’s teaser — that furrows the brows of serious creative writing instructors.
Once the article’s seventh paragraph turns its attention to McGurl’s book, which I haven’t read, Menand more or less abandons what his first paragraph so mercilessly parodied: the premises and procedures in creative writing. Indeed his paraphrase of McGurl’s thesis should alert readers that they’re in for a major detour, into the kind of “fancy stuff” that Seamus Heaney could sniff out a mile away:
“The argument is that teaching creative writing should always be a scandal, since it’s a scandal that suits everyone. It allows people in creative-writing departments to feel that, unlike their colleagues in the traditional academic disciplines, they are not cogs in a knowledge machine; and it allows the university to regard itself as what McGurl calls a ‘difference engine,’ devoted to producing original people as well as original research. He points out that teachers in creative-writing programs were asking ‘Can it be taught?’ right from the start, but that virtually no one has ever tried to lay down rules for what should go on in the classroom.”
“Difference engine” — a candidate for Polonius’s lexicon of ill phrases if there ever was one — is cause enough to head for the exit; I pass over “original people” with a mild shudder. But further alternative facts persist so glaringly, anyone with experience can’t help entering the fray. There’s this fiction: “Virtually no one has ever tried to lay down rules for what should go on in the [workshop] classroom.” I suppose it depends on how one reads “virtually,” but certainly AWP’s two Hallmarks for Effective MFA Programs — one for on-campus and one for low-residency programs like the one I founded and teach in — attempt exactly what Menand says virtually no one has ever tried to do.
Other dubious, or at least uninterrogated, claims pepper the article, passed off as verities: “serious fiction readers … are taught how to read in departments of literature.” Really? Certainly not the art of close reading, which long ago abandoned the literature department to find a safe haven in … where else? — MFA or PhD programs in creative writing. Menand repeatedly deals in stunningly self-evident platitudes. Borrowing some more fancy jargon (this time from linguistic philosophy) to characterize works of fiction as “illocutionary acts,” he salvages from that creepy-sounding locution the following insight: “The meaning of one of Raymond Carver’s stories is not only what the story says; it’s also the way the story says it.” Well, bust my buttons! After that earth-shaker, the piece flattens out into intermittent paragraphs of dropped names and university affiliations, scores of well-known writers landing in the reader’s lap along with their institutional patrons: in addition to Carver, Menand pitches us John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Richard Cortez Day, Dennis Schmidt, John Cheever, Tess Gallagher, Jay McInerney, Thomas Wolfe, and Bharati Mukherjee. I like name-pitching as much as the next person, but how does this roster of writers say anything for, against, or even about the value of teaching creative writing?
Menand punctuates his first litany of writers with this koan: “The beat goes on — McGurl’s point.” I confess I’m not sure what point Menand thinks McGurl has scored. That writers tend to hang out with other writers? That writers often seek out the advice, critique, and encouragement of other writers? Indeed they do, and have ever done: Coleridge and Wordsworth were pals; Keats “studied” with Leigh Hunt before outpacing his mentor lickety-split; Yeats, his Celtic Twilight poetry stalled, asked Pound to help “modernize” him, and they played odd couple together in Stone Cottage for three winters between 1913 and 1916; Pound hob-knobbed with Williams, Eliot, and H.D., and out of those “original people,” among others, came Modernism; Bishop needed Moore until she didn’t; the beat does indeed go on, but what of it?
But when Menand approvingly summarizes McGurl’s second thesis about creative writing programs, this time posed as an analogy, the BS detector of any experienced teacher-practitioner of creative writing really ought to flip into the red zone:
“’The Program Era’ … treat[s] the world of creative writing as an ant farm, in which the writer-ants go about busily executing the tasks they have been programmed for. Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. Reflecting on yourself — your experience, your “voice,” your background, your talent or lack of it — is what writing workshops make people do.”
I’ll let the ant-farm analogy speak, or snigger, for itself. The concept of “voice” I’ve already cashiered. But the more intriguing notion — that writing is a technology — could prompt a few responses. No it isn’t; it’s an art works well enough in a pinch. But if Menand means by “technology” that writing involves technique, then okay. And how do those aspiring to learn the techniques of creative writing do so? As my two years at Iowa proved to me — a proof replicated constantly in my ensuing decades of writing and teaching — aspiring writers do so in two ways. To extend Menand’s technology metaphor, they engage in an analytic process that scientists call “reverse engineering” — essentially, dissecting something of interest (in this case, excellent writing) to closely observe how it works. Philip Larkin described the activity more colorfully in a Paris Review interview:
Interviewer: What in particular did you learn from your study of [poets]?
Philip Larkin: Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do that? And that’s how you learn.
I suspect Philip Larkin detested the idea of creative writing workshops — assuming he knew of their existence — so I imagine him rolling his eyes at the second way I believe aspiring writers acquire technique. From writers who’ve already mastered those techniques, students of writing receive criticism; experienced and considered suggestions; tough respect, if not tough love; and sometimes — if the work warrants it — passionate encouragement and support, which occasionally last for decades. Some may find reductive my reliance on “technique” to describe what aspiring writers can and should acquire. Of course, creative writing instructors can’t teach what Lorca called duende. But they can recognize it in nascent form, and nurturing it accounts for the single most valuable contribution a good creative writing teacher can make to culture. Menand implies that creative writing teachers throw up their hands in despair when they encounter in one of their students “the standard ‘genius’ exception.” No, they don’t. They do the best work they can to nurture, through constant challenge, that student’s gifts.
But it’s the last two sentences of the passage above — part-Menand, part McGurl — that perpetrate the article’s prime falsehood about a good creative writing workshop. No doubt the discourse in my workshops has implanted self-consciousness in more than a few of my students, and I’ve had hundreds of conversations with them about that indeterminate, thorny concept, talent. But I can assure anyone interested that, as a group who takes poetry quite seriously, in class we almost never reflect (except during breaks) on ourselves, our experiences, our “voices,” our backgrounds, and least of all, our “talents.” What then do we focus on? Poems — as early drafts, in process, near completion; poems with and without futures; poems needing editing and poems needing reimagining; poems worth working on and poems best abandoned. Is There a Text in this Class? was the ironic rhetorical question that titled Stanley Fish’s 1982 work of literary theory. Without irony or excess rhetoric, the creative writing instructor answers with an unapologetic yes.
Done with his faint praise of the ant-farm model (even McGurl’s few advertisements for creative writing programs — quoted presumably approvingly by Menand — sound like upbeat annual reports to the stockholders: “There has been a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period”), Menand throws in more platitudes: “Creative-writing courses follow naturally from the ‘learning by doing’ theories of progressive education,” as if “learning by doing” didn’t go back at least as far as Keats’s embryonic (and bad) imitations of Spenser. To be fair, the latter passages of Menand’s article offer a balanced, if commonplace, overview of the origins, evolution, and proliferation of American creative writing pedagogy — as both a practice and, increasingly, as a discipline firmly established in academia. But what he doesn’t address, much less dispel, is his first paragraph’s mischaracterization of what actually goes on in creative writing classrooms. Three-quarters of the way through, mostly we get a lot more names—thirty-plus, by my rough count—which once again proves the point not needing proof: writers tend to hang out with each other, both in the world and in New Yorker articles. But, given how often it gets asked, one persistently wonders what happened to the question about whether teaching creative writing has legitimacy. A single sentence, late in the piece, makes plain that Menand has all but jettisoned the originating question: “McGurl is not interested in the effects of individual teachers and editors, though; he’s interested in the effects of systems.”
I say “all but,” because Menand does reflect, briefly, on the interplay between creative writing pedagogy and the writing process itself. Again, though, his comments on process and craft strike me as untutored: “What counted as craft for James … was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie … must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer.” True enough: in every art, technique means different things to different artists. But it hardly follows, as Menand concludes, that limitless varieties of craft mean “there is no ‘craft of fiction’ as such.” Flowers come in countless shapes and colors; thus, no flowers as such? Then there’s the glib dismissal of improvisatory procedures, common to the practice of literary writing, to generate early drafts:
“It’s a method that generates copy for a class to chew on, but writing that way is like throwing a lot of bricks on a pile and then being asked to organize them into a house. Surely the goal should be to get people to learn to think while they’re writing, not after they have written.”
The fallacy here should be transparent to any serious writer of poems, fiction, memoir, etc. In brooding a piece of writing to completion, there’s a “before,” of course, but no “after.” Revision — as in re-seeing —simply denotes a different stage in the process of composition. Every time you write, every time you rewrite, and every time you rewrite what you’ve rewritten, you’re doing one crucial thing: writing. As for the bricks thrown on a pile, I recommend that Menand read Anne Lamott’s essay “Shitty First Drafts,” as well as the widely available first version of what is perhaps the greatest villanelle of the 20thcentury: Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Actually, I find it hard to believe that someone as erudite as Menand hasn’t read those documents. Hence, my perplexity at his apparent unawareness of a fact beyond dispute: even the most inchoate writing involves thinking. A naïve assumption underlines Menand’s category mistake — that writing and thinking proceed independently and sequentially, like floats in a parade.
During a vivid run-down of some of the more flamboyantly bullying writer-exemplars of Heaney’s “talented men and women … encased in the shining armor of moi,” Menand perpetrates one of the cardinal sins of dishonest argument: suppression of evidence. “‘I could write nothing that pleased Lowell,’ Philip Levine complained about a workshop that he had taken with Robert Lowell at Iowa,” reports Menand. And indeed, Levine does write that sentence four pages into his essay, “Mine Own John Berryman.” Thereafter, Levine devotes twenty pages of homage to a workshop taught by his essay’s eponymous subject. Unlike Lowell, Berryman “never appeared bored” in class. From the start, the students “sensed something significant was taking place.” That significance Berryman sometimes distilled into powerfully compressed axioms: “One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will be.” In an informal gathering after workshop, a participant told Berryman that a classmate whose poem he’d just stringently critiqued had work forthcoming in the then-coveted magazine, Botteghe Oscure. “Utterly irrelevant, old sport, utterly irrelevant,” Berryman retorted, a pedagogically shrewd response. Many more episodes exemplify Levine’s absolute respect for Berryman as artist and teacher, but three more sentences serve as a kind of ultimate verdict on a good, even great, poetry workshop: “[Berryman] sensed that the students had themselves developed a wonderful fellowship and took joy whenever one of us produced something fine” and “[h]e gave all he had to us and asked no special thanks. He did it for the love of poetry.” Of course, memory romances, but the focus of Levine’s recollection is John Berryman’s generosity and devotion as a teacher in an extraordinarily successful poetry workshop, not Robert Lowell’s malpractice.
By this point, Menand has so strayed from his generating question that any attentive reader will ask, in desperation: so, then, should creative writing be taught or not? That question — and its more speculative, less moralistic cousin: can creative writing be taught? — doesn’t need forty paragraphs, especially if no expert witnesses offer testimony, and the judge shows more interest in literary gossip than the pedagogy of creative writing. Truth is, one can easily address the matter, and be done with it, by posing a few counter-questions: can music composition be taught? Can dance be taught? Painting? Sculpture? Guitar? Why so few diatribes — if there are any at all — against Julliard; or Cooper Union; or The Martha Graham School; or, for that matter, the guitar teacher who comes into your living room and places your child’s hand on the fretboard to demonstrate the rudiments of chord formation? I could expand my point to include analogies to skill acquisition in basketball, tennis, horse-back riding, and so on. But most sports metaphors are clichés. When they crop up in my students’ poems, I almost always urge them to find something fresher. One way to become a better writer is to terminate clichés with deep prejudice. Kill your dead metaphors (“dead metaphor,” for instance).
Having gotten all — well, almost all — of the rebuttal out of my system, I’ll return to my original impulse: to praise and express gratitude. For nearly two decades, three poets have met regularly — in Arlington, Bedford, and Lexington, Massachusetts; and during the period of the Covid pandemic, via conference call (although Zoom looms) — to share and discuss their poems (and sometimes prose) in progress. Between us, Teresa Cader, Joyce Peseroff, and I have published fifteen books of poems, plus scores of essays, reviews, and meditations on the art of poetry. The universities where we’ve taught literature, creative writing, and creative writing pedagogy—to undergraduate and graduate students—include Bennington College, Boston University, Emerson College, Lesley University, M.I.T., Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As teacher-practitioners, over many years we have resembled in no way Menand’s “instructor, who has (usually) published a poem [or] who has had no training as a teacher of anything … grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.” We know creative writing can be taught, but more important, we know it can be learned. In fact, as part of a trio of poets who know each other’s work as well, if not better, than we know our own, I believe we often identify, through a kind of purifying role-play, more empathetically with Menand’s other caricature — “students who have never published a poem teach[ing] other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.” In art, originality often requires cultivating one’s “inner amateur,” and although we’ve published hundreds of poems, we’ve also written quite a few — some among our best — that have proved unpublishable, at least in journals. We choose what appears in our books, and while previous magazine publication may influence those choices, it doesn’t govern them.
Perhaps it’s appropriate here to revisit that word, “publishable,” which Menand employs as if it functioned like a sticker on a pound of hamburger, confirming FDA inspection. The roster of significant, or great, initially “unpublishable” poems and poets impresses. Whitman self-published the first two editions of Leaves of Grass (admittedly, he didn’t send it around to “the contests” beforehand). Dickinson saw published (against her wishes) between eight and twelve of her almost 1800 poems (I wish scholars could agree on the precise number), and it could be said that Thomas Wentworth Higginson rejected all of the roughly one hundred poems she sent him. (We began reading what she really wrote in 1955, seventy years after her death.) T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was arguably unpublishable until Ezra Pound badgered Harriet Munroe into opening the doors to Poetry. None of the poems in Frank Bidart’s debut, Golden State, found space in literary journals (the poetry editor at one of the magazines which poets most covet — that is, one that pays and turns up in waiting rooms — advised Bidart to find a more promising day job). More recently, Spencer Reece’s luminously original The Clerk’s Tale received around three hundred rejections until Louise Glück recognized how original it was.
My Lesley colleague, Kevin Prufer, edits the indispensable Unsung Masters Series, publishing books that showcase poets like Russell Atkins (b. 1926) — an African American experimentalist who self-published almost all his poetry until his work caught Kevin’s eye — and Laura Hershey (1962-2010), a disabled queer poet of the 1990s, whose work appeared in a few fugitive chapbooks until her 2019 Unsung Masters volume. Always limited in meaning, the word “publishable” becomes less and less denotatively useful every year, as so-called “publishing” happens in so many ways. A text which its author considers a poem can go public these days with a few mouse-clicks. Of course, good editors still publish good poems, and great editors publish great ones. Indeed, some not-so-great editors can publish poems that may prove to be great: the editor who suggested that Bidart find a different vocation introduced readers to major achievements like Robert Hass’s “Heroic Simile,” Linda Gregerson’s “Safe,” and Carl Phillips’s “As from a Quiver of Arrows.” My point is not that “publishable” means absolutely nothing, just that it can never mean enough if we want to recognize poetry of enduring merit.
In any case, when Joyce, Teresa and I meet, the word almost never comes up, and never, ever, as a litmus test for whether our drafts are promising or unpromising, finished or unfinished, examples of our art at its best, or at its least. How do our discussions go? First of all, while none of us frontloads a new draft with an explanation, much less a justification, of its intentions, after approximately140 collective years of experience reading and writing poetry, we feel justified in at least relaxing the “gag rule.” As poets, we’re not clueless about our aesthetic aims, nor are we reticent when we think another’s poem falls short of those aims. Moreover, we’ll call a cliché a cliché, a maladroit rhythm maladroit, clunky syntax clunky. Indeed, we often call out such glitches in our own poems before our compatriots get the chance, but I don’t believe we’ve ever “torn apart” anything during our meetings (with my own poems I’ve often done so afterwards).
What we do — always, though of course not always at peak performance — is read, work with, and play with, each other’s poems so intensely that I think of us as humble yet palpable embodiments of Pound’s dictum in the CREDO section of “A Retrospect”: “It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it.” Does that mean we rewrite, or even write, each other’s poems? Of course not, although one will often suggest to another that stanza one should trade places with stanza three; or that the syntax of a line or a passage contains numerous alternate possibilities; or that, after some dismemberment — of the head or the feet—a poem stands taller. In some of the most fascinating cases, a poem leaves our group with fresher diction, imagery, syntax, structure, and lineation not quite from suggestions, but from offerings. In a way, we brainstorm as much as we evaluate. Yes, we behave more often than not as poetry analysts, not poetry doctors, but if Joyce or Teresa reads a poem of mine and thinks up a promising cure for what she believes ails it, she writes the prescription, and often, not always, I take the medicine.
Perhaps most important, we do not read each other’s work to “critique” it, much less to render final verdicts upon it, despite the many drawing boards they’ve sent me back to over the years. Rather, we read and talk about our poems collaboratively, often able to listen to another’s poem more closely and creatively than we can listen to our own. In this way, I’d like to think we make good on Heaney’s approving description of the teaching poet’s predisposition “to be on the lookout for … flaws [and felicities] in the writing of others if not in their own.” At a Q&A session after a reading years ago, I heard an audience member ask Louise Glück how she knew when a poem of hers was finished. “My friends tell me,” Glück responded — not glibly, not apologetically, but with a certain sort of honest insight into the collective creative process any serious poet, with serious poets for friends, instantly recognizes.
This collaborative spirit matters so much that I’ve invited both Joyce and Teresa to add their own take on us, as it were. Here’s what Teresa wrote: “I think we try to find the best solution for every problem a given poem presents; we wrestle with the poem, not the poet; we listen to the poem, not talk at it; we enter the mystery of the poem on its own terms; we won’t rest if a single word isn’t the best word in that place; we are often in awe of what a given poem achieves, but not in awe of the author. And the author often leaves a meeting able to go deep inside to find the transforming place, to hear what the poem thinks. And here’s Joyce: Often it’s the dynamic of conversation that pushes us to imagine the right word, line break, or bit of syntax that makes a bright poem luminous. I might put a finger on a soft spot and suggest a change of phrase; Teresa or Steven notices that it’s not that one, but the adjacent line or image that needs adjusting. It’s both our scrupulous attention and joint process I find invaluable — we balance on each other’s shoulders.”
The flavor of our dynamic comes across best with examples (after all, God is in the details). The second of the two cases I offer in testimony may be atypically local, even microscopic, but I present both as evidence and homage. An early draft of my poem entitled “The Look” — which those still with me can read here — had the following as its second stanza:
To some, singing’s a sin, a capital crime.
Some prove their godliness by devising
devices filled with framing nails, timed
to kill a radius of strangers, in song, in prayer.
I can’t reconstruct Teresa’s response with exactitude, but the gist I recall: for a description of suicide bombers and the bombs they make, the diction above felt to her unconvincingly distanced, especially the over-fancy “devising / devices.” Moreover, the notion that proof of godliness motivated these bombers came across as simultaneously detached, editorial, and unpersuasively telepathic. Finally, I recall — I trust accurately — Teresa’s characteristic matter-of-factness in her final comment: “who says the victims are strangers?” Back at my drawing board, I consulted one of my favorite web-sites, The Online Etymological Dictionary, and tried to inch my imagination closer to these bombers, which led to this:
To some, singing’s a sin, a capital crime.
Some, to brighten their afterlives, pack
mirror shards into a pipe, thus boosting
their radius of kills, in song, at prayer.
This result may not please everyone (or anyone) either; pleasure isn’t its intended effect anyway. But Teresa’s dissatisfactions got me looking for new words, and most of the ones I found derive from Anglo-Saxon or Germanic roots — bright, after, life, pack, shards, pipe, and thus. (Boost is “pure American,” of unknown origin.) These plainer words bring both stanza and reader closer to the bombers and their bomb — too close for comfort, I hope. Would I have revisited this stanza without Teresa’s encouraging displeasure with the draft? I don’t know, grateful that I don’t need to find out.
My example of Joyce’s indispensable genius involves a single piece of punctuation, a period, and a familiarity with the Chicago Manual of Style’s rules regarding where to place periods in relation to parentheses. A very recent poem, “Elegy for Little Richard,” digresses back briefly to the moment in 1980 when I heard the news of John Lennon’s murder. Immediately thereafter, a further deviation alludes to six years in my life that I spend drunk as often as not. The passage in the draft I showed Joyce and Teresa read like this:
. . . his murder, down
to a loaf-sized radio the news dirged through,
I can’t not recall. (I call that period my six-
year lost weekend.)
Joyce suggested this:
. . . his murder, down
to a loaf-sized radio the news dirged through,
I can’t not recall (I call that period my six-
year lost weekend).
One might well ask, What’s the diff? I think the distinction — and the measure of Joyce’s subtlety of mind — involves how differently the sequential digressions relate. In my rendition, two sentences separated by a period, the parenthetical aside simply follows the traumatic historical memory; it’s a second thought, not an afterthought. In Joyce’s recommended version, the aside still blurts into the passage, but the revised punctuation — full stop delayed until the end — creates a true afterthought that follows upon the memory of Lennon’s murder. The mindset these four lines dramatize — an appalled recollection of public tragedy giving rise to the rueful memory of a stretch of dissipation — registers, I believe, both more plausibly and more poignantly. Will anyone notice? I notice, and feel gratitude for Joyce’s noticing.
I could end this piece with that chorus of collective horn-tooting. Instead, I hope to provoke some head-scratching among readers by visiting the last three paragraphs of “Show or Tell,” which are often affecting and — held up to the gloaming mordancy of its opening — downright perverse in their misty nostalgia. Menand concludes by reminiscing about poetry workshops he took as an undergraduate, which right away incites this question: why bookend a piece exclusively about creative writing and American fiction with two episodes — the first a misbegotten invention, the second a sepia-tinged memory—wholly devoted to poetry? More puzzlingly, did the same person who produced its smirking introduction really write the following words? —
“[I]n spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work. I wrote poetry in college, and I was in a lot of workshops. I was a pretty untalented poet, but I was in a class with some very talented ones. . . . Our teacher was. . . Dick Barnes, a sly and wonderful poet who also taught medieval and Renaissance literature. . . [M]y friends and I . . . thought that discovering a new poet or a new poem was the most exciting thing in the world. When you are nineteen years old, it can be.
I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.
And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated . . . [b]ut I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
I trust that my compression — distilling 221 words from 381 — hasn’t violated the spirit of this often lovely passage. I tried to cut uncontroversial tangents. (If Menand ever reads this essay, maybe he can weigh in, even give me some workshop “feedback.”) I’m moved by the sensibility here, but I just can’t square it with the condescending first paragraph. How can the author who claims that “a workshop is not a course in the normal sense” speak with such reverence for the erudition of the sadly neglected Dick Barnes, whom he justly celebrates? Does a forum “designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem” belong in the same category with a collective endeavor that authorizes “the authentic celebration of the importance of making things, not just reading things?” And if “car[ing] about things that you make. . . makes it easier to care about things that other people make,” why demean the activity that supports that aesthetic empathy as “a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy?” Further applying a skill I’ve cultivated as both a student in, and teacher of, workshops—close textual reading—I begin to wonder: is the author of this encomium to creative writing pedagogy narcissistic enough to believe that only his own experiences rose to the level of workshops that, against all the odds, work? Even queasier is the peculiar insinuation that, when Menand stopped writing poetry, poetry workshops stopped working. Might the sourness of his first paragraph taste of grapes?
My cognitive dissonance intensifies as I read Menand’s final sentence, because I really believe he wouldn’t trade his experience for anything, but I can’t understand the article’s overall implication that those who’ve persisted in the “fragile enterprise” are somehow benighted. The most revealing — and, in a way, sad — of the nostalgic ruminations that conclude “Show or Tell” is the aside that completes the homage to his poet friends: “[M]y friends and I … thought that discovering a new poet or a new poem was the most exciting thing in the world. When you are nineteen years old, it can be.” Forty-seven years since turning twenty — my age, as I recall, when the work of W.S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, and many other permanent American poets first left me breathless — I’m still quickened by the discovery of a new poet or poem I admire (although I’ll admit that poems I dislike make my blood run colder than they used to). In other words (some of them Menand’s), when you’re sixty-seven years old, “it can be.” I mean no disrespect to a writer I’ve long admired, but I wonder if my prolonged, teen-like enthusiasm for poetry — certainly why I still write it — relates, inversely, to why Louis Menand no longer does. Oh, probably not. Still, I look forward to calling both Joyce and Teresa with the exciting news that the three of us, at least in spirit, are still nineteen.