Writing Problems: Things They Don't Teach you in MFA Programs

This post is republished from May 21, 2022.

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1. Turf wars are a waste of time.

There is no turf. The literary internecine battles waste energy because poetry’s umbrella is broad enough to include everything. When I was in college from 1993-1997, there was still serious conversation about the status and placement of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Something similar exists now between the so-called Insta poets and the more traditional training in the academy. Yawn. Who cares? The proof is on the page, and poetry is not a competition. Everything that happens to you is material for poetry.

2. Writing good and teaching good are not the same thing.

Getting past followership can be a tough lesson if people go to MFA programs imagining what it’s like to work with a writer they admire. Donald Justice, who was young once even though he seemed like a relic from another era, put it this way:

Teaching requires a generosity of spirit and patience, and writing well often demands an obsessional quality that can verge into solipsism. The question, “Who did you study with?” is often asked as if the answer will somehow reveal a transformation from A to B. Most of this transformation doesn’t happen in a classroom, because either you are driven to write or you’re not.

“Feeling no pain”

This is a photo taken by Weegee [Arthur Fellig] in 1945 or 1946. Donald Justice is second from left. They’re at an after-hours jazz jam session in trumpeter Frankie Newton’s basement apartment. The original caption was “Feeling no pain.” Justice’s effortless sense of form, his precise vision, and ability to say things “once for all and perfectly” came from inside him.

3. There are no rewards in poetry.

Sometimes poetry is seen as a zero-sum game where there are a few nuggets of cake at the top for the chosen few, and perhaps some crumbs for everyone else. Particularly in the United States, where there is almost no state-funded support for it, poetry is not rewarded by anything other than itself.

4. An MFA is not a meaningful degree.

Writing workshops represent some of the worst aspects of the 21st century: the problems, for example, of elevating the individual over collective organization; of confusing the writer’s authority as ego with the poem’s authority as something larger than the writer themselves. In other words, selectively fetishizing what we loved about the 20th century, but ignoring the lessons of its history. 

They were developed by the CIA as a cultural weapon in the Cold War. Ever since, they’ve had a toxic effect on writers. People love writing workshops because they provide a built-in or captive readership: a “safe” place where they can be praised or critiqued with minimal consequences. Writing workshops help assuage the loneliness of writing. They provide a set of containers—organizing time, and organizing principles—by which we can do the task of writing. 

An MFA degree does not confer morality onto a person with an MFA. It’s just a sticker that says: “I did an MFA.” Like researching spiders on the internet, you don’t know if the person on the other end of the research has a doctorate studying arachnids, or if they never got past Little Miss Muffet. A person with an MFA is like anyone else: they either know something about poetry, or they don’t.

5. “I want to teach, and therefore need an MFA degree.”

Sit and meditate on whether this is something you actually want to do with your life. Increasingly, graduate instruction in creative writing involves assuaging egos, managing psychological breakdowns and crises, adhering to a narrow set of aesthetic tastes, and propping-up a fiction that higher ed will save us.

Only and until higher ed is supported by the very wealthy, and benefits the very poor and medium poor, it cannot save us. The current system only serves to perpetuate itself, which is to say power begets power. The fact that beautiful books have come out of people working in higher ed is despite its structure, not because of it.

Jack Gilbert, who never had a 401K, health insurance, or worked more than six months at a job in his whole life, put it this way:

6. Most of the writers you admire did not go to graduate school.

Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, David Markson, Norman Manea, Lorine Niedecker, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Jerzy Kosinski, Janet Frame, Marcel Proust, Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Czesław Miłosz, and Zbigniew Herbert did not have MFA degrees.

The challenge for all of them, for me, and for all poets is the same: fill a blank page with something. Camilo José Cela put it this way:

7. Going into debt for a graduate degree is a bad idea.

If we lived in a free society, education would be free. Unsurprisingly, colleges and universities are mainly concerned with the portfolios of the endowment rather than the research or creativity of the faculty.

This Twitter thread lists the amount of debt people have taken on to get an MFA. Essentially this is a Mephistophelean situation where you are paying to be part of a community. Are you ready to pay to be part of a community?

This article in Slate explains why Master’s programs are a scam. Master’s programs, unlike BA programs which all last four years, are not required to publish their acceptance statistics. Federal policy says that there are no limits on how much people can borrow for graduate school. Without regulation, rules, or ethics, people will continue to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for educations that will almost never lead to earnings from those degrees.

8. There is good news about MFA programs.

Once you’ve made peace with all the above criticisms, it’s true that an MFA program gives you time—two years—where you can focus on your writing, where you have a captive group of empathetic readers to support you, and where you can feel there is a community of writers who are interested in the same things you are.

An MFA program is really a testing ground where you can use your isopod feelers as bioindicators for heavy metals in the soil: you discover the voice that is your own voice. You become the person who can write the poems. You learn discrimination—what to leave out as much as what to put in. You touch the environment, cultivate awareness of your bodily experience, you read as much as possible to know into ways your own stream feeds the Lake of Literature.

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For further reading:

Sarah Fay, “Interview with Jack Gilbert,” The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 91, Issue 175, Fall / Winter 2005.

Logan, William, ed. Certain Solitudes, on the Poetry of Donald Justice. Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1997, p. 184. [Buy at Bookshop]

Valerie Miles, “Interview with Camilo José Cela,” The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 145, Issue 139, Summer 1996.

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