Heather Christle’s blog on standard-issue workshop comments has inspired me to reflect further on my own list of least-favorite comments. I should note, however, that I have probably encountered these comments nowhere more often than in my own poetry writing courses, issuing from my own lips. Because a given comment can be applied to a line, a stanza, or a verse paragraph, I shall simply leave a ‘[blank]’ where the noun of focus would go.
1) This [blank] is not earned.
2) Show, don’t tell.
3) This [blank] is abstract.
Each of these comments is perfectly serviceable so long as it’s accompanied by further explanation, for each comment standing alone violates its own principle. The statement “This [blank] is not earned” is itself not earned unless one explains what the work and wages are, and thus precisely what it is that has not been earned. The command “Show, don’t tell,” standing alone, simply tells the writer a thing (not two) without showing how and why the command might relate. And besides, plenty of good poems have their telling moments, without which everything would be detail, detail, detail without a measure of interstitial material. Finally, the observation that [blank] is abstract remains itself uselessly abstract without an explanation about why a given abstraction does not serve the poem. After all, plenty of poems have some exquisitely abstract moments–I suspect that one could read three or four Wallace Stevens poems and come away knowing far more about the marvels of abstraction than I am presently prepared to say.
So each of my least favorite comments has plenty to recommend it, but each needs more than itself to have meaning. At minimum, I make the attempt to provide this more, and push and invite my students to do the same. In this I am providing–or trying to provide–much the same service that the professors of the program I attended provided for my classmates and me. While I learned plenty from my classmates, I learned most from my professors. This was at the University of Florida from 1989 to 1991, during which time Donald Justice was finishing up his regular-semester duties before retirement. While Don would praise our poems when he felt they merited such treatment, he also was willing to let us know when something was awry. One evening he led off the class discussion with one of my poems by stating, in his gentlemanly and smooth voice, ‘I wanted to begin with this poem because I feel that it represents an especially pernicious strain of contemporary writing.’ He was quite correct, and his criticisms helped me to stop doing what otherwise I might have done for years, what otherwise I might be doing to this day. And then there were also Debora Greger and William Logan with their complex assignments, each based on a poem that we’d read for class. In the course of the semester with Greger, we read the Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and each poem assignment would have us trying to do something of what we’d seen Bishop doing better: Be sure your poem includes a place name and the name of an historical figure; at least one line should come in the form of a question; the poem most end with a moment of apostrophe; on and on, an assignment every other week. The difference with Logan was that the assignments came weekly (though there was nothing weak about them), and each was based on the work of a different poet: Larkin, Lowell, Heaney, Schnackenberg. How I resented those assignments, and how I learned from them. It’s not just that I made greater progress faster than I would have without the goading; I’m pretty sure that this instruction taught me to do things that otherwise I never would have tried or learned to do. I should of course conclude this paragraph with the necessary qualifier that I can hold none of my professors responsible for any weaknesses of my current poems; the faults remain my own.
Because an MFA program typically has its own complex culture of reading and writing, I agree with Tyler Meier’s idea of the MFA as an extension of the liberal arts. Whatever one does after the MFA in terms of pursuing the writing and publication of poems, the MFA is ideally formation in ways of reading, attentiveness to language and its multiple nuances and motions, skill in using words oneself–not to mention instruction in literary tradition, especially as it manifests itself in recent decades and up to the moment. In these ways, the MFA provides a certain formation in ways of understanding and being in the world, especially the worlds of human making and meaning. In this latter function the MFA is about what the liberal arts have been about all along, the ways of meaning in human language and action.
The titles of certain academic positions register some of the history and associations of literary study. For example, Jorie Graham currently serves at Harvard University as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. In this position she succeeds Seamus Heaney, who succeeded the great translator Robert Fitzgerald. In fact, this academic position–one of the oldest in the country–has been occupied by many a shining light in American Poetry. Today the primary task of the Boylston Professor is to teach creative writing, but the position title indicates the historical connection to the arts of persuasion and public speaking. Another example comes from across the pond where, at Cambridge, I. A. Richards (1893-1979) was a lecturer in English and Moral Sciences, a position that emphasizes the connection between the study of literature and the rest of the human lifeworld, for what part of the world of human action might ‘moral science’ not touch? Richards is perhaps most widely remembered for his book Practical Criticism (1929), a version of which is the criticism widely practiced in MFA programs today, though with the focus on poems in progress rather than those already printed. In other words, MFA programs have grown out of the complex history of the liberal arts, and there is every reason why they should continue to play their own complex roles in today’s culture.