What's with the ad hominem attacks on MFA programs?

How was there an ad hominem attack? Did they attack you?

I'm trying to decide if this posting is a joke.

If I were trying to parody MFA students I couldn't think of a better strategy than to create a post in which an MFA student complained about an "ad hominem" attack on an abstraction - an MFA program! Is it too much to expect that a student in a master's program involving language knows what "ad hominem" means? Am I the only one who thinks this is at least a little bit funny?

In case your question is serious, here's my take: I think many of us perceive there to be two different worlds of poetry.
1. Poets who try to communicate something - an experience, an emotion, maybe a joke or a conceit, in a manner that can be felt and appreciated by the reader. This is what good poetry, and indeed, good writing, has always been about.

2. Academic poetry, which consists more of intellectual exercises that can be appreciated or grasped only by fellow academics, and is done to prove some kind of abstract point. Some of us think MFA programs foster that sort of writing. If you compare the poetry in Poetry Magazine, Tin House, or the Atlantic or the New Yorker, to publications with names involving "<educational institution> Review" the difference is stark.

Last year I attended a poetry workshop in Paris and one evening we all went out to hear a reading by a noted US (academic) poet. He was reading from his latest book which consisted of one "poem" a day he had written for several hundred days. His previous book was the same thing, written over even MORE hundreds of days. In every poem, as far as I could tell, he was looking out his window scribbling what he saw. There was nothing "poetic" about it at all - a few nouns, the occasional adjective, and no craft. If it was possible to die of yawning there would have been casualties that night!

Later that week we - a group of non-academic poets - read, and listened to others read, at Shakespeare and Company. Here's a picture I took . . .



...note the expression on the listeners' faces. That's NOT an expression you'll often see when people listen to academic poetry.

(BTW - the reader in this shot actually has an MFA, but her poetry didn't suffer from it)

My wife has a master's in music and she's a classical pianist. Mostly she plays late romantic composers but once in a while she plays something modern. I ask her if she finds that music moving, evocative, if it makes her happy, sad, wistful, or anything else. And she usually says, 'no', but sometimes she finds it "interesting". I guess that's how I think of academic writing - it's designed to be 'interesting' - i.e., make some intellectual point - but that's not the side of the brain good poetry is aimed at.

I'm staying away from this one. I might just release the hounds if I stick around too long...

Ultra said:

I guess I'm wondering where the perception that MFA programs are so rotten comes from. Some of them probably are. But some poets with MAs in English are rotten, and some poets who have never studied poetry are rotten. What makes MFAs-- as an institution-- worthy of such loathing? This is an honest question, and is not directed towards any one individual.

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WRT where the perception comes from, honestly, I mainly get it from what I see published. I like to go to bookstores with big literary magazine sections and thumb through them. Full confession: I sometimes just do this to check out potential markets for my own poetry - but I also buy and subscribe to several such journals because I like to read poetry.

In general - and I realize this is a generalization - the academic quarterlies - the ones published by various colleges and universities and often weighted toward their students and faculties, seem to produce the sort of dry, academic, or experimenting-for-the-sake-of-experimenting, weird typographical or grammatical exercises that leave me cold. But the non-academic ones that have to appeal to a broader audience can't get away with that and have to publish works that are more accessible, less abstract, more human, more moving, and more evocative, i.e., poems that people like - or no one will read their magazine.

Seriously - everyone should try this - go to your nearest Barnes and Noble or wherever there's a large literary magazine section and read the poems in a random selection of magazines. Try to identify poems you actually like - the ones you connect with or would want to read aloud to someone else. if this was your poem would you be proud to read this? When I do that the "winners" are seldom in the academic journals.

Ultra,

I think the following article by Joan Houlihan should get you started in understanding the general discontent with MFA programs: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5914

I'll try to give you my personal arguments via PM when I've had time to organize and prepare them.

James R. Hoye (JRH)

You will find similar comments made hereabouts, about many types of degrees, mainly by people who hold them. I think that what you are reading as both fear and contempt (although I am not quite sure how) is actually a just little wry cynicism.

That said, I thank plnelson for his honest and forthcoming critique of MFA programs. I find it telling that he notes that the person in the picture pursured an MFA and emerged unscathed.

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... but I'll bet she would have been a great poet even if she had never studied - she's one of those people who's poetic even in casual conversation.

I can understand why someone who wants to teach might pursue an MFA, but I think this says more about a fetish for getting credentialed in the teaching profession than anything else. My wife has her Master's and was a teacher for 7 years before she got fed up and quit to design software. But the whole teaching profession from k-12 to university level bases their pay, promotion, and advancement scheme far more on degrees than on actual teaching skill.

But it's never been obvious to me how a degree -per se - improves one's poetry (or for that matter, painting, photography, piano playing, or other artistic pusuits). Artistic skill is mainly the result of absolutely relentless practice, coupled with working with masters on specific skill or problem areas. I'm also a painter and my painting style is "classical realism", which requires good draghtsmanship, and you get that through practice. I once had a teacher tell me that every artist has 10,000 bad drawings in him that he has to get out before starting to draw well!

I'm less than halfway there but I can already draw better than many MFA's I know.

So I guess that what I don't get is, what the benefit is of an MFA, that you wouldn't get by living life, reading the best poetry you can find, writing lots of poetry, and taking frequent opportunities to attend workshops or work with masters (lower-case M) to improve your skills?

Ultra said:

Are most of those academic publications run by the MFA programs? I

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You might be right. I'm aligning (or is it "maligning") "academic" and MFA, and maybe that's not fair of me.

Still. I'm curious about the second half of my question - what benefit does an MFA confer? I've been a visual artist longer than I've been a poet, and I've achieved more success at it, and my comments about MFA's in the visual arts would parallel what I've said above about poetry.

JRH said:

Ultra,

I think the following article by Joan Houlihan should get you started in understanding the general discontent with MFA programs: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5914

I'll try to give you my personal arguments via PM when I've had time to organize and prepare them.

James R. Hoye (JRH)

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The above link references Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter". I assume everyone present in this discussion has already read it, but if not, it's a must-read. Here.

The advantages of an MFA can include high quality mentoring, mixing with like-minded people, learning about the history etc of poetry and devoting the majority of your waking time to poetry. All that and a pretty piece of paper.

veinglory said:

The advantages of an MFA can include high quality mentoring, mixing with like-minded people, learning about the history etc of poetry and devoting the majority of your waking time to poetry. All that and a pretty piece of paper.

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The "mixing with like-minded people" is a big part of the problem with all the arts today. All of the arts are hopelessly incestuous. They create works for a tiny cognoscenti of like-minded people who "get it" (or claim to, anyway), while the general public is condescended-to or ignored.

As a visual artist I've sometimes had the fantasy of opening an art gallery and naming it after Emmanuel Asare, the janitor who accidentally threw out a Damien Hirst sculpture, thinking it was just some trash left over after a party at London's Eyestorm Gallery. Amazingly this is not the only time that's happened - something similar happened to an Anish Kapoor sculture last year. The kind of art that wins the Turner Prize and fills our galleries with "installations" is why so many members of the general public think we're all crazy. (that and the fact that we really are!)

I go to poetry readings every chance I get and when I talk to the other people there almost all of them are fellow poets. I'd be very surprised if active poets don't also comprise the bulk of subscribers to all these little literary journals many of us here try to get published in.

The urge to "mix with like-minded people" is understandable, but I think that it leads to insularity and detachment.

8 million penalty points for being so erudite as to use a word like cognoscenti.

Bless you.

plnelson said:

... Emmanuel Asare, the janitor who accidentally threw out a Damien Hirst sculpture, thinking it was just some trash left over after a party at London's Eyestorm Gallery

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That really happened? That's hilarious. I'm going to have to read up on that.

The rest of your post is something that we've talked about in here before and I think it's a valid concern -- poetry hidden behind, even inadvertently, circled wagons.

dclary said:

8 million penalty points for being so erudite as to use a word like cognoscenti.

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Rats! How can I make up for it?

So....everyone seems to be dissing MFA programs. What about Creative Writing undergraduate degrees? That's the only degree that sounds really cool to me!

I briefly discuss that here, http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76992, so if anyone wants to discuss various options for a girl interested in being a writer or going into publishing, please click away!

Perks said:

That really happened? That's hilarious. I'm going to have to read up on that.

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Here

and

Here


It's happened several times. I mentioned the Anish Kapoor instance. Here's that story.

Provrb1810meggy said:

So....everyone seems to be dissing MFA programs.

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"Dissing" is too strong a word. I have a number of friends with MFA's, in various things. There are any number of reasons to want one. You might want to develop deep expertise is something arcane like 19th century French Literature, or maybe you need the Master's to as a credential to teach, but my basic points are:

1. It does not necessarily make you a better artist

2. It comes with the danger of insularity - plague that afflicts ALL of the fine arts today.

My social circle has more classical musicians than anything else. There exist living composers today who mainly write symphonies, concertos and chamber works. What percentage of the population do you imagine can name one?

It wasn't meant in a Oh, you're so mean for dissing them! way. I just meant that overall there seems to be unfavorable opinions. I should've used a different word.

Dude

That is so not an ad hominem attack.

It's nothing even vaguely approaching an ad hominem, or an attack.

That there was what we call an opinion.

Ultra said:

I guess I'm wondering where the perception that MFA programs are so rotten comes from. Some of them probably are. But some poets with MAs in English are rotten, and some poets who have never studied poetry are rotten. What makes MFAs-- as an institution-- worthy of such loathing? This is an honest question, and is not directed towards any one individual.\

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In my case, I think it depends on the program, and the reason one wants an MFA.

First, very very few MFAs teach one to write genre fiction. So for many people, they are a waste of time. Secondly, the track record of MFAs in terms of publishing non-academic fiction and poetry is sorta poor. Thirdly, they're really not much in the way of a teaching credential.

I have a friend with a doctorate in library science.

Yeah, he's a massive nerd.

He also just got promoted to Assistant Dean at the University of Washington.

So there!