Steve Kowit's Rules for Anti-Rules

After careful consideration, I decided to scream.

A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book

Steve Kowit

The Writer’s Chronicle
Vol 43 No 6

One of the things that fascinates me is watching people attempt to be open to all kinds of poetry and then crash and burn. The latest instance of this is Steve Kowit in The Writer’s Chronicle. It’s a lesson. Even as he says to watch out for the biases and hidden agendas of teachers and those writing about poetry, he not so subtly advances his own.

His agenda can be seen easily enough by his choices of the best-and-most-open-to-breaking-rules poets: Galway Kinnell, Kim Addonizio, Stephen Dobyns, Ray Carver, Billy Collins, Ed Field, Tony Hoagland, David Kirby, Ron Koertge, Ted Kooser, Suzanne Lummis, Thomas Lux, Dorianne Laux, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Jane Shore, Natasha Trethewey, Diane Wakoski, and Charles Harper Webb.

OK, so I’m not knocking the work of the poets he’s choosing to list out (some of whom I like [Thomas Lux, for example]) as “our best poets,” but I am knocking him for making claims that his essay is supporting the idea that “everything is permitted,” when, in reality, he’s playing in a pretty narrow corner of the aesthetic sandbox. A poet looking for a wide field of possibilities isn’t going to find it in this essay, even as Kowit seems to be promising just that.

In the final section of his essay, titled “Poetry Workshop Teachers and Their Biases,” he rightfully says that “It’s hardly surprising that poet-teachers bring their own predilections, tastes, prejudices, attitudes, and emotional responses to the workshops they facilitate.” The problem is that he’s pretending he’s above all that in this essay, when in reality, he’s pushing his biases, hard, on the reader.

Kowit’s essay is another instance of the way many poets these days think of the aesthetic position of “simplicity, clarity, and grace” that is “committed to accessibility” as a default position, one outside of theory and the need for interrogation. It’s just being sensible, unlike, say, those deluded and crazy postmodern poets out to be “obtuse.”

No one's an island, but anyone can be full of holes.  

For some of his essay, I’m with him. There are a lot of dumb rules that teachers and essayists oppress people with, and they need to be taken very skeptically. Things such as “Show Don’t Tell.” The irony is that he’s unwittingly participating in just this sort of silly rule-making without the least bit of self-awareness.

He hates the kind of poetry that he describes as “postmodern.” OK. That’s fine (even if that phrase is getting a little long in the tooth, I basically know what he means). I dislike the poetry of Mary Oliver, so we’re even. The problem is that he’s writing an essay that has at its heart the purported acceptance of experimentation and rule-breaking. He grudgingly accepts the poetry of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Crane, and Williams, barely, while attacking strongly any poetry that might be defined as “difficult” or “postmodern” or even mysterious:

“’Mystery’ seems to be a word that some poets, critics, and poet-teachers use as a synonym for mystification, and as a way of valorizing confusing or indecipherable passages, a way of coating an awkward fact with a patina of mystical romance. If one wants to valorize that quality in more intellectual terms, you can call it ‘indeterminacy’: that’s the modish, lit-crit version of ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ Now, if the workshop student wanted to be incoherent (i.e, indeterminate, mysterious) then fine. He’s succeeded. But if the poet had no wish for that passage to be indecipherable it might be advantageous not to seduce him with a term that validates a quality he is decidedly not seeking—and probably wishes to avoid.”

Kowit apparently lives in a world where the poem is either going be clear with the “grace, power, authority, and genuine humility” of Mary Oliver, or it’s going to be incoherently “drunk with theory.” This is a pretty wobbly dichotomy, and one I wouldn’t expect from someone who reads and reviews poetry on a regular basis.

The difficulty—and why Kowit is fighting here, rather than pitching the large tent—is that the poetry he loves, is, in his estimation, being ruled against in workshops, where the “postmodern notion that poetry needs ambiguity” is really an admonition against “socially conscious poetry.” Likewise, the “idiosyncratic” rule “widespread among postmodernists . . . to eschew the word ‘I’ so that—the explanation goes—one can escape the ego . . . [is] really meant as a prohibition against ‘personal’ poetry.”

First, I’ve never heard of either rule, either as a student, teacher, or in conversation with even the most theory-headed poet about his or her art. Kowit is still fighting a battle with the 1980s, it seems to me, and that old fight cheapens greatly the other things he has to say that can be of use. I mean, what do these poets want anyway? Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are the two most popular poets in America. What’s there to fight about?

To posit Billy Collins and Mary Oliver as, apparently, “socially conscious” and “personal” against the postmodern mystifiers who are NOT socially conscious and personal (C.D. Wright? Rae Armantrout? What names do we place in here?) is easily negated by examples. So it’s really neither of these he’s really worried about. It’s about this thing called “clarity.”

I feel a little like Kowit, myself, at times, as I keep having this same argument with the way people like him frame the debate between “clarity” and “incoherence”. I believe in clarity and find little use for incoherence, but usually (especially in essays such as this where there are no examples of what he means by “incoherence”) what they mean by incoherence is poets such as John Ashbery. I rather like the poetry of John Ashbery, and I don’t care for these reductive arguments that paint “all of that” as some “postmodern” delusion. We’re talking about art here, not trying to hail a cab.

PS. The fact that he doesn’t mention Kay Ryan makes me think there might be something to her poetry after all.

Sure, they say it's harmless, but would you want to get on?

Easter Tweets

Today I'm @Twitter doin' the Tweets. One more thing I said I'd never do.

Be careful what you say you'll never do.

http://www.twitter.com/Poetsorg

Things the world will find out: I wake early. I go to sleep early. What I listen to at the gym.

The Rejection Group Hits the Market

WHO

The Rejection Group.

It was an anonymous group for a while. Then Kent Johnson outed himself. Then he was (maybe) kicked out of the group. And now they’re back. The Rejection Group appears to contain five members that are tagged in the chapbook only by their initials:

CB
KG
KSM
VP
KJ

More specifically, though, The Rejection Group is not longer anonymous. The museum is open: TRG was a six-month experiment in collaboration, involving Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bok, Vanessa Place, Kasey Silem Mohammad, and Kent Johnson.

WHAT

5 Works

In fine, handsewn production (with two different color-versions of cover) from Habenicht Press.

This is the first book by the Rejection Group (a second, larger collection, mostly translations from Rimbaud's Illuminations, is in preparation).

19 pp., $7 each. Copies (A-Z), signed by all five authors, available for $20 each.

WHERE

http://habenichtpress.com/?p=696

WHEN

While supplies last.

WHY

Good question. Thank you for asking.

HOW

$

+

The Rejection Group performs a necessary function. “Poets, hi.” it begins. “We’ve had it,” it continues. Uncomfortable things, impolite things, TRG writes, “never quite made it into your experiments.” Therefore, “Sometimes one just has to start from scratch.”

“Our poet,” in TRG's fusion, is a drover, it seems. And TRG is actually thinking of poets and poetry as worthy of satire and critique in art. I take this as a positive development, a positive project. Rimbaud is translated. Wittgenstein and Ashbery are mapped. And all assaults are full frontal. Even the bumper stickers make an appearance:

WHAT WOULD FRANZ WRIGHT DO?

LANGUAGE POETRY: IT’S NOT YOUR FATHER’S IVY LEAGUE ANYMORE

MY OTHER POEM’S A HYBRID

A thesis for the project, of sorts:

“There can be no sovereign music for your prefab amps and your cautious pride.”

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Obscurity = Clarity

This, from David Orr's Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry:


“What poets have faced for almost half a century, though, is a chasm between their art and the broader culture that’s nearly as profound as the divide between land and sea, or sea and air. This is what Randall Jarrell had in mind when he said that ‘if we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.’”

I’ve long felt that bit from Jarrell to be true. This is how I’ve seen it play out from my 20 years of teaching undergraduates who are not interested in poetry (in Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri).

Poets, and those who read poetry, can fight among themselves as to the cause and cure of poetry’s marginal status, as they (we) will, but the obvious facts are telling.  A healthy segment of the population loves obscure art. Think of music and movies, from The Beatles to Memento. Obscurity isn’t a problem if one is in the habit of listening to music or going to movies. But if one heard no music, and then listened to “I Am the Walrus” (to use an old example), one would get all “what does it mean” about it. But if one is in the habit of listening to music (from the 60s through the present), then “I Am the Walrus” just becomes another Beatles song. One that it’s OK to like or dislike. One where it’s OK to call it weird and still like it. It’s not threatening.

Now, with poetry, it’s difficult for me to find a poem to give to undergraduates (who haven’t been exposed to poetry) that doesn’t give them anxiety. And, by and large, it doesn’t matter what I give them to bring them into poetry.

There are always exceptions to this, of course. Children are a good example. Children make no differentiation between genres, for the most part, and because of that, they’re pretty ready to accept all forms of language play. There are adults, too, who have something of this natural appreciation. Burt talks about something like this in Close Calls with Nonsense. I’ll look it up and post it when and if I find it.

To people not used to reading poetry, a poem by Kay Ryan is every bit as obscure as one by Rae Armantrout. A poem by Michael Palmer is every bit as obscure as one by Billy Collins. OK, maybe that second example is a stretch, but I’m hard-pressed to find much of a difference in student reactions to either. Truth is, whether it’s a poem from Collins or Palmer or Armantrout or Ryan, students don’t know what to do with it. They don’t see what it’s for. They don’t know what it means.

It’s a genre problem, not a problem of the poetry itself. So doing something with the poems (writing differently) isn’t going to fix it. We already write differently, all across the gamut, and it’s not helping. It might be that obscurity makes it harder for those not used to poetry to find a way in, but even the most non-obscure poets (Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, etc) have miniscule readerships when one looks at other forms of art. The smallest indie band in America (East River Pipe, for example) sells more albums that the most popular poet in America. The idea of “accessible” poetry is only one that people who read poetry can have.

The good news is it doesn’t seem to matter much where I start when introducing people to poetry, and that it is possible to introduce people to poetry, and, also, once introduced, they can find things of interest there. After that, they can find the types of poetry that they like and the types that they don’t. Poetry reading and appreciation is not dead, it’s just dormant. It can grow.

Anyway, the bit from Orr will be going up on the Poetry Daily news page at some point today:

http://poems.com/news.php

Can we please stop calling Kay Ryan an outsider now?

I mean, like who didn't see that coming?

Paul McDonald - American Dreams

I don’t watch American Idol (I somehow got sucked in this season. I don' tknow how it happened.), but I think this guy’s pretty good. It makes me hope he doesn’t win.



Paul McDonald / The Grand Magnolias
American Dreams

Just saying.

The Nothing Poem

My daughter, Natalie (age 9), likes to write poems. Here's her version of the last family get-together.

The Nothing Poem

Natalie Gallaher

Here I am there you are but your cousin

is across the room—he looks at me like he’s got

something on his mind, but he doesn’t have a

word to think about with all this music—it has

been a crazy house with all this non-sense.

I’ve journeyed around the room for years, well at

least that’s what I remember from the tigers that

attacked us.

The Midwest Chapbook Series 2011

The Midwest Chapbook Series
GreenTower Press/The Laurel Review

Final Judge: Dana Levin

The contest is open to anyone who is living in, from, or closely associated with the Midwest, excluding close friends and former students of the editors or contest judge, as well as employees and students of Northwest Missouri State University.

Guidelines:

20-30 pages (typed, single-sided, one poem per page).

Individual poems may have been previously published. You may include an acknowledgements page if you wish, though one is not required.

Include two cover pages: one with title only, the other with name, address, email address, manuscript title, and a short note establishing your connection to the Midwest.

Your name should ONLY appear on the cover page, which the staff will keep on file. Manuscripts will be read blind.

Reading period opens February 1 and ends July 1, 2011. Late entries will be returned unread.

$10.00 reading fee. Please make checks payable to GreenTower Press. Reading fee gets you a one-year subscription to The Laurel Review, starting with the summer issue.

The winning chapbook will be published in an edition of 300 copies. Winner will receive one hundred copies. Additional copies offered at 40% off the list price ($7.00) plus shipping and handling.

Winner also will be invited to give a reading at Northwest Missouri State University’s Visiting Writers series, which includes travel expenses paid and an honorarium of $250.00

All entries will be considered for publication in The Laurel Review.

Winner will be notified by email or telephone, and will be announced on our website (http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/tlr/) in September, 2011.

If you’d like an acknowledgement of receipt send a SASP; please do not send a SASE.

Send entries to:

GreenTower Press
Midwest Chapbook Series
Northwest Missouri State University
Maryville, MO 64468

Questions may be addressed to the editors of The Laurel Review at: TLR@nwmissouri.edu

Recent chapbooks available from GreenTower Press:

BLOOM, Rob Schlegel
Show Me Yours, Hadara bar-Nadav

Off the Fire Road, Greg Wrenn
Instructions for a Painting, Molly Brodak

ITINERARY, Reginald Shepherd
Anatomy of a Ghost, Rumit Pancholi

Grenade, Rebecca Hoogs
The BirdGirl Handbook, Amy Newman

On Not Waiting Alone - Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

ON NOT WAITING ALONE
John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep


GCW: For me, the origin of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts was a set of largely inchoate ideas about poetry and community—about art and life. It seemed to me that we were all still mired, largely, in a Romantic conception of the poet as a solitary singer: that poetry, from both a writer’s and a reader’s standpoint, was something isolated and isolating. But this wasn’t how the Dadaists and Surrealists viewed it. As someone who has committed his life to a certain ideal of community outside the classroom and written page, the presumption bothered me. What sort of poetry might arise out of collaboration, that is, artistic community? Out of friendship?

It’s a question I’m still pondering, even after the 16 months of poetic exchanges from which YFOTTOG was sculpted. Can reading and writing be public/ collective/ collaborative acts? Rather than personal/ private/ individual? What sort of literature—what sort of poetry—might result if they were?

JG: The creation of YFOTTOG was a social act (and it still IS, as we figure out what to do with all the poems that are not in the book). That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about it. We didn’t have a purpose or plan, other than what was in front of us. It’s interesting to hear you mention the “solitary singer” conception. It’s one of the many things I didn’t know about you when we started, but it’s something I’ve also been contending with for a long time. This “solitary singer” is just as fraught (or, as I’ve also heard it termed, “authenticity”) as is “originality.” What I mean is that the notion of this Romantic I with its “authenticity” gets passed around a lot, and I think it’s largely a fantasy. Just as “originality” is largely a fantasy. These are relative terms, not absolutes.

Poems, in reality, come from everywhere the poet can find them: memory, environment, gum wrappers. It’s all reaching out into the context to add something new. The poet just tunes in to whatever works. It’s been my general feeling all my writing life that all writing is collaborative. One collaborates with the world. Working on this book has made it literal. It’s given the world an email address, so to speak.

For many years these two questions have continued to tap me on the shoulder:

What are you going to listen to?
What are you going to listen for?

I think they’re two of the fundamental questions for artists, whether the artist thinks directly about it or not, as the answers to these questions become the metaphors the poet will use to tune into the process. If the poet believes poetry comes from inside, this singer you mentioned, the poet will tune to that. If the poet believes poetry comes from outside, the poet will tune to that.

That’s the LISTEN TO. And it matters, because what one listens to will exclude things that one could listen to. So one has to have a belief as to where poems come from. Then there’s the LISTEN FOR. And what one listens for matters, because when one tunes to one thing, one will invariably miss other things. Like conversations in a crowded room, something will/must get filtered out. But, either way, the inside and the outside will both still get in. There is always bleed-through.

I found myself circling this formulation many times during the back and forth that became YFOTTOG. A poem written by you would pop up in my inbox, and I was to read it and then respond. And what form would that response take? We both went through many versions of what “responding” meant.

GCW: Jack Spicer says “The words are counters, and the whole structure of language is essentially a counter. It’s an obstruction to what the poem wants to do….” So, if language is a game—if poetry is a sort of game we play with language—what then is a “response”? What are the words, the poems in earnest of?

JG: Spicer’s been important to both of us in this way, I think? I suppose, to use his terms, the response is predicated upon what furniture we leave in the room for the voices to inhabit. How we prepare. Or unprepare.

GCW: Although sometimes, it’s the voices that turn out to be the furniture. We live here, we move some things around, some things move us around. A heart attack. A radio. A poem is a vessel, or a poem is searching for a vessel. Or…something else, entirely?

One of the reasons I liked using the particular Spicer quotation for an epigraph for the book—“Like somebody knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know. And you try to pretend that you aren’t breathing”—is that I’ve never been entirely sure just what the space opened up by poetry is.

A colleague of mine here at Bucknell recently defined the poem—a poem, any poem, literature itself—as essentially a space of waiting, in part because while you’re reading, you’re not really “doing” anything. In another context, I’ve written “Poetry is like entering a room someone or something has just left. Maybe it’s a homey sitting room, fire crackling in the grate, inviting; maybe it’s a sumptuously-appointed hall. Either way, you’re the only one there. There was music playing, but it’s quiet now. You’ve missed someone or something important by minutes, perhaps even seconds. The telephone has just been ringing—somehow you know this—and you pick it up, just in time to hear click.”

For me, this was part of the essential mystery of YFOTTOG—writing poems in this voice that was neither John’s nor mine, but somehow a stepping-outside of our usual voices, perhaps of Voice itself.

What do poems do when we’re not reading them? …is one way of thinking about it. What are they up to?

JG: I swear I saw some minor poems of Wallace Stevens’s wandering aimlessly in the soda aisle at Walmart the other night. They seemed rather forlorn. For me, this sort of defining is fun, as it creates an architecture, or a landscape where we can think of poetry going, not just the singular poem. I’ve always been more interested in poetry than poems, if that makes any sense. There’s a form of letting go involved. Neil Young talks about it. How technically proficient musicians can play better than he can, but they come to a wall. He likes to go through the wall. Collaboration is a form of that, I think. At least it felt that way to me. I was writing talking to a friend and I had no idea where we were going, where it was taking us. The friend part, the poem I was responding to, took over, and then whatever happened happened, wall or no wall.

GCW: The last time this happened to me, with a friend, we wound up eating Ethiopian in Brooklyn....

I’m interested in that wall, though. Is it keeping us from something, or is it the something from which we are being kept? Should we try to scale it, or decorate it, or blow it up? Sketch it in pastels? Tell our pets about it, late at night?

JG: Now that we’re no longer writing YFOTTOG, I have a recurring sense of loss. While we were exchanging poems (the average, I think, was that between us we wrote 2.5 poems a day) everything I was doing was to feed the poems. I felt like all my receptors were open. And now, I have only myself to wait for. There’s a loneliness to that. I wonder if others who have worked collaboratively feel this way.

Just a minute ago, I went looking for the title of a collaborative book I read years ago, to mention in this exchange. It was written by Olga Broumas and Jane Miller, and is titled Black Holes, Black Stockings. While looking for it, I came across a book with the subtitle “New Ideas for the Imaginative Quilter.” That’s just the sort of thing that would have gotten directly folded into the collaboration. I would know that what you’d send would relate to imaginative quilting. There would be a connection, as there’s always a connection. And then I’d just tune in. But now what do I do with this thing? This little scrap? I have to wait to think of something or for the voices to speak or something.

There’s a definite sense of loss in that. Just as I feel this sense of loss about the 290 or whatever poems we wrote that didn’t end up in the book. Where are they to go? Seattle or something? They don’t exist for me or you, they exist for each other. If we don’t do something with them together we won’t do something with them, right? Will they become mercenaries? Competitive quilters?

GCW: They will form their own support groups, certainly. I can see them sitting in little circles in church basements, late at night, saying “Hi, my name is ‘New Ideas for the Imaginative Quilter,’ and....”

JG: “… and I’ve wasted my life waiting,” yeah. Now we’re back to waiting, and one of the definition of poetry. So is that how it ends, then? They wait? Or we do? Either way, I would suggest collaboration, and others would as well, as I’m seeing more collaborations these days. It must be something in the water. Maybe that’s one of the things about long exposure to fluoridation the Keep America Committee tried to warn us about.

But at least when you collaborate, you don’t have to wait alone.

You Are Here Or You're Not: The Iowa Workshop Turns 75

So the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is 75! Cue the music. Several songs will be playing, ranging from celebration for the time and space that Iowa (and writing programs in general) has allowed young writers to take, to calls for the end of writing programs, saying that they do more harm than good to young writers.


Either way, to get the anniversary started, here’s the transcript of the piece that ran on The News Hour the other night:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/iowawriters_04-07.html

A few highlights:

JEFFREY BROWN: But, for as long as Iowa has existed, and no doubt a lot longer than that, the question has been asked: Can writing be taught?

Surprisingly perhaps, the official answer from Iowa is not really. Its website makes clear the "conviction that writing cannot be taught, but that writers can be encouraged."

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: We try as hard as we can to take everybody's work seriously, to respect the writer's intentions, to discuss technical and non-technical elements of the work. Having said all of that, I sometimes feel that if I just brought them into the room and fed them chicken soup, they would get better anyway.

The elements of -- you know, that go into creating a great writer are completely mysterious. Nobody really knows what they are.

Another highlight:

JEFFREY BROWN: What happens to all those graduates? And what's the impact on American fiction and poetry?


MARK LEVINE: The danger is that there's a kind of a uniformity in the work, or that the work is written for critical approval and so tailors itself to whatever the prevailing critical interests or trends are.

It's a thing that you have to patrol your – that you would want to patrol yourself for in a creative-writing classroom.

One last one:


JEFFREY BROWN: So, what's different about from when you were here?

ALLAN GURGANUS: I think they're healthier than we were.

JEFFREY BROWN: Healthier?

(LAUGHTER)

ALLAN GURGANUS: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Physically? Mind?

ALLAN GURGANUS: It used to be -- all the above. They go to gyms. They swim. They don't drink as much. The parties end at 11:30, so they can go home and write the next morning.

JEFFREY BROWN: Which was not how it was for you?

ALLAN GURGANUS: Oh, no.

Here's the full transcript:

Iowa Writers' Workshop, Famous for Training Top Writers, Turns 75
REPORT AIR DATE: April 7, 2011


JIM LEHRER: Now, writers, poets and one of the nation's leading literary institutions.

Jeffrey Brown reports.

MARCUS BURKE, writer: All the little birds fluttered through our block, cocoa-buttered up in their poom-poom shorts.

JEFFREY BROWN: A portrait of the artist as a young writer: 23-year-old Marcus Burke, a first-year student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where his short story in progress is about street life where he grew up, near Boston.

I mean, Iowa is a famous place, but you didn't grow up knowing about it?

MARCUS BURKE: No, no. I -- God, no. No.

(LAUGHTER)

MARCUS BURKE: There was no writers in my neighborhood.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: But now Burke has turned from basketball – he was a high school star and played in college – to a different kind of bruising sport: writing and presenting his work in class to peers and teachers at the country's oldest and most renowned graduate writing program.

MARCUS BURKE: There'll be days that you leave and you're like, wow, I felt that one in the ribs a little, you know?

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: It can – it gets a little rough sometimes?

MARCUS BURKE: Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, the truth isn't the nicest thing to hear all the time.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's one of the surprising and counterintuitive facts of literary life today. Even as we hear that fewer and fewer people read serious literature, writing programs like the famous one here at Iowa have never been so popular.

Does it surprise you how many people send applications?

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG, Iowa Writers' Workshop: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Novelist Samantha Chang is director of the Iowa Workshop. When we met her recently, she'd just finished reading more than 1,200 manuscripts from applicants for next year's class.

So, something in those folders jumped out at you and your colleagues?

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: Absolutely.

JEFFREY BROWN: This bin held the work of the lucky 26 who were accepted to the two-year master's program.

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: Something just jumps off the page.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: And you think, oh, my God, I'm in another world. I have been transported.

JEFFREY BROWN: The Iowa Workshop has been attracting would-be writers for 75 years, first in a small Quonset hut on the campus of the University of Iowa, then moving into much larger quarters.

MARK LEVINE, Iowa Writers' Workshop: It is a fantastic poem.

JEFFREY BROWN: The program has two departments, one for fiction, the other poetry, with a core faculty joined each semester by visiting writers.

And it's been home to a roll call of literary lights, graduates such as Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stegner, John Irving, Rita Dove, and last year's Pulitzer winner for fiction, Paul Harding, teachers including John Cheever, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and, currently, Pulitzer-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson. All passing through a university town that goes out of its way to honor its writers, including special plaques along a downtown avenue.

But what exactly do they teach and learn at the workshop?

Samantha Chang was herself once a student here, so has seen it from both sides.

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: I think I go into the class with the general assumption that every piece has something good and not good in it. It's interesting to me that the student become aware of their strengths, because I think that by sort of really working on their strengths, they can become extraordinary.

Do you get a sense that you can tell from what point she's telling the story and why she's telling it?

JEFFREY BROWN: The heart of the Iowa experience is the classroom workshop, where poems and stories are critiqued by teachers and fellow students.

WOMAN: Any time there was dialogue after that, I just felt completely riveted.

JEFFREY BROWN: But, for as long as Iowa has existed, and no doubt a lot longer than that, the question has been asked: Can writing be taught?

Surprisingly perhaps, the official answer from Iowa is not really. Its website makes clear the "conviction that writing cannot be taught, but that writers can be encouraged."

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG: We try as hard as we can to take everybody's work seriously, to respect the writer's intentions, to discuss technical and non-technical elements of the work. Having said all of that, I sometimes feel that if I just brought them into the room and fed them chicken soup, they would get better anyway.

The elements of -- you know, that go into creating a great writer are completely mysterious. Nobody really knows what they are.

JEFFREY BROWN: Of course, one way to learn is through careful reading.

Mark Levine, also an Iowa alum, teaches a poetry workshop, as well as seminars on past masters, here, the odes of Keats.

WOMAN: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense."

JEFFREY BROWN: Levine says he works on technical aspects of writing, but there's a lot more, things like courage, confidence and honesty.

MARK LEVINE: One of the acts of faith in the exchange between the student and the teacher and the other – and the other members of the class is to be honest. And the honesty is hard. I mean, it's a very – it's a much more emotionally fraught setting, I think, than other classrooms.

JEFFREY BROWN: Whatever one thinks about the ability to teach writing, it's indisputable that what began in Iowa has exploded.

Thirty-five years ago, there were just 79 writing programs around the country. Today, there are more than 800. And that's brought new questions: What happens to all those graduates? And what's the impact on American fiction and poetry?

MARK LEVINE: The danger is that there's a kind of a uniformity in the work, or that the work is written for critical approval and so tailors itself to whatever the prevailing critical interests or trends are.

It's a thing that you have to patrol your – that you would want to patrol yourself for in a creative-writing classroom.

ALLAN GURGANUS, author, "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All": That's the surprise of the story.

JEFFREY BROWN: Allan Gurganus, the acclaimed author of "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" and other works of fiction, is an alumnus of the Iowa program and comes back to read and give master classes often.

So, what's different about from when you were here?

ALLAN GURGANUS: I think they're healthier than we were.

JEFFREY BROWN: Healthier?

(LAUGHTER)

ALLAN GURGANUS: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: Physically? Mind?

ALLAN GURGANUS: It used to be -- all the above. They go to gyms. They swim. They don't drink as much. The parties end at 11:30, so they can go home and write the next morning.

JEFFREY BROWN: Which was not how it was for you?

ALLAN GURGANUS: Oh, no.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Gurganus has certainly heard the critiques of writing programs but says that, for the students, it comes down to something simple.

ALLAN GURGANUS: They get time and readership, time in that two years are free and clear to do the work and to put the work not at the back of their life, but at the absolute center of their life.

JEFFREY BROWN: And after those two years, armed with an MFA degree, who knows? Gurganus himself didn't publish his first novel until age 42.

ALLAN GURGANUS: What's the rush? You know more as you get older. You develop more. Your heart is broken many, many times. And that is essential to getting your driver's license as a writer.

(LAUGHTER)

ALLAN GURGANUS: And, boy, can we drive.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Taking your time, in fact, is another lesson they try to impart here, even as the publishing industry looks for the next big and often young thing.

Marcus Burke says he's already been approached by agents, but he's not biting, at least yet.

MARCUS BURKE: I think there is that pressure to publish. But, at the same time, you only get to come out once. And first impressions are very important. And if the work isn't right, you can get charged up for people to look at you, but they aren't going to look very long.

JEFFREY BROWN: And as everyone we talked to put it, if you're in it for the job, the fame, or God forbid, the money, it's probably best to find another line of work.

G.C. Waldrep / YFOTTOG / PW Blog

I'm in PA right now and away from the blog. Meanwhile, G.C. Waldrep and I are blogging together here through Thursday:

http://bit.ly/hSjvbE

Here's our post from yesterday, the new one will go up at 1:00 Eastern:

G.C. Waldrep: For me, the origin of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts was a set of largely inchoate ideas about poetry and community—about art and life. It seemed to me that we were all still mired, largely, in a Romantic conception of the poet as a solitary singer: that poetry, from both a writer’s and a reader’s standpoint, was something isolated and isolating. But this wasn’t how the Dadaists and Surrealists viewed it. As someone who has committed his life to a certain ideal of community outside the classroom and written page, the presumption bothered me. What sort of poetry might arise out of collaboration, that is, artistic community? Out of friendship?


It’s a question I’m still pondering, even after the 16 months of poetic exchanges from which YFOTTOG was sculpted. Can reading and writing be public/ collective/ collaborative acts? Rather than personal/ private/ individual? What sort of literature—what sort of poetry—might result if they were?


John Gallaher: The creation of YFOTTOG was a social act (and it still IS, as we figure out what to do with all the poems that are not in the book). That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about it. We didn’t have a purpose or plan, other than what was in front of us. It’s interesting to hear you mention the “solitary singer” conception. It’s one of the many things I didn’t know about you when we started, but it’s something I’ve also been contending with for a long time. This “solitary singer” is just as fraught (or, as I’ve also heard it termed, “authenticity”) as is “originality.” What I mean is that the notion of this Romantic I with its “authenticity” gets passed around a lot, and I think it’s largely a fantasy. Just as “originality” is largely a fantasy. These are relative terms, not absolutes.

Poems, in reality, come from everywhere the poet can find them: memory, environment, gum wrappers. It’s all reaching out into the context to add something new. The poet just tunes in to whatever works. It’s been my general feeling all my writing life that all writing is collaborative. One collaborates with the world. Working on this book has made it literal. It’s given the world an email address, so to speak.

Eagle Cam

And now for something completely different:


Live Video streaming by Ustream

We’ve been watching this all weekend. Two eaglets so far, and one egg still to hatch!

The Moveable Poetry School

Saturday project: The New Moveable Poetry School
(suitable for cocktail parties and term papers).


So, here’s what you do:

1. Go to any book page on Amazon.
2. Scroll down to “Customers Also Bought Items By”

Voila. DIY schools of poetry, as association cloud.

Here’s one (today, that is. They change) for Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts:

Dean Young
Timothy Donnelly
Ben Lerner
W. S. Merwin
Mark Doty
James Longenbach
Sandra Beasley
Ellen Bryant Voigt
C. D. Wright
Kathleen Graber
Zachary Schomburg
Larry Levis
Matthew Rohrer
Anne Carson
Michael Dickman
Mark Bibbins
Frank Bidart


Taa Daa!

[This message brought to you by Commerce As Aesthetics]



Just to show how infallible it is, here’s one for Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet:

Charles Bernstein
Lyn Hejinian
Rae Armantrout
Susan Howe
Marjorie Perloff
Charles Bernstein
Robert Duncan
Jack Spicer
Bob Perelman
Charles Olson
Paul Hoover
Anne Carson
Louis Zukofsky
Robert Edward Duncan
Gertrude Stein
Roberto Bolano
Walter Benjamin

I was going to post the one for Rae Armantrout’s Money Shot, but for some reason there isn’t one. (?)