"A Brief History of the Creative Writing MFA": [GO TO PART I]. [GO TO PART II] [GO TO PART III].
{Adapted from}:
J. Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990
Ron Silliman has opined -- on many occasions -- that the so-called "School of Quietude," which appears (or at least is purported to be) nominally co-extensive with the literary byproduct of the nation's stock of graduate creative writing programs, is a problem for scholars and creative writers alike because it will not engage in public acts of self-definition. The fallacy here has always been a self-evident one: Conventional poetries do not engage in acts of self-definition because it is not their historical inheritance to do so; it is the avant-garde that self-defines, and in self-defining distinguishes itself from all else and thereby opens itself up to the critical interpellation (usually by institutionalized scholars) it requires to survive, as its non-institutionalized bohemian communities are usually not of sufficient fiber to hold together long absent the ongoing approval of the scholarly class. Conventional poetry, for better or worse, requires no such acknowledgment, approval, or definition because its incalculable mass ensures (and more's the pity, it says here) that it will continue to be self-perpetuating for years or decades to come.
Had Silliman only tarred "SoQ" poetry with being self-perpetuating (for, in short, not being a self-defining, manifesto-driven avant-garde) his criticism would have been well-founded but also, one suspects, a little bit tautological and a little bit of a head-scratcher, too -- for the moment conventional poetry engages in the act of self-definition it must, by definition, be "separating" itself from some larger entity (as larger entities do not detach from smaller ones, for reasons already indicated), and it then itself becomes definitionally (culturally) avant-garde. Ron Silliman, then, is Magneto: He wishes to inject the "normative" population with the avant-garde mutation (I use the term here entirely non-pejoratively) so that all will be mutant, all will be avant-garde.
As noted, Silliman's view bears further investigation because it seems, at first glance, troublingly counter-historical. We have all read the manifestos of the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Vorticists, Projectivists, Language poets, flarfists, Conceptual poets, et cetera -- and yet, with the possible exception of the last three manifestos, is it really fair to say that it was these "self-defining" moments that created (or by proxy acknowledged and interpellated) the movements they so gregariously announced? Olson's Projectivism doesn't describe any poet's oeuvre -- his own included -- particularly well, nor do the contradiction- and nonsense-laden manifestos of the Futurists and Dadaists. Pound was so dissatisfied with his own description of "Vorticism" that by the time anyone noticed he'd written it he wasn't even a Vorticist anymore. No -- prior to the late 1970s/early 1980s, the avant-garde was defined (not self-defined) by literary criticism originating in the academy, which means that, were the same condition to exist today, we'd expect Silliman's demand that conventional aesthetics self-define itself be a demand solely for the academy to address, i.e. in scholarship, i.e. in scholarship on the nature of the poetry emanating from graduate creative writing programs (if indeed any such summaries can be responsibly written).
Thus far, as is readily evident, the academy has either refused to provide such exegeses or else has done so in an unacceptably terse and conclusory fashion -- two things for which academe has never been known -- and indeed in a way outside observers might even be inclined to deem suspicious. A few such volleys from the scholarly class are itemized in Pt. III of my "Brief History of the MFA" essay, and in a moment I'm going to try to "think through" (in real-time) why the academy might thus far be declining to participate in an act of taxonomy and/or canonization (which is what self-defining usually amounts to) for the first time in its long history.
First, it's worth considering whether it wasn't Silliman and friends who themselves poisoned the well they've now invited others to drink from. If indeed they did so, how they did they do it? How did Silliman and poets like Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman successfully "self-define" Language writing such that they've become the foremost experts on the topic -- in the same, slightly uncomfortable way we'd assume Barry Bonds to be the nation's "top expert" on himself -- and indeed in some instances elbow out (or at the very least inflect) the account given of Language writing by their peers in the academy? Wait... did I say peers? I said peers. It was instinctive, and yet I suppose it also answers both this question and the one I posed above about the unique -- indeed historically unprecedented -- treatment of "MFA writing" offered by the academy. The long and short of it, then: Silliman and Bernstein were and are not only creative writers, they and their Language writing cohort were and are products of the academy themselves, giving them precisely the privileged place needed to usurp the very act of "self-definition" usually reserved for non-creative writing scholars. I don't mean to suggest that all of the men and women who originally formulated the Language writing movement were products of the Program Era; in fact, very few were, most likely because the Program Era hadn't started yet. We can speculate all we like about what one man or woman or another might have done had he or she been born a decade later, but this much we know: when Bruce Andrews began applying to his Master's in International Relations at Johns Hopkins in (history suggests) late 1968, only six MFA programs in the world had ever graduated a single class of poets, and all but two had graduated their first class within the preceding twelve to eighteen months; had Charles Bernstein hoped to pursue an MFA when he graduated from Harvard (where Andrews took his doctorate) in 1972, he would have had less than a dozen options in the United States, many quite far from his native New York (several of the then-extant programs were in North Carolina, Arkansas, Montana, Oregon, and on the Ohio-Kentucky border); Ron Silliman studied creative writing in the famed SFSU graduate (CW M.A.) program, and later taught creative writing at SFSU, UCSD, the New College, Naropa University, and Brown University; the year Lyn Hejinian graduated from college, only six MFA programs in the world had thus far graduated a class of poets, only five of those in the United States (even so, Hejinian would later teach in the MFA program at the New College. and she now teaches literature and creative writing at Berkeley); Barrett Watten and Bob Perelman both attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop; Carla Harryman, like Silliman, appears to have studied creative writing at SFSU, and later taught creative writing at Eastern Michigan University and Bard College (I believe she still teaches at both schools, but I'm not certain); when Steve McCaffery, born and raised in England, was of age to attend a graduate creative writing program, there were no such programs in the entire United Kingdom; Rae Armantrout, like Harryman and Silliman, studied in the graduate creative writing program at SFSU; Kit Robinson graduated from Yale in 1971, when only ten U.S. MFA programs had graduated a single class (and only one MFA in the world had graduated more than five classes); and so on.
Putting aside the obvious question -- how could Language writing have been a response to an MFA juggernaut that didn't even exist yet? -- in any case we must still ask, is it possible that this group of men and women, largely comprised of poet-scholars with the unique experience of having taken upon themselves the "hybridic" subjectivity of creative writers in the academy, were in fact the very earliest generation of avant-garde poets in U.S. history who even had the capacity?and authority to successfully self-define? And if this very capacity arose from studying and/or teaching in graduate creative writing programs -- a combined form of academic and artistic study/research -- how could those programs then be the boogeyman that animated these individuals (in part) for the next twenty to thirty years? Looked at another way, if the Language poets see the divestment of creative writing from the literary studies/literary theory wing of the contemporary English department as an evil visited upon aspiring creative writers in the academy, doesn't this divestment -- which strips from aspiring creative writers precisely that capacity and authority Silliman and others exploited in successfully self-defining their own literary movement -- answer Silliman's question about why the poetics of the MFA workshop won't (or can't) self-define, and isn't continuing to insist on that self-definition sort of like chastising an unconscious person for being unconscious while one is in the midst of performing CPR?
If "conventional" members of the academy -- scholars with doctorates in Literary Studies/English Literature -- are loathe to, or unable to, provide "conventional" poetics with any meaningful self-definition, it may well be because such scholars are already experiencing anxiety with respect the positionality of creative writers in the academy. That is, for scholars to theorize creative writers in the academy they must first come to grips with the fact that there are creative writers in their midst at all --?and clearly they have never yet done so. (A less flashy argument would hold that, as Language writing is presently the "latest" literary movement the academy deems worthy of substantial scholarship, the Program Era may simply lie outside the present temporal focus of contemporary doctoral research and study and scholarly publication. Still, were this so, conventional scholars would likely remain silent on the topic of creative writing workshops, rather than, like Golding and Vickery, take disingenuous potshots at them.)
My own preference is to approach the question logically: The Language writers opine that poetry-writing in the academy is divorced from literary theory; if true, the boundary-lines between poetry-writing and literary theory in the academy are clear and uncontested; if these boundary-lines are clear and uncontested, there can be no such thing as a "poet-scholar" or hybridic subjectivity (at least related to creative writing) within the academy; if there is no such thing as a "poet-scholar" within the academy, then Language poetry is the first avant-garde movement in the history of American letters to successfully self-define itself from outside the academy; if this is true, it is Language poetry that must explain its methods, not those adhering to conventional aesthetics, as it is only Language poetry whose development is idiosyncratic and counterhistorical.
If, instead of that logic-chain, we attempt another, we reach a quite different result:?The Language writers opine that poetry-writing in the academy is divorced from literary theory; if true, the boundary-lines between poetry-writing and literary theory in the academy are clear and uncontested; if these lines were clear and uncontested, Language writing would have nothing to complain about with respect to the academy, as the divestment of creative writing from traditional literary studies would be complete and final; it must be the case, then, that the divestment of creative writing from traditional literary studies is as yet imperfect and incomplete; such imperfect and incomplete divestiture must necessarily produce anxiety among all those who produce either art or criticism under its sign; such anxiety would explain the identical reaction of both creative writers and scholars to the presence of creative writing within the academy: That is, to ignore it (the creative writers, by refusing to theorize themselves in what would be an obvious act of scholarship; the scholars, by refusing to acknowledge that their own space is necessarily lessened if they lack the ability to write creatively themselves but must share their academic turf with creative writers capable of both creative writing and scholarship).
I already mentioned in Pt. III of the preceding "Brief History" that Jed Rasula has criticized Ron Silliman for his counterhistorical reading of the MFA. Silliman argues that such programs have colonized modern poetry, but Rasula points out (and in this he's absolutely correct) that in fact modern poetry arose alongside and within the academy, so the appropriate question is not "How did MFAs colonize poetry?" or "What can we do about MFAs colonizing poetry?" but actually "Did MFAs colonize poetry at all, or was it the other way around?" or even "Can something actually colonize a contemporaneous phenomenon?"?Rasula, in his highly-regarded scholarly survey, The American Poetry Wax Museum, of course says much that has nothing directly to do with Silliman. For instance, he references Freud in speaking of the "uncanny" and its relation to the phenomenon of "doubles." He also cites Helen Vendler for the proposition that contemporary poetry-readers engage in "cognition by re-cognition," that is, they process what they read by comparing it to the poetry that preceded it in time, thereby ensuring -- on some level -- that all poetry will seem merely a pale, sterile, and unsatisfying imitation of some preceding aesthetic trend.
In both these citations I see possible metaphors for the difficulty the academy has had in accommodating creative writing in its midst over the last 132 years. For instance, what if scholars and other critics looking at the MFA themselves engage -- as a way of "reading" an unfamiliar or puzzling text (the presence of creative writing in the academy being this "text") -- in acts of "cognition by re-cognition"? This would involve both scholars and non-institutional MFA critics alike looking at creative writing in the academy and attempting -- in vain -- to recreate the MFA as identical to the academic spaces they already "recognize." For the non-institutional MFA critic, such "cognition by re-cognition" involves presuming the MFA to be a "traditional" "academic" (and "institutional") space that mirrors precisely the sort of spaces such critics themselves had to flee from in order to enable their own imaginative impulses and begin writing creatively. To the institutional scholar, who is closer to the phenomenon of creative writing in the academy -- and more intimately familiar with academic and institutional spaces, as such individuals still inhabit and work within them -- the problem is altogether different. For the institutional scholar, the "mirroring" problem is that the reflection the mirror sends back is an imperfect one, and thus the "uncanniness" produced is an "imperfect uncanniness." In short, for the institutional scholar who considers the presence of creative writing in the academy, such a presence manifests as an imperfect doppleganger whose very existence disproves the academic's controlling theory of space. Such scholars become aware, in the moment of this imperfect mirroring, this imperfect uncanniness, this confrontation with an imperfect doppleganger, that the very existence of such an entity means that their own space has been subdivided and therefore lessened. The subdividing or lessening force must consequently either be ignored -- in an effort to deny the loss of space -- or else treated as a new and inorganic monstrosity incapable of coherent interpellation. In either case, the lack of any previous scholarship on creative writing in the academy (Myers' aforementioned treatise excepted) only exacerbates the problem, and the result is that all such scholars can do (other than simply "write over" the problem) is register their horror again and again in the genteel jargon of their trade.
The result is that Silliman's wish -- that conventional aesthetics "self-define" -- remains perpetually a dream deferred, precisely because he achieved the subject position of poet-scholar in the first instance, and was therefore able to demand, in the first instance, that conventional aesthetics self-define itself. This is the Silliman Paradox. And for those who say that Silliman (and Bernstein, Hejinian, Watten, Armantrout, et cetera) could remove this paradox-obstacle themselves merely by self-defining the means by which they came to become poet-scholars -- thereby demystifying the poet-scholar status for creative writers and scholars alike -- the necessary response is that neither Silliman nor Bernstein nor anyone in their cohort can do so because a) they do not know or understand the history of creative writing in the academy (indeed they have made a decades-long habit of unintentionally misstating or miscontruing it), and/or b) for Silliman and Bernstein and other Language poets to self-define as poet-scholars they would have to acknowledge the transformative agency of a series of institutions (to wit, graduate creative writing programs in which poet-scholars may study or teach or both) they devoutly wish would simply disappear. That such a disappearance would erase most Language writers instantaneously -- by erasing their histories, their jobs, their special agency, and the foundation upon which they've built their public complaint (a complaint so generative, we've seen, of new avant-garde poetries) -- is a paradox for another day. I have to finish watching The Killing.
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