There's a War On in American Poetry

There Has Been for 125 Years; the Combatants Aren't Who You'd Suspect; Is a Peace Treaty Possible?

[NB: In this pre-prelims essay/note-taking exercise, I hypothesize about a 125-year-long battle between two opposing forces in American poetry, "creative writing" and "the Academy." There are no good guys or bad guys in this supposed/proposed tilt; both "sides" offer absolutely essential ingredients to the mix that is contemporary American poetry. While many of the first principles/values assigned here to "the Academy" might seem, at first glance, distasteful, they are not intended to be seen (nor are they intended to be described) pejoratively. In fact, they offer a necessary counterbalance to the potential excesses of their opposition, and are often reified in ways substantially more generative and progressive than their on-the-page/screen recitation would imply.]

{Part II; Part III forthcoming].

One of the questions we are called upon to answer as poets is the relationship between aesthetic preference and aesthetic judgment. As authors, we elect our preferences via whatever means and methods seem sensible to us, and in that respect, at least, our elections are beyond the censure of others: We must make good on our designs -- whatever that finally means, within the work itself -- but as long as we come to those designs earnestly (which is to say, reasonably independently of undue outside influences) they have an integrity all their own. But writers of poetry are also readers of poetry, and sometimes even critics of poetry, and in this it is our aesthetic judgment that's ultimately called to account. In such instances we ask ourselves, "Can we admit the validity and vitality of practices and theories in poetry that are not our own? Do we credit them as readers and critics, even when and as we don't share them as working authors?"

There has been a good deal of discussion, of late, of the role of faculties in graduate creative writing programs. There are those, such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, who argue that the aesthetic temperament of an author is roughly co-extensive with his or her temperament as a teacher; in other words, one can determine what kinds of work a poet is willing and able to understand, condone, encourage, and speak intelligently about merely by reading up on that poet's own creative endeavors. MFA applicants, in this way of thinking, are advised to select their graduate creative writing programs largely through careful study of the published work of faculty. In one sense, we might consider this perspective reactionary; it calls to mind, for many of us, the unfortunate hegemony of those New Critic poet-critics of the 1940s and 1950s, whose arbitration of good taste appeared almost entirely the product of their own writerly predilections. But on the other hand, this viewpoint is also sympatico with much of the prose coming out of the avant-garde and post-avant community since the mid-1970s; in such non-academic-institutional, or what I will shortly call "bohemian-Academic" communities, one may or may not occupy the position of a poet-critic, but to remain in good standing one must produce work broadly in keeping with the general tenor of the group, and thus the "private" poet and the "public" community member must in some way be aligned.

There is a different historical tradition from this AWP/avant-garde one, however, and it has one foot in and one foot out of academic institutions. The men -- and regrettably, they were almost entirely men -- who heralded, in the mid- to late 1960s, the very earliest movements of what Mark McGurl has called The Program Era (an Era which did not properly ascend to actual influence until the late 1980s, at the earliest), were not poets unable or unwilling to disentangle aesthetic preference and aesthetic judgment. By and large, they founded graduate creative writing programs not to indoctrinate students in their own preferred aesthetic elections, but to explore -- alongside their students -- the vastness of poetic possibility.

Putting aside the founding of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936, we see that the beginning of the program-creation era in American literary history comes in 1964, with the founding of the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the MFA program at the University of Oregon, and the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. From 1964 onward, at least one new terminal-degree graduate creative writing program was founded in most years, though that glacial pace of academic-institutional development wouldn't pick up appreciably for about two decades more. Still, it's useful to see what the founders of these early MFA programs were doing and saying around the time they became the Fathers (and in at least two cases, the Mothers) of the Program Era -- perhaps not the Grandfathers (that would be Iowa City's Carl Seashore, or perhaps Wilbur Schramm, or perhaps Paul Engle) or the Great-Grandfathers (those would be a gaggle of Harvard composition instructors in the 1880s and 1890s), but certainly the men and on occasion women whose decision to spread the idea of non-academic degree-granting graduate creative writing programs beyond the borders of Iowa actually did have a domino effect nationally. (As I've discussed previously, the founding of the Iowa Writers' Workshop was not the influential historical event many presume it to be.)

I think it's worthwhile, before providing some additional info on the founders of some of the "First Twelve" MFA programs (those twelve programs being, in order of founding, Iowa, Massachusetts-Amherst, North Carolina-Greensboro, Oregon, Arkansas-Fayetteville, British Columbia-Vancouver, Montana, Cornell, Bowling Green, Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, and California-Irvine) to lay out the terms of the ongoing, 125-year-long dispute that seems to define the "academic institutionalization" wars in the American literary arts:

Combatant #1: "Creative Writing":

1. "Creative writing" at the college/university level was created (in the 1880s) as a progressive educational reform within the composition studies (not literary studies) movement. It had, and has, no association with the progressive educational ideologies of either Hughes Mearns or John Dewey (cf. "self-expression"), who came on scene approximately a half-century later; likewise, it has no formal association whatsoever with the New Criticism, which also arrived on scene a half-century later and whose history in almost no way intersects with that of the so-called Program Era.

2. "Creative writing" was and is opposed to rules-based composition instruction as well as the staid canonizing and historicizing endemic to literary studies programs specifically and to academia generally.

3. As a phenomenon, "creative writing" originated at Harvard University but took firmest root in public institutions of higher learning in the Midwestern, Southern, and Plains states.

4. "Creative writing" was intended (and executed) as a populist, nonhierarchical schemata for introducing the arts to the academy and thus to a broader audience.

5. "Creative writing" sought, and seeks, increased access to the arts for all students in higher education.

6. "Creative writing" implicitly and (historically) often explicitly sought to decentralize cultural capital away from the coasts. One of its earliest aims was to convince young rural-dwelling poets and writers there was ample literary material in their own backyards -- one didn't need to run off to the Big City to find inspiration.

7. As an academic-institutional phenomenon, "creative writing" not surprisingly is inclined (and definitionally must) equate pedagogy (not aesthetics) with political values. In doing so, it still does not believe creative genius can be directly taught.

8. However, "creative writing" also does not subscribe to the Romantic view that artists should be separated from Society, nor that artists cannot develop their genius through active engagement with other artists and with Society.

9. While the earliest period of creative writing workshops in higher education (1880-1935) emphasized preparation of students for professional (but non-creative writing) careers, and a middle period (1936-1963) emphasized the mutually-beneficial intertwining of the literary arts with literary studies, as the Program Era (1964-present) commenced -- despite not hitting its first actual "boom" until the late 1980s -- it was typified by an anti-academic, anti-theory, anti-New Critical, anti-professionalization bent. MFA teachers saw themselves as poets first, and professors a distant second; they secured TAships for their students not in the interest of professional development, but simply as a means to get them funding; programs did absolutely nothing to professionally develop students, including offering minimal pedagogical training, virtually no courses in any "practical" money-making field (publishing, editing, printing, professional/technical writing, screenwriting, journalism), no career services, no systemic/standardized advice on how to get published or find an agent, no education or other form of instruction on how to develop a specialized language for literary critique (as was insisted upon by, and defined, the New Critics), no training in literary theory, no insistence on any sort of "academic" rigor in terms of homework or course selection or grades, no systemic/standardized attempts to integrate students into the English departments that technically housed and supported them, &c.

10. In all respects, "creative writing" was designed to be radically democratic. It took strides to integrate the creative writing community -- gender-wise, racially and ethnically, and in other respects -- well before any other entity (institutional or otherwise) in American letters. It admitted students regardless of background or -- well, without regard to any consideration at all -- besides a creative portfolio, and most faculties had been/are crafted to be diverse enough aesthetically that different faculty members are most interested in working with different applicants. While some programs did (and do) more than others to keep students out of student loan debt, the proliferation of programs numbers-wise and geographically (and in terms of residency type) ensures that more or less anyone who wants access to a graduate creative writing program can find that access with a halfway decent portfolio and a dollop of persistence.

11. While opposed to the elitism, fetishization of specialized knowledge, and hierarchical structure of the New Criticism, inasmuch as the New Criticism was also, like "creative writing," opposed to traditional literary studies and the immobilization of creative thinking/judgment traditional literary studies engendered, the New Criticism was an unaffiliated, historically-mininally-related, enemy-of-my-enemy ally of "creative writing." The backgrounds of the dominant New Critics were equal parts Academic and "creative writing," and the preeminent New Critics were no more invested in the creation of graduate creative writing programs than anyone else was -- in fact, they were much, much less so. Indeed, their heyday (1940 to 1955) came during the longest "dead" period in the development of "program"-based creative writing in higher education.

12. "Creative writing" uses non-academic institutional organs -- specifically, institutional organs in publishing -- to create canons. While no one necessarily gets taken more seriously by any other poet simply because they announce on Facebook or Twitter that they've received tenure at their college or university -- that sort of data is esoteric to anyone not presently friends with that individual or attending or working in that particular institution -- significant cultural capital accrues to those on the "creative writing" side of this historical divide who find success with a different form of literary institution, the literary magazine/literary publisher.

13. Aesthetically, contemporary "creative writers" are most directly influenced by The New York School, the Beats, the Deep Image poets, and that collation of talented but largely-unrelated writers wrongly termed "Confessionalists" by the Academy as a means to discredit and belittle them.

14. In the absolute sense, neither the Academy nor "creative writing" is pro-professionalization; in the narrow sense, "creative writing" is anti-professionalization (see below for more).

15. "Creative writing" believes in the demystification of genius. It does not coddle or otherwise protect genius from itself or from Society; instead, it sticks genius in a room of fellow travelers and tells it -- quite literally -- to be quiet and listen to everyone else deconstruct each and every element of any supposed "genius" on display. In the workshops that define "creative writing," the author is the one person who doesn't get to explain or justify themselves and they therefore occupy a deprivileged space in the workshop setting.


Combatant #2: "The Academy": 

1. The Academy is defined and comprised by both institutional organs (the non-creative writing sectors of English departments) and allied non-institutional organs (affiliated, quasi-affiliated, and non-affiliated private individuals and groups of private individuals whose separate and collective efforts are generatively conjoined with, and conducive to, and benefit from, traditional literary studies).

2. The forces of the Academy are pro-theory and are generally aligned with literary studies. This means that, like literary studies, they exhibit an implicit and instinctive contempt for composition studies and its accouterments (e.g., pedagogy, see below).

3. The forces of the Academy are, naturally, anti-"creative writing." Their not-at-all-secret aim is to destroy "creative writing" via one of the following two methods: eradicate it directly, by collapsing the market for/interest in/viability of graduate creative writing programs (mostly through a public propaganda campaign that has thus far been passing successful), and by deriding into effective non-existence populist literary communities such as state- and local-level communities comprised of neophyte poets; or, to eradicate it indirectly, by collapsing it (back) into the literary studies "Academic" camp it fought for many decades to free itself from (this latter mode of thinking explains Marjorie Perloff's headscratching -- perhaps merely wishful -- insistence that the wave of the future in "creative writing" is the Ph.D. program in Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo, which program is as close as one can come to claiming a separate space from the academy while still being in most senses wedded to traditional literary studies and its organs).

4. The forces of the Academy are anti-populist.

5. The forces of the Academy are primarily coastal and urban.

6. The forces of the Academy are Romanticist inasmuch as they believe in a model of "creative genius" in which such genius is harmed by patronage, Society, concern for audience, and direct interaction with non-academic literary criticism or critics.

7. The forces of the Academy are dedicated to hierarchies -- both vertical hierarchies (e.g., where these forces are academic-institutional, bureaucratic and administrative and pedagogical and intracultural hierarchies) and horizontal hierarchies (e.g., where these forces are bohemian-Academic, gatekeeping who is permitted membership in the group or collective or movement). While we see this most vividly in the vertical hierarchies of non-creative writing English scholars, and the bohemian exclusiveness of non-institutional communities comprised of private individuals (e.g., the masculinity-driven avant-garde cadres of the 1950s and 1960s, the locational enclaves of the Language writers, the hegemony of hipsterdom in salons in New York City), we can also see this in those rare spaces of Venn-diagram intersection between "creative writing" and the Academy: e.g., coastal, urban, academics-oriented graduate creative writing programs which necessarily skew socioeconomically wealthy in their student cohorts (because little funding is available) and which primarily advertise themselves on the basis of their faculties (thereby emphasizing a form of traditional vertical-hierarchy pedagogical instruction consistent with Romantic ideals).

7. The forces of the Academy use academic and quasi-academic discourse to create canons, and institutional organs (publishing-wise) to "fence" their communal territories sociologically.

8. The forces of the Academy are temperamentally elitist.

9. The forces of the Academy are pro-multiculturalism in discourse, anti-multiculturalism in community. Whereas "creative writing" spaces are generally (albeit perhaps only relatively speaking) highly-integrated gender-wise and racially/ethnically and sociogeographically, Academic and Academy-affiliated spaces have historically tended to be overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly urbanist/urbane, and overwhelmingly upper-class.

10. Consistent with their academic affiliations, the forces of the Academy are anti-aesthetics and pro-poetics.

11. The Academy is most directly influenced by High Modernism, Language writing, early-twentieth century avant-garde movements (Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism, Objectivism), and continental literary theory.

12. The Academy is privatized. Many of its most important operations occur in spaces difficult or impossible for outsiders to access either because substantial academic credentials are required (e.g., a doctorate) or because substantial cultural-capital credentials are required (e.g., a long course of pre-admission networking). These are also spaces that derive little or none of their funding from public sources (e.g., grants, taxpayer funds, &c).

13. The Academy is self-denying. Its method of ideological warfare is what is commonly called "Rovian" in contemporary American politics: that is, in a strategy popularized by former Bush aide Karl Rove, it turns its opponents' greatest strength into its greatest weakness. In this case, that means redefining "creative writing" as privatized, elitist, academic, professionalized, and several other things to which "creative writing" is manifestly and historically diametrically opposed.

14. The Academy refuses to acknowledge pedagogy as a valid topic for discussion.

15. The Academy equates aesthetics and politics.

16. The Academy prefers the centralization of literary production in a small number of localized cadres. It is easier to produce taxonomic and theory-oriented scholarship based upon such cadres; also, it is easier to erect fences around such communities to ensure they remain ideologically pure.

17. In the absolute sense, neither the Academy nor "creative writing" is pro-professionalization; in the narrow sense, the Academy is pro-professionalization.


(Silent) Combatant #3: Inter-Party Propaganda

1. If we take it in the broad sense, that is, as meaning "making a 'career' out of 'creative writing,'" Professionalization exists in a No Man's Land between "creative writing" and the Academy. It exists in this space because it is a chimera (see this essay for more on that topic and its intersection with Marjorie Perloff's recent article in Boston Review). "Creative writing" offers non-professional degrees; sends virtually none of its adherents/alumni into full-time professional work in creative writing; does little to prepare its adherents/alumni for any professional endeavor of any kind; has made intra-institutional advancement of the "professional" sort (e.g., acquisition of tenure) an important piece of economic capital which nevertheless has virtually no cache or cultural capital among the nation's 70,000+ working creative writers; has used its populism to so suffuse the job and literary market with literary art that it is no longer possible for anyone to successfully professionalize. For its part, the Academy pushes back against professionalization by not taking academic-institutional creative writers seriously as scholars or professional colleagues; by administratively choking creative writing programs and creative writing departments; by refusing to theorize or research or otherwise provide cultural capital to writers associated with "creative writing"; by allying with quasi- and non-institutional forces which misuse the term "professionalization" as a catch-all for anything/anyone associated with "creative writing"; by promoting the careers of academic literary critics who likewise misuse the term "professionalization" and misstate the chances of successfully "professionalizing" oneself as a poet in America.

In the small-a "academic" sense, "professionalization" means the creation of a specialized form of discourse to which only some have access (and to which therefore attaches a significant amount of cultural capital). By this standard, the Academy is pro-professionalization and "creative writing" is anti-professionalization. The rise of theory in academe (and thus in the cross-institutional coalition I am here terming "the Academy") was an attempt to "professionalize" literary scholars by giving them a language others could not access; this was, oddly, the same project as the New Critics (albeit achieved via different means; the New Critics abhorred quasi-scientific academic-speak right up to the point at which they'd perfectly replicated what they hated most). This is one reason the New Critics are also in the same No Man's Land of this ongoing discussion/war as "professionalization" is (the easiest way to distinguish the New Critics from "creative writing" is to note that the writers invested in the former wanted to conquer and dominate their literary studies peers, whereas the writers invested in the latter wanted to get as far away from their literary studies peers as possible while still receiving university monies. As for the Academy, its forces felt equal animus toward the New Critics -- who were undermining their cachet by suggesting that working writers held innate authority in the academy -- and "creative writing," which was undermining their authority in an entirely different way, namely by trying to secede from English departments altogether in the way the Iowa Writers' Workshop had successfully done in the 1940s). In embracing theory, both wings of the Academy -- the academic-institutional wing and the non- or quasi-institutional bohemian wing -- desired professionalization; by throwing students into workshops with absolutely no formalized, standardized pedagogical preparation for providing literary criticism to their peers, "creative writing" adopted the basically-anyone-can-do-it model of literary discourse, which could not possibly have been more populist or less "professionalized."

While the use of the term "professional" and "profession" by (for instance) AWP denoted/denotes, instead, a more capitalist orientation -- namely, it is defined roughly as, "Will someone pay me to 'do' creative writing, or something associated with it?" -- as already noted that particular type of professionalization always was, and still is, D.O.A. in America, as Ammons points out (see below) and as data published on this website bears out (e.g., well under 5% of MFA graduates will secure full-time employment in higher education). As well to speak of "professionalization" of this sort with respect to the literary arts as to attempt to describe the taste of a watermelon when you think a "watermelon" is a Rolls Royce.

2. Institutionalization is a weapon used equally by the Academy and "creative writing" but whose meaning has been bastardized in a way conducive to the rhetorical advancement of the Academy. In fact, most institutions in the literary arts have one foot in the Academy and one foot in "creative writing" -- because the most numerous "institutions" in American literary arts are publishing organs which variously advance the literary output of both the Academy and "creative writing." Academic-institutional capital is likewise constantly fought over by the Academy proper (e.g., the non-creative writing sectors of English departments; or, by unaffiliated writers who jockey for readings and conference spots and interview opportunities associated with the academy) and "creative writing" (e.g., by graduate creative writing programs who want the money available from academic-institutional sources but don't want any intellectual or social or administrative discourse with capital-A "Academic" entities).

3. Neutrality is an illusion propagated by those who quite wisely do not wish to be active participants in this longstanding internecine literary arts struggle between the Academy and "creative writing." True neutrality is almost impossible to imagine, however. For instance, a non-academic-institutional independent publishing outfit located outside a major metropolitan area, and staffed entirely by artists who are friends with one another, necessarily must orient itself in some way or another on the questions of: 1) access to the group; 2) internal organization of the group; 3) willingness to associate with Academic or "creative writing" organs; 4) the openness or non-openness of submissions policies; 5) the association of authors with literary theory (and/or the taxonomy of any other aesthetic inheritances evident in their work); 6) the geographic sphere of their operations (e.g., online, coastal, mid-American, rural, urban, national, international); and so on. While many individual poets or groups of poets or "institutions" developed by poets will share certain values and tendencies with both the Academy and "creative writing," it is difficult to imagine any such collation of values which would not generally favor one slate of principles over another -- as the Academy and "creative writing" are opposed in nearly all imaginable respects.

4. Scholarship has primarily been used -- by both sides: academic and quasi-academic scholarship, by the Academy; non-academic, populist essays (and blogging, &c) by "creative writing" -- to obscure the historical and cultural and intellectual record that informs both the Academy and "creative writing." Capital-A "Academic" scholarship on "creative writing" is near-uniformly abysmal -- often disingenuous, almost always historically inaccurate. Prose emanating from the "creative writing" camp which addresses writing favored by/produced under the sign of "the Academy" is typically derisive, hostile, dismissive, and unengaged (that is, it uses ad hominem attacks to discredit such literary art, as it often lacks the intellectual-historical underpinning required to competently and forthrightly engage this kind of output). Mostly, both "creative writing" and the Academy engage in proxy battles -- e.g., the canon-making activity of anthologizing; the soft science of taxonomizing poets and poetries -- to avoid the sort of scholarship that would trace the actual sociology of contemporary poetry communities in both/either camp.

5. Style has been regularly used as a form of subterfuge in the struggle described above; both sides try to outdo one another in establishing their bona fides as "purists" or "bohemians" -- in other words, "real poets" (or simply "real writers"). For instance, the Academy's emphasis on the value of language that "resists assimilation" has been used as a metaphor to attack presumptive "institutional assimilation" (i.e., poets who coordinate with institutions of any kind, be they graduate creative writing programs or long-standing publishing organs like trade presses and award-winning print literary magazines) and even "social assimilation" (i.e., poets associated with "creative writing" are regularly depicted by capital-A Academics as less individualistic, less iconoclastic, less confident, less talented, less innovative, &c). Likewise, the increasing willingness of "creative writing" to engage matters of performativity -- to try to make literary artists into "popular" rock stars at readings and in other fora -- is an indirect swipe at the presumptive nerdiness, social awkwardness, and anti-populist disengagement of poets who read literary theory, write poems "average" folks wouldn't understand, and presumably are "killing poetry" with their self-conscious over-seriousness and smugness.

6. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs occupies a liminal space in the above-described tilt. Long accused of representing writing programs adequately but doing little to promote the interests of individual creative writers -- particularly those writers with minimal cultural capital -- depending upon the issue and the historical moment AWP can be and has been deployed to both the benefit and detriment of "creative writing" adherents, and to the benefit and detriment of the Academy. For instance, it has resolutely opposed increased transparency in the MFA admissions process; however, it has also provided a critical community for those who have successfully navigated that process and come out whole (or reasonably so) the other side. It devoutly patrols the borderlands between itself and an Academic institutional organ like MLA, but it also provides the Academy with its very best opportunities to infiltrate the "creative writing" camp and find new recruits (or simply further blur the boundaries between the Academy and "creative writing," which usually benefits the much smaller and structurally more frail Academy). It implicitly and sometimes explicitly proffers creative writers with the wholly-illusory possibility of successfully professionalizing -- while doing little to combat the rise of adjuncts in academia and publish data on the non-viability of the academic job market -- but it also does much to promote the arts for/among those who have decided to forego any involvement in the small-a academy whatsoever. It's also worth noting that there has been some "mission drift" on the part of AWP over the past 45 years, as is only to be expected of any organization.

With all of the above submitted -- only as a theory, and certainly subject to revision -- it's worth looking at the founders of a few of the earliest graduate creative writing programs, to see if we can see in these men (and in two instances, women) the germination of the "creative writing" attitude toward literature as opposed to the Academic one. Likewise, we can see if the Academy's archetyping of MFA-program founders is at all accurate; if it isn't, the ways in which it isn't will likely also be telling.

But before getting to that, it's worth briefly noting the problems that exist within Academic narratives that attempt to circumscribe the "creative writing" phenomenon -- i.e., it's good to see some of the apparent misinformation out there before we pivot into looking at actual facts.

In his book The Marginalization of Poetry, "Academic" (using the terms of this essay) Bob Perelman describes the basic features of both "creative writing" and the mode of literary operation favored by Charles Bernstein (in the terms of this essay, a fellow "Academic"). Perelman describes "creative writing" as hierarchical, centralized, aesthetics-obsessed, and institutionalized in state apparatuses; he describes Bernstein's conception of literature as "radically democratic," multicultural, nonhierarchical, and an admixture of poetry and poetics (rather than poetry and aesthetics). Because Perelman collapses aesthetics and politics, Bernstein's vision of literature can be seen as "radically democratic" even if, pedagogically and sociologically, it is in most respects (non-pejoratively) "elitist." For instance, access to Language writing communities is almost entirely closed to those without the right education and living in the right place and familiar with the right people, whereas access to college/university and/or community workshops is open to more or less anyone with free time and the necessary will; just so, workshop pedagogy is almost entirely democratic in its structure, whereas Bernsteinian pedagogy (as described in Bernstein's writings) is imaginative and -- it says here -- even superlative, but it is also almost entirely top-down and hierarchical.

Perelman sees graduate creative writing programs as "centralized" because, in Marxist terms, they are one wing of a recognized institutional apparatus (State Education); if we speak in terms of sociology and history and culture rather than literary theory, however, we see that "creative writing" has radically decentralized cultural capital away from urban enclaves on the coasts, that "creative writing" takes place in public spaces where there is general access for all individuals regardless of their economic or cultural capital, and that "creative writing" entities have largely been successful in divorcing themselves -- in pragmatic terms -- from so-called "administrative" spaces they might otherwise inhabit (for instance, if all Creative Writing MFAs had remained English MAs). Indeed, it is Language writing that relies for intellectual and cultural-capital sustenance on the continued support of rigid hierarchies in traditional (non-CW) English departments. (This is why bohemian-Academics often bemoan everything about the academy and then rush off to MLA come January or February.) In fact, the primary dispute of non-academic-institutional (i.e. bohemian-)Academics with "creative writing" is that "creative writing" has successfully torn itself away from the academy; Bernstein and others believe that literary theory ought to be reintroduced back into graduate creative writing programs, that students should be forcibly exposed to those poetries favored by the academy (and the Academy) rather than innately favored by individual students in "creative writing" programs. Note that, pedagogically, Bernstein's position may well be a wise and profitable one; we cannot say, though, that it is a "radically democratic" one, or a "nonhierarchical" one, or an "anti-academic" one. One reason the Academy favors theoretical rather than sociological discussions of poetry communities is that, once divorced from the theoretical, academic-institutional Academic and bohemian-Academic poetry communities can be seen as operating on a raft of privilege directly oppositional to the sort of actual "radical democracy" we can see when we look at, for instance, MFA funding data, rosters of where MFA programs are located, and so on. (From this perspective, we can also understand why those Academics and bohemian-Academics who oppose "creative writing" would prefer not to see or acknowledge MFA data that shows that hundreds and hundreds of aspiring poets and writers do not go into debt for their degrees each year, and that the most popular programs in the 2010s are not generally those located in major urban areas; this would cut against the claims of such Academics and bohemian-Academics that "creative writing" is elitist, privatized, and centralized -- claims which are directly counter-factual.)

Anyway, without further ado, here are brief (and, I emphasize, incomplete) profiles of several of the early-MFA founders (what I'm calling the Fathers and Mothers of the Program Era). Note that the notation "veteran" indicates whether the founder was a wartime soldier; one popular claim of Academics (academic-institutional and bohemian) is that those invested in "creative writing" refuse to participate in the "real world" outside the "academy" [sic]. If I'd fought in a war, I'd been pretty upset by that accusation.

Presented in no particular order (Columbia University is not yet included only because thus far I have been unable to track down any information -- anywhere -- about its founders or its founding):

1. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1964 

Founder: Joseph Langland (poet)
Veteran: Yes
Education: M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (1941)

In 1963, literally on the very eve of the very start of the Program Era, Langland co-authored a book with Paul Engle, the first proper Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book, Poet's Choice, asked 103 of the nation's poets to provide a poem of their own and an exegesis of same. Any New Critics in their graves at the time of the publication of Poet's Choice in 1963 must certainly have rolled over at the news: Asking poets to historicize or otherwise contextualize their own poetry is the greatest possible anathema to the New Criticism, which until recently had been suspected (quite wrongly, the history now shows) of generating the Program Era. If you're thinking that knowing the roster of poets selected for Poet's Choice is of paramount importance in understanding who one Father of the Program Era was himself reading at the time he took that fateful step at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, I'd say you're correct. We might look, too, at the reviews Langland was writing at the time, for indeed he was also a prolific poetry reviewer.

It's important, first, to make no bones about it: Langland himself was what might politely be termed "a nature poet," though his first book, For Harold (1945), was entirely about the death of his brother in wartime. James Dickey, who at the time was almost entirely hostile to any (what we might now term) invention in poetry, had equal scorn for Langland's verse, of which he said in 1957 -- in a sentence many would apply to much of the poetry that has come out of MFA programs -- "attractive, a little moving, and disastrously competent...necessary, perhaps (for some day [he] might be worth knowing), but now conventional, earnest, and somewhat dull." (He added: "Joseph Langland is a charming, slight, well-mannered writer who makes pleasant poems out of birds, rain, greenness, water, flowers, and words....most of them have little passion or urgency.") To some avant-garde/post-avant critics this sort of concession might more or less end the inquiry -- and indeed any scholarship -- into what students matriculating at University of Massachusetts-Amherst could expect when they showed up in the Pioneer Valley in 1964. Many at AWP might agree with them on this, if little else. But a closer look at the history tells a different story: Looking at Langland's published prose we have a sense both of his aesthetic judgment (quite apart from his aesthetic preferences) and also of the much broader and more basic question, "Who was he reading?" The answer, in 1964, at least in part, was Clayton Eshleman and Barbara Guest, seminal figures in the American avant-garde. The longer answer would be, "everything."

Before going further it seems important to caution against anachronism; the incredibly staid poetry world of the late 1950s and early 1960s lacked many of the hindsight-driven insights we have today: Language writing was a glimmer in no one's eye; the Beats had only just come on the scene; the old Objectivists had only just come out of their dormant phase (publishing-wise, not writing-wise, of course); Eliot and Pound had done much to discredit themselves (as individuals, and therefore, things being, unfortunately and wrongly, what they are, to a degree as poets) in the eyes of many; even Plath's Ariel hadn't yet been published at the time Langland founded the Program for Poets & Writers in Amherst. So that Langland reviewed Clayton Eshleman's first book in 1963 -- which had only ever had a private pressing -- alongside Barbara Guest's first three books (collected in a single edition) in the same review published in Poetry, is notable. I'm still waiting on my copy of Poet's Choice to see which 103 poets Langland and Engle selected, but I know a few of the names: Ginsberg and Merwin, for instance.

2. University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, 1965 *

* University of Arkansas-Fayetteville was the first public institution of higher education in the South to integrate. It did so -- without dissent or litigation -- in 1948.

Founder #1: James Whitehead (poet)
Veteran: No
Education: M.A., English (creative thesis), Vanderbilt University (date unknown); M.F.A., English, Iowa Writers' Workshop (1964)

Founder #2: William Neal Harrison (novelist)
Education: M.F.A. (unfinished), English, Iowa Writers' Workshop (1963)

Born in Missouri and raised in Mississippi, descended from a Ozarks-dwelling Arkansan family whose sons all fought for the Union, James Whitehead was in every respect iconoclastic. He was a white Mississippian passionate about racial equality in the 1960s -- he'd met Medgar Evers several times and idolized him -- and a lapsed Protestant in a region where many or even most wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves. He was more than "lapsed," actually: He denied "special revelation," abhorred "Christology," and was near-obsessed with the idea that Jesus' father was not the Judeo-Christian God but Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera, a Roman legionnaire. Whitehead wrote many poems on the topic (in which the protagonist of "the greatest love story never told" is referred to as "the Panther"), traveled to Germany to study the theory, and even got in touch with several European anthropologists to follow up on particulars.

Whitehead's folksy manner -- and poetry -- was in every respect anathema to academia. In Mississippi Writers Talking, a collection of interviews with authors from the state, the following exchange occurs when Whitehead is asked about whether he agrees there was a "1925 to 1955" generation of great Southern writers (emphasis supplied here, and in all other places in this essay where there's bolding):

WHITEHEAD: "That whole business about the academic critic wanting to shut the gate on the generation [of Southern novelists] prior to me, on my generation, and on the young people I'm working with and encouraging, is something I think ought to be rejected out of hand, dismissed....What I'm interested in is art, is literature. We have an Acadian literature that has hardly been translated yet. In the Chicano part of the South--Texas is a Southern state--you have a tremendous literature that has just been born in the last twenty-five years. It is a brand new thing! Where do these people get off saying that these people are not making discoveries? Of course, one of the things they say is that the racial issue in the South has been laid to rest. The racial issue is not solved. The problems endure, and they will endure for a long time.

I'm against pedantry. Most scholars, critics, and writers are against it. Possibly a majority. I was not saying anything bad about going to school and getting an education. That's the last thing I would do. I was talking about a particular brand of academic critic who has a vested interest in a group of writers who lived and produced their work between certain dates." (Mississippi Writers Talking, 153-4).

Whitehead also had a mocking attitude toward his own experience at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he discovered that "the really good poems were not often well-received. They were thought to be too blunt, and they were too rough in meter and texture, and often called obscure" (MWT, 176). Of one particular poem his interviewer asked him about, Whitehead responded (emphasis supplied), "That's a phony poem. That's a literary poem. Boy, did they love that [at the Writers' Workshop]! Whoo, they loved that poem!" (MWT, 176). (Whitehead wrote the short story that would help launch his career in Iowa City in 1964; he notes, in fondly recounting the class roster of the particular workshop in which he wrote that story, run by AWP co-founder R.V. Cassill, that one of his favorite classmates was an African-American female novelist named Diane Oliver. Oliver later died tragically in a motorcycle accident).

But Whitehead was not necessarily hostile to literary theory. As he indicated in his Mississippi Writers Talking interview, "I'm very interested in [neo-Heideggerian] literary criticism. Heidigger is a great influence on me....[I'm a] Heidigger freak" (MWT, 177).

These eclectic perspectives and catholic tastes were not necessarily always reflected in Whitehead's poetry, consistent with the thesis of this particular essay. For instance, poet Miller Williams once wrote, of reading some poems of Whitehead's poem in 1957, "He wrote comfortable poems that anybody could read or understand without looking up the words in the dictionary, and that's not always true today." Poet R.S. Gwynn, reviewing Whitehead's work in The Hudson Review, wrote of Whitehead (in 1994) that "with so many books of this postconfessional era sounding like auditions for daytime talk shows, it has become almost archaic for a critic to praise aesthetic distance, but it is a quality I paradoxically find in this most personal of poets" (Gwynn also called Whitehead's titles "quirky").

One of Whitehead's earliest students was C.D. Wright, who showed up at UA in 1972 or 1973; she was writing narrative poetry at the time. However, nothing in her experience working with Whitehead kept her from becoming the Director of the San Francisco State University Poetry Center in 1979 -- a font for avant-garde literary production/showcasing in poetry -- and becoming one of the nation's chief experimental authors.

William Neal Harrison was a traveler: He traveled through China, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and lived abroad for a notable portion of his life (in London, Spain, and Africa).

3. University of California-Irvine, 1970

Founder #1: Oakley Hall (novelist)
Education: M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (1950)

Founder #2: Donald Heiney/MacDonald Harris (novelist)
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.A., University of Redlands, 1948; M.A., University of Southern California, 1949; Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1952

Heiney, who wrote under the pseudonym "MacDonald Harris," was famously the mentor of Michael Chabon. Later in his life, however -- after his retirement from teaching -- he expressed skepticism about being a creative writer on a college campus: "I've come to the conclusion that the university environment wasn't ideal for me. It didn't allow me enough freedom of imagination. My writing is getting a little crazier--I'm putting in more exclamation points....even though I thought of myself as a free spirit, all those years I was writing with the thought of those thirty English professors looking over my shoulder" (Los Angeles Times, obituary).

Both Hall and Heiney were inextricably intertwined with the UCI English department, because they'd helped found it at the time of the University's creation in 1965.

Heiney in particular was as much (or more) of an academic than a creative writer. In the 1950s he'd been a lecturer at University of Utah in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on Italian literature. The authors his research addressed included Proust, Camus, Giuseppe Berto, Melville, Bellow, and Ionesco. During his tenure in Salt Lake City he spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer at Bologna and Venice, and another year on an American Council of Learned Societies Research Grant in Rome. During this period (the late 1950s and early 1960s) he also published translations of, among others, Rilke and Italo Calvino.

Hall's attitude toward teaching creative writing was typical for the time-period: Of his work at the Squaw Valley Writers' Conference (which he helped found), he wrote, "I didn't really teach them, I just got out of the way."

4. Sarah Lawrence College, 1969

Founder #1: Jane Cooper

Founder #2: Grace Paley (poet)
Education: B.A. (unfinished/expelled), Hunter College (1938-1939); B.A. (unfinished), The New School (1940)

Paley was the child of Jewish socialists exiled from Russia by Czar Nicholas II. She studied creative writing with W.H. Auden at The New School in New York City after being expelled from Hunter College for poor attendance. In 1967, one year after her hiring at Sarah Lawrence College but two years before the College amended its charter to permit a creative writing MFA, she co-founded (with such writers as June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, and Anne Sexton) the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. The TWC sends writers and other artists into schools, including both elementary and high schools.

In 1969, the same year the Sarah Lawrence MFA program was founded, Paley became a significant figure in the United States -- as to her political activism -- when she was asked to accompany a delegation sent to Hanoi to negotiate the release of American POWs.

In 1974, Paley served as a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Moscow. In 1978, she was arrested at the White House as one of the "White House Eleven" (anti-nuclear activists who illegally unfurled a banner promoting their cause on the White House lawn).

In 2007, The Los Angeles Times called Paley "[a] writer[ ] whose haphazard publications indicate the existence of equally important identities." Among the identities cited by the Times were "poet, short story writer, activist, feminist..." While Paley was active in the feminist and anti-nuclear/anti-war movements, she also believed in "deep politics," i.e. the involvement of politics with the aesthetics of authors. She once described her sense of "deep politics" as writing of "the daily life of black, white, brown children in the grown-up world."

It's not clear how convinced Paley was of the need for creative writing classes. Poet Maud Newton recalls her saying once, in 2007, "Look, you’re really a writer. You’re really doing it. You don’t need this class."

5. Bowling Green State University, 1968

Founder #1: Frederick F. Eckman (poet)
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.A., Ohio State University (1948); M.A., Ohio State University (1949); Ph.D., Ohio State University (1954)

Founder #2: Philip F. O'Connor
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.S., University of San Francisco (1954); M.A., San Francisco State University [San Francisco State College] (1961), M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (1963)

The archives at Bowling Green State University strongly imply that the creation of the creative writing MFA at BGSU was hastened -- if not, quite possibly, entirely due to -- mass murderer Charles Stuart Whitman.

Among the sixteen people killed by Whitman on the University of Texas-Austin campus in August of 1966 was Thomas Eckman, a freshman and son of Frederick F. Eckman, one of the two founders of the BGSU MFA program. According to the archives, "Particularly after the death of his son Thomas, Eckman turned his attention to teaching young poets in the BGSU Creative Writing Program." Thomas, himself an aspiring creative writer, was shot and killed while attempting to aid a wounded classmate, Claire Wilson. (Frederick Eckman and his wife Martha would later establish, in memory of their son, the Thomas F. Eckman Memorial Collection in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of Bowling Green State University's Jerome Library; the couple donated a sizable poetry collection and also a substantial fund for the continued growth of the Collection.)

While a graduate student at Ohio State, Frederick Eckman and Richard Wirz Emerson were editors for Cronos, a literary magazine published by the university-affiliated Golden Goose Press; he also wrote scripts for "Voices," a radio program at the University which, according to the University archives, "provided a forum for poetry and criticism of twentieth century American poets." Once hired at Bowling Green, however, Eckman was a "conventional" academic inasmuch as he wrote scholarly essays, published in professional academic journals, and attended and participated in academic conferences. Still he was writing both poetry and prose on the side. He even once said, "I'm a poet who happens to be a teacher" (BGSU archives).

According to the BGSU archives, when the program at BGSU was founded in 1968, "Similar to the program at the University of Iowa, its purpose was to train young writers of poetry and fiction in their craft by intensive small-group work and exposure to writers of national note brought to campus to teach in-residence or through lecture/reading."

O'Connor was a high school English teacher, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle before he found his way to Bowling Green.

6. University of Oregon, 1964

Founder #1: James B. Hall (poet/novelist)
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.A. (unfinished), Miami University of Ohio (1938-39); B.A. (unfinished), University of Hawaii (1939-40); B.A., University of Iowa (1947); M.A., University of Iowa (1948); Ph.D., University of Iowa (1953)

Founder #2: Ralph Salisbury
Veteran: Yes
Education: M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (1951)

Founder #3: John Haislip (poet)
Veteran: Yes
Education: Ph.D., University of Washington (date unknown)

When Hall founded the MFA program at the University of Oregon (sometime between 1961 and 1964, but most likely in 1964), his original plan, according to the UO MFA website, was that "the writing workshop would be complemented with graduate courses in literature and other artistic disciplines." This was the case until Hall went to University of California-Irvine in 1965, at which point Ralph Salisbury and John Haislip took over stewardship of the program, and "the program subsequently began to emphasize more individual attention in conference hours and moved away from complementary classes in other fields" (UO website). Under the directorship of poet Garrett Hongo, the program has further emphasized "workshop hours and writing time" (UO website).

Hall was much more than a creative writer and professor. While at Oregon he co-founded the Northwest Review (in 1957) and the University of Oregon Summer Academy of Contemporary Arts (1959). In 1960 he was an editorial consultant for the trade publisher Doubleday & Company; that same year, he worked as a "cultural specialist" for the U.S. State Department.

Salisbury describes his upbringing on his personal website this way: "Born of a Cherokee story-teller/singer father and a story-telling Irish American mother, [I] grew up hunting and trapping for meat and pelts, and working on a family farm which had no electricity or running water but was reachable by a dirt road. When [I] visited [my] father's mother, the only road was a footpath along a creek." Somehow this in no way whatsoever reminds us of the archetypal New Critic: an elbow-patched, stuffed-shirt academic.

7. University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 1964

Founder: Fred Chappell
Veteran: No
Education: B.A., Duke University; M.A. (18th c. Lit), Duke University

A native Ohioan, Chappell was friends with Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, and James Appelwhite at Duke undergrad. Jointly an academic and a creative writer, he's published over a dozen books of poetry, several collections of short stories, several novels, and two works of scholarly prose.

On teaching, Chappell has said, "I teach writing like everybody else I ever heard of teaches writing: I tell the students to go write, to bring it into class, and then we all sit around and say mean things about it. That's how it works, as far as I know." He's also said, "You can't teach people how to write, because good writing comes from emotion, and you can't teach emotion" (Interviewing Appalachia: The Appalachian Journal Interviews, 1978-1992, 245).

8. Cornell University, 1967

Founder #1: A.R. Ammons
Veteran: Yes

Ammons was hired by Cornell in 1964, and the longstanding MA there -- which did not appear to permit a creative thesis (Toni Morrison completed a critical thesis on the role of suicide in Faulkner when she graduated in 1955) -- was switched to a creative-thesis MFA in 1967, so nominally Ammons must be considered one of the reasons that switch was possible and advisable, even if the "creative" (non-terminal) MA had technically been founded by James McConkey and Batxer Hathaway in 1947.

Ammons was a strange person to form the cornerstone of an MFA program -- in more ways than one. He once said that "trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings" (Paris Review interview). Of government support of the arts he said, in the same interview, "I detest it....the government gouges money from people who may need it for other purposes. Second, the money forced from needy average citizens is then filtered through the sieve of a bureaucracy, which absorbs much of the money into itself and distributes the rest incompetently....[and] I detest the averaging down of expectation and dedication that occurs when thousands of poets are given money in what is really waste and welfare, not art at all. Artists should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write." He was vocal in considering avant-gardist John Ashbery the nation's greatest poet. When asked by his interviewer to react to the claim that the "academic dependence [of poets] is a [un]healthy state of affairs," Ammons agreed unreservedly, and further noted that he struggled to write anything while in-semester ("Most of the things [I've written] have been done between semesters or during the summers").

As to teaching, Ammons stated his philosophy this way: "I omit praising [students] too much if I think that will be the catalyst that causes them to move into a seizure with a poetic way of life. Because I know how difficult that can be, and I tend to agree with Rilke that if it’s possible for you to live some other life, by all means do so. If it seems to me that the person can’t live otherwise than as a writer of poetry, then I encourage them to go ahead and do it. However, the advice splits, depending on how I feel about the person. If I think he’s really a genuine poet, I’d like to encourage him to get out into the so-called real world. If he seems like a poet who’s going to get by through a kind of pressure of having to turn in so many poems per week in order to get a good grade or having to publish a book of poems in order to get promoted, then I encourage him to go to an M.F.A program somewhere and become a so-called professional poet. You get to know people who know how to publish books, you begin to advance your career. I don’t think that has very much to do with real poetry. It sometimes happens that these professional M.F.A. people are also poets, but it rarely happens."

As for McConkey, the poet John Latta notes that, in the early 1980s, he heard McConkey say that MFA candidates, in light of the diminishing job market and the saturation of MFA graduates, should (in Latta's recollection) "be required to gain, too, some expertise in the printing trades, fine letterpress or commercial."

9. University of Montana, 1966

Founder #1: Warren Carrier
Veteran: Yes (American Field Service, Burma, 1944-45)
Education: B.A. (unfinished), Wabash College (date unknown); B.A., Miami University of Ohio (1942); M.A. (Comparative Literature), Harvard University (1948); Ph.D., Occidental College (1962)

Founder #2: Richard Hugo (poet)
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.A., University of Washington (1948); M.A., University of Washington (1952)

Founder #3: Madeline DeFrees (poet)
Veteran: No (nun)
Education: B.A., Marylhurst College; M.A. (Journalism), University of Oregon

Founder #4: Earl Ganz
Education: M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (date unknown); Ph.D., University of Utah (1977)

Founder #5: William Kittredge
Veteran: No
Education: B.A., Oregon State University (1953); M.F.A. Iowa Writers' Workshop (1967)

Founder #6: James Lee Burke
Veteran: No
Education: B.A., University of Louisiana at Lafayette (1958); M.A., University of Missouri (1960)

Founder #7: James Crumley
Veteran: Yes
Education: B.A. (History), Texas College of Art and Industries (1964); M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop (1966)

Carrier was faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1950s and (also) taught modern literary criticism -- i.e. the New Criticism -- while there. In fact, then-Workshop Director Paul Engle used Carrier as a weapon against "the hill" (the Workshop's term for the scholars in the English department not affiliated with the Workshop) inasmuch as Engle successfully evaded a UI edict that all English faculty teach only one graduate section apiece by using Carrier's scholarly bona fides to earn an exemption from that rule for the entire Workshop. This certainly does suggest, of course, that Engle wanted his students schooled in the New Criticism; it also shows, however, that even in 1950 Engle was trying to pull away from the UI English department -- rather than take it over -- in a way quite different indeed from the New Critics' own methodologies and strategies. Likewise, when Engle and Carrier co-edited an anthology of modern poetry, it was "New Critical" inasmuch as it included a critical exegesis of every poem, but also lightly subversive inasmuch as every seventh poem had (instead of or in addition) an exegesis by the poet themselves, a convention a New Critic in good standing might well frown upon. The University of Montana website suggests that Carrier had an M.F.A. from the Writers' Workshop, but the man's own essays suggest otherwise -- he was made faculty in Iowa City without having attended the program. (Likewise, there are places on the Montana website in which the date of foundation of the program in Montana is listed as 1964 -- the year Hugo was hired -- whereas elsewhere it is listed as 1966, the year several of the others listed above were hired.)

Carrier founded the Quarterly Review of Literature at the University of North Carolina in 1943; while he had to give up the reins almost immediately to join the Army, the QRL went on to publish work by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and deconstructionist theorist Paul de Man.

Earl Ganz's most celebrated novel, The Taos Truth Game, is filed under Gay Fiction in most catalogs (Ganz was not himself gay, but the subject of his novel -- a fellow Jewish Montanan and novelist -- who Ganz fictionalized, was).

Kittredge was a rancher up until his early to mid-thirties.

According to his personal website, Burke "over the years...worked as a landman for Sinclair Oil Company, pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on Skid Row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U.S. Job Corps."

10. University of British Columbia-Vancouver, 1965

Founder #1: Earle Birney
Veteran: Yes
Education: University of British Columbia; University of Toronto; University of California-Berkeley; University of London (dates presently unknown)

Birney at various points was a farmhand, a bank clerk, and a park ranger. For at least a decade (the 1930s) he was an active Trotskyite and a leading figure in the Socialist Workers League.


Unanswered Questions

This data raises some interesting questions: Why were so few individuals involved in the spread of "creative writing" from the supposed centers of literary production in their time, New York City and San Francisco? Is "creative writing" associated with the New Criticism largely because both were movements centered in agrarian rather than urban locales? If nearly every early MFA program was founded by a World War II veteran, where does the claim come from that these programs were created by academics or by individuals with little outside-the-academy experience? Do we assume that individuals with lives as varied as the individuals described above intentionally looked, in selecting MFA candidates, for individuals who had lived lives far less interesting than their own? If AWP was founded by fifteen individuals representing thirteen universities in 1967, with the explicit aim of making the MFA the terminal degree in the field (see Footnotes, below), doesn't that mean that many of AWP's founders worked at universities without an MFA -- as in 1967 only eight universities offered the MFA, and only four had ever graduated a class of students? Does anyone realize that a co-founder of the AWP, George Garrett, published the first-ever ranking of MFA programs in 1993, and that another co-founder, R.V. Cassill, militated publicly for the abolishment of the AWP (on the grounds that its mission had been terminally poisoned by the academy) in a speech to the organization in 1982? Why did none of the New Critics found MFA programs, when all were in a position to do so and had the necessary cultural capital to do so? Is it because the idea of graduate-level poets and writers represented a threat to the authority of the New Critics in a way undergraduate creative writers did not/would not? There are many other questions I have, in reading all of the above -- many stemming from the fact that these biographies seem to me to be very far-flung -- but that's all I'll write, question-wise, for now.

Conclusion: Is a Treaty Possible?

Is there a way to put this 125-year-long war to bed? I think there might be. I think it's possible to take the very best ideas from both camps, for instance. "Creative writing" is to be lauded for increasing access to imaginative literary production; for securing tens of millions of dollars in public monies, all devoted to the support of artists; for creating distinct administrative spaces only marginally overseen by those with no actual, abiding devotion to imaginative literary production; for casting aside a destructive, Romanticism-influenced model of "creative genius" which ensures depression, penury, and isolation for the bulk of the American literary arts community; for offering occasional employment to a small number of literary artists, and full-time employment to a miniscule number; for decentralizing literary production in the United States; and for many other things, besides. The Academy is to be lauded for vividly illustrating the limits of aesthetics-only (i.e. entirely "craft"-based) discourse; for introducing the sort of literary theory to poetry (via "poetics") that truly offers hope for innovation in poetry and the enlightenment and creative improvement of individual artists; for attacking the false premise that anyone anywhere can produce Art; for enumerating in detail the limits of the workshop pedagogy; for forcing literary artists to be more reflexive about their influences and their history; for encouraging and fostering and patronizing localized institutional organs that are not academic-institutional (e.g., small presses and independent literary magazines); for attacking the false premise that poets can successfully be (financially) "professionalized" in America; for encouraging young poets and writers to both a) see as much of the world as they can, and b) also not entirely cut ties with the sort of literary study which (as Matthew Arnold told us so many decades ago) is actually an ongoing boon to creative literary production in more ways than can be counted.

The reason a treaty or truce between these two parties has been impossible thus far is because the combatants don't actually understand the first thing about one another -- propaganda and spite has defined the discourse, not facts. For instance, the Academy falsely treats "creative writing" as though its pedagogy is comprised entirely of the workshop; consequently, the Academy sees no way to change MFA curricula except to destroy MFAs altogether. In fact, MFA programs have complex curricula which could easily be overhauled without completely nixing the workshop. It is possible to introduce literary studies, literary theory, and poetics to MFA programs while still permitting students occasional time to freely discourse about literature in a generally non-hierarchical, radically democratic space, as workshops do. Just so, "creative writing" is so suspicious of the Academy that it has failed to require any academic rigor of its programs, any scholarship (even on matters of pedagogy) of its faculties, any standardization of its curricula, any "professionalization" of even the nominal sort (e.g., by introducing elements of/instruction in professional/technical writing, editing/publishing, journalism, &c), any acknowledgment that perhaps the number of MFAs can/should contract to ensure (as Lionel Shriver recently advised) that only those with a realistic prospect of participating actively in the nation's literary community will be admitted to a program (an "elitist" prospect that anathema to "creative writing," but part-and-parcel of the sort of thinking endemic to the academy/Academy). In other words, the Academy is wrong to think "creative writing" must give up any of its hard-won gains to be the sort of enterprise the Academy (in all its wings) could support, and "creative writing" is wrong to have gotten so bloated and lazy (conceptually) that it no longer questions anything it does or is.

There are few spaces in which "creative writing" and the Academy meet. Some of those include: traditional literary studies doctoral programs with "full" internal minors in creative writing (of which there is presently only one in the United States, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison); doctoral programs in "poetics" that are distinct from literary studies programs (of which there are presently only two, one at University of Notre Dame and one at SUNY-Buffalo); MFA programs which are still rigorously "academic" in their orientation, of which there are very, very few remaining (and most are large, urban, and unfunded, and therefore appear to be -- the data suggest -- declining both in number and in popularity among applicants); graduates of MFA programs with both a knowledge of "creative writing" and some nostalgia for their personal experiences but also a temperamental inclination toward the Academy (of which graduates there are precious few, as most everyone has "chosen a side" already and is no longer straddling any fences). But if we could get all these folks together we could probably remake the presence of the literary arts in the academy in a generative way that would take us to the next stage in the development of American poetry. It's time for those dissatisfied with 125 years of fruitless propaganda-laden battles to put down their swords and seek a better way forward for all.
___________________________________________________________

FOONOTES: A partial (ongoing) list of founders of AWP (15 writers, 13 universities):

George Garrett, Hollins University [Hollins College]
Ellen Bryant Voigt, University of Iowa
James Whitehead, University of Arkansas
R.V. Cassill, University of Iowa
John Williams, University of Denver

According to its Charter, AWP was established "for the purpose of (1) Establishing a clearing house to place writers more usefully and profitably in the main stream of literary tradition; (2) Building a new reading and publishing community within the academic community among the academic multitudes; and (3) Supporting and defining the master of fine arts degree as a terminal degree for those whose primary and long-term commitment to letters is a commitment to writing and its related disciplines."