Dana Gioia, MFA Programs, and Why I Decided to Start Cavalier
Quotes from “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, 1991:
“AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.”
“What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines.”
“But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward.”
“Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success--the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university--have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.”
“The established rituals of the poetry world--the readings, small magazines, workshops, and conferences--exhibit a surprising number of self-imposed limitations. Why, for example, does poetry mix so seldom with music, dance, or theater?”
“The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience.”
“It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the dessicated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.”
I learned early on that I must (if this is going to be a long-term endeavor) care about something as much or more than I care about creative writing—whether it’s a human relationship, a cause, another career. Too many delusions of self-importance or artistic grandeur—self-mythologizing—is counter-productive to the task, which, for me, is to inhabit the minds and bodies of different characters and convey their struggles in vivid, exact terms. As John Gardner once said, a writer shouldn’t suffer from writer’s block any more than a sand-castle-builder suffers from sand-castle-building-block. Why the anxiety? What’s the big deal? Unlike some people who criticize MFA programs for producing same-old, same-old “workshop” stories, I found that it generated a productive state of mind for me. I’m not a rebel, and I’m not anti-establishment in this sense; yes, of course there are downsides to any structured environment and of course there are many great artists who dropped out of school, but I appreciate it for what it is: an imperfect space to read some books, talk about them, work on one's craft, and share it with others who presumably care. It was also a kingdom in itself, a bit like being "at court" (think The Other Boleyn Girl, The Tudors) with the usual mix of ambition, jealousy, rivalry, incest, and intrigue. At arm's length and through a certain lens, a bubbling little laboratory of emotion.
Maybe it was just the simple desire to impress that kicked in and made the endeavor worth it. This is what I told some students at a panel for emerging writers: I think the best mentality for writing is to pretend there’s someone in workshop you have a huge crush on; you want to make him/her fall in love with you. In other words, just a little positive pressure. You want every line to be the best thing he/she has ever read, you’re not thinking of prizes or publications; you just want to be memorable in a humble, person-to-person sense. I like the naturalness of this mindset.
One thing that did bother me about studying creative writing in a formal, academic setting is the way it kind of encouraged me to be depressed, neurotic, suspicious, anti-social, cynical, arbitrary, unmeritocratic, ambivalent, and willfully subjective. All of a sudden, it was bizarre to be social, outgoing, cheerful, balanced, energetic, ambitious, and optimistic--to desire love, success, and community like other people who don't have the luxury of spending 2 years getting paid to obsess over comma placement. Why shouldn’t an MFA program function more like a sports team or a business—like other organizations designed to achieve a goal? (I know the answer, because we can’t decide on a goal, or something like that; seemingly innocuous concepts like "teamwork," "unity," and "agreement" are questionable) But what is the price of this endless self-justification, this childish insistence on intellectualizing weakness and romanticizing neuroses? No wonder MFA programs are known for producing clinically depressed fiction of minor epiphanies. Things are far from perfect out there. There aren’t many opportunities for literary writers—not really, when 3/1500 is the acceptance rate, everything is winner-take-all (in the harshest sense) and most of the educated world doesn’t know what a literary magazine is. There simply isn’t enough money flowing through our stale system. I’m not one of those people who thinks there are too many writers and too many wannabes who need to be cut down harshly—in my dreamland, a career in literary fiction would be entirely feasible with a little work. Just like pursuing law or becoming a real estate agent. Would it really hurt writers to be a bit more entrepreneurial and take responsibility for the survival of their art? To begin with, writers should at least buy books and subscribe to literary magazines and consider volunteering at local high schools to increase adolescent interest in literary fiction and drive up the demand for their art. Here in New York, my friends drop $200 on drinks in a single night and buy bottle service for $480 a night at nightclubs. And yet, it’s tough to sell a $15 book of poetry to the same crowd. I refuse to believe poetry is as inherently undesirable and unpalatable as this comparison would make it seem. Perhaps those people selling bottle service are just better at selling their product? More creative? Not that it should even require this sort of effort--but people out there have evidently found a way to make cigarettes and tobacco "glamorous" and popular... If only we had the same forces behind literary art.
Maybe the problem is that reading is considered "good" for you. Maybe if it weren't so good, people would want more of it.
On the first day of a workshop last year, a professor of mine casually asked the class if we could conceive of coincidence as being an aesthetic strength rather than a weakness in the construction of a story. (We're usually taught that every move must be incremental and inevitable.)
In undergrad, I learned all the traditional, John-Gardner-rules of good fiction. Grad school was about breaking them.
This is where CAVALIER comes in. After awhile I started to ask myself: What’s wrong with happiness and optimism? What’s wrong with perfection? And striving? And unabashed ambition? And teamwork? All the qualities of robustness that are generally admired among non-literary, real people? I think the literary world needs to stop being clinically depressed and insular. I don’t think certain trade-offs and sacrifices are necessary. Why can’t something be fun, playful, serious, sexy, lucrative, artistic, elite, democratic, surreal, real, extraordinary, down-to-earth, communal, social, dangerous, safe, experimental, established, sensual, cerebral, wise, and youthful all at once? Paradise is here, now, or never. Let's call CAVALIER an experiment in optimism.
