The President of AWP Responds to John Barr Below appears the complete letter that AWP President Sidney Wade sent to the editors of POETRY magazine in response to the essay “American Poetry in the New Century” by John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation. Her letter as it appears in the November 2006 issue of POETRY omitted a few of its original passages. 1 September 2006 The Editors Dear Editors, I’m writing to respond to some peculiar assumptions and declarations made by John Barr in his commentary on “American Poetry in the New Century” in your September issue. Barr’s argument that writing programs have converted all MFA students into zombies of a housebroken and homogenous modernism is entirely laughable. Writers who teach have long worried that modernism has estranged audiences of literature, and many have championed retro-eclecticism, morality, spirituality, and accessibility in the making of poetry. In fact, poetry and the teaching of poetry had become largely anti-modernist by the 1970s. Students in those days, as they still do, studied the examples of Richard Hugo, William Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Sharon Olds, and Mary Oliver alongside or instead of Eliot, Pound, and Stein. Postmodernist disciples of Jorie Graham, Cole Swenson, Lynn Hejinian, and Michael Palmer have only recently become numerous. Our programs contain multitudes, pluralities, strife, and insurgencies. A few of my colleagues believe that a few of the people I just mentioned are the spawn of the devil. Two of my own thesis students, Geoffrey Brock and Noelle Kocot, inhabit the furthest opposing extremes of style and form—Kocot tends to the postmodernist surreal; Brock is a master of genteel and elegant form. A good MFA program will enhance a student’s own aesthetic vision and will encourage the student to build on his or her own individual strengths. We do not stamp out poets by the cookie-cutter method. We could not do so if we tried. Students, especially young writers, excel in rebellion, in a culture that promotes individuality above all. Although, due to his limited experience as a teacher, Barr may find it hard to believe, MFA students can be cruel and competitive. They don’t seek to duplicate their teachers’ work. They plan to surpass us. We have seminar rooms full of literary subversives, outsiders, provocateurs, lunatics, and guerillas. If you bother to examine many literary Web logs, you will find that many of them, even now, are plotting your overthrow and mine. Barr accuses MFA programs of training students “to think of poetry as a career.” This is nonsense, as the broadest survey of our graduate students shows; they attend MFA programs because they love poetry and love to write poetry. They know full well that a “career in poetry” is an oxymoron, that only a small percentage of them will end up teaching in an MFA program, and that they need to investigate rather vigorously other means of supporting themselves. Many study in MFA programs at tremendous personal cost. They know the risk and the unlikelihood of financial remuneration within the field, but they continue to cherish poetry. They study and practice poetry as an art. Public neglect of poetry is not the fault of MFA programs, most of which, by the way, are outposts of public institutions that serve the public in the most basic and necessary forms. Professors, students, and graduates of writing programs teach in prisons, in hospitals, in community centers, in old-folk homes, as well as in universities. They organize local readings at cafés and at bookstores. They appear in all of the Poetry Foundation’s programming, in POETRY, in its public events, in its radio shows, and its podcasts. They are working very hard to build audiences for poetry. The American public, however, is not always so receptive, drugged and bemused by entertainment that seems to blast every minute of every hour out of every public orifice. Has Barr observed the recent rituals of college freshmen installing themselves in their dorms for the first time? Here’s what they are unloading from their parents’ SUVs, minivans, and trucks: iPods, DVD players, stereo speakers, portable computers, stereo speakers, X-Boxes, Playstations, game controllers, and TVs. It’s a wonder some dorm rooms still have room for books. Has he ever shopped in an Abercrombie and Fitch? It’s a miracle of deafening ambient music, as is any retailer pursuing the custom of the younger set. Walmart has just signed a contract to acquire shopping carts with built-in TVs for children. Our public turns either querulous or anxious if not doped by the flow of media. I lived in Turkey for two years, and whenever I told a new acquaintance I was a poet, his or her eyes would open wide in delight and admiration. A similar exchange in America more often than not results in the quick glaze of dismay, bewilderment, or boredom. This cultural difference goes a long way towards explaining why sales of books of poetry are modest in comparison to sales of movie tickets. If Barr is so sanguine about the American public and the quality of its attention, I fear for the success of his foundation’s efforts in audience-building. “An entire art form has fallen into a bad mood,” reports Barr, after reading one book review of morose poets. Aside from the fact that tragedy has always been the legitimate purview of poets (along with love, war, and sex), he appears not to be able to keep tabs on his own magazine. This year’s annual “humor issue” includes the work of several light-hearted poets, approximately half of them either graduates of, or teachers in, MFA programs. He has also apparently never read the work of Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, J.V. Cunningham, Stephen Dobyns, Lynn Emanuel, Russell Edson Angie Estes, Albert Goldbarth, Barbara Hamby, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Bob Hicock, Tony Hoagland, X.J. Kennedy, David Kirby, Thomas Lux, William Matthews, Joan Murray, Jack Myers, Barbara Ras, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Henry Taylor, or Dean Young, all of whom can be charming, funny, absurd, wildly inventive, satirical, or witty in their poems. Perhaps the most offensive of Barr’s several provocations are his claims that contemporary poetry has failed to challenge us politically. He appeals to all poets to leave their classrooms, to follow the hairy-chested model of Hemingway, and to go on safari or go to war in order to refresh the possibilities of poetry. Women poets especially are hooting nationwide in response to this last. During the last fifty years, poets and professors of poetry have fought political battles on a variety of relevant fronts. Many have argued that the old forms and canons of poetry needed either to be demolished or radically expanded in order to make room for new kinds of experience: that of people other than those in the clubs, locker rooms, barracks, and boardrooms of the white, male elite. The aesthetic and political debates continue. The ascendancy of women as scholars, as authors, and as teachers of writing has helped to create a pantheon of poets of unsurpassed variety. The success of one of Barr’s favorite poets, Mary Oliver, would not have been possible without the cultural sea-change engineered by countless women, including the academic professionals whom Barr holds in such low esteem. In an earlier age, Oliver would have been trivialized, if not destroyed as an artist. One may say the same of countless other poets who have illuminated some of the previously best-kept secrets of humanity: the private lives of women, the lives of minorities, the lives of the poor and working classes, the lives of the colonized, and the lives of the oppressed. Academe has helped America to create a literature that more closely resembles its peoples. Universities and writing programs have been custodians and guardians of literary reputations, including many of the writers Barr quotes and admires. Universities have created the greatest system of literary patronage the world has ever seen, and the reading public is the beneficiary. Writing programs have made our arts and letters more interesting, various, beautiful, and humane. That the President of the Poetry Foundation thinks otherwise is sad and worrisome news. Sidney Wade |
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