I am inspired by this post to make my own modest proposal, but I am personally not in favor of "bulldozing." I much prefer a wrecking ball, to be applied to political science departments far and wide, starting with Harvard (where I would welcome a bulldozer as well). Our minds have been lobotomized by the Orwellian lie that John ("Mr. Slavepower") Locke was the inspiration for the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. In graduate school I discovered smoking-gun proof otherwise: The 1776 congressional definition of "happiness" is the opposite of Locke. My paradigm-shattering research has been suppressed, to protect the delicate egos of ageing ivory-tower dinosaurs afflicted with Academic Superiority Syndrome (note the handy acronym) while our culture gets lobotomized: Happiness is actually the byproduct of being habitually good to others.
And yet the desire to comment betrays something less than impassivity or boredom. This IS the "morbid interregnum" of culture we are sitting in. You can "yawn" all you like, but I can hear you screaming.
I support you raging against indifference. It's considered "bad form" for writers to hit back against TL;DR and vocal DNF-ers. (To be clear, no one is owed readership and people have every right to DNF, but people who are proud of it suck balls.) I, for one, am glad to see someone doing it. But this is not to say it is wise. If you want to be well-liked, take the opposite of my advice at every turn.
I got a free ride to an MFA program that included a teaching stipend, and I wanted an excuse to quit my job...so I took it.
I'm between semesters now. If my mood about the novel & publishing world were dim before, I'm pretty much in despair now—especially after an instructor brought a literary agent to speak with the class. The literary fiction market exists solely for the urban book club & brunch & "I heard on NPR..." crowd now. That's who's encouraged to write. That's who decides what gets published. That's who's reading. Everyone else has been pushed out.
The program I'm in recently changed directors. The outgoing head was an older Gen X author who was pretty much completely checked out and ready to leave during the final semester, but showed glimmers of enthusiasm while reminiscing about his acquaintance with David Foster Wallace and other writers in that milieu. A friend of mine put it brilliantly: the man's entire civilization has been destroyed. The literary edifice of his generation was bulldozed during the Cluster B Cultural Revolution and replaced by a relentlessly unchallenging and agreeable hugbox—and the extinction spiral of fiction's cultural capital effectively prevents any eventual reverse swing of the pendulum. The MFA industrial complex is permanently locked in.
The Empire has fallen. The Odovacer of YA and monster smut rules the land now. Even "uplifting voices" lit is dying now that the Democrats blame arabs, black men, and latinos for Trump. Every literary agent I've spoken to casually says the most "literary" product they're looking for is "upmarket fiction," which is just airport paperbacks masquerading as capital-L Literature. We are citizens of the ruins.
wow - made me think back to my experience at the BA level trying to squeeze my way into the graces of the poetry clique and probably harming myself in the process
I call it Iowacore. Sure, some is good - I think Marilyn Robinson is amazing for example, and she's Iowa through-and-through, but most of it gets remaindered and forgotten.
the parallel between the emergence of realism & impressionism as a reaction against academicism highlights a conflict at the heart of the matter: it is a surer road to success to learn the rules before you try to break them. many of those painters came up through the academy, learned technique, and innovated because they were in touch with emergent modern culture. i think this also accounts for why minimalism is popular with young writers and in academic settings---fewer aesthetic variables lets you concentrate on whatever effect you're trying to concoct.
I dunno. People who manage to recoup some amount of their inner child or whatever on the heels of finishing an MFA don't go around rocking “I Survived MFA” tshirts, you just (eventually) go out and do your thing. It takes years to quell the anger and self-loathing and self-pity and careerism to manageable levels; I'm not tryna broadcast that I hung out at the gift shop afterwards.
An excellent blogger about the Freelance life (I forget who at the moment) did an experiment where she asked MFA programs how many professional writers they had created. Typically the answer was none, or unknown. When she asked one about this, they replied that MFA programs were not for creating professional writers, but for creating writing professors. In other words, the program exists solely to propagate itself. I found this incredibly helpful. Not that everyone in or out of the program fits this mold, but that the real purpose is made clear, and the outliers also made clear.
Holy based. I went to Concordia for the same fucking program and I agree with everything here. I fucking hate minimalist workshop core shit man, I fucking hate it with every fibre of my being.
Interesting piece, thanks. It brings to mind the words of Martin Amis: 'The foundation of good writing is the ability to craft a strong English sentence. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness and avoidance of ornamentation, but I often find it lacks a deeper rhythm. I suspect many writers are terse not by choice but because it’s the only way they can write.
The writers I admire—those I trust—build their prose on the English sentence, which serves as a poetic meter, a basic rhythm from which they can deviate in unexpected ways. To be blunt, it’s like trusting an abstract painter only if I know they can draw hands.
Under the prose of writers like Nabokov, Burgess, or my father’s early work, the English sentence is a living rhythm. Modern writing, by contrast, often feels like a “vow-of-poverty prose,” a depressed use of language. I prefer the richness of a king in his countinghouse—give me Updike'.
I am surprised to read about "show, don't tell," in this respect- what drove me to start writing for publication in 2025, after 35 years since publishing poetry in college, was precisely that I had started reading new/recent material in 2024 and saw mostly telling - diary entries, aphorisms, Hallmark Cards..... IG posts.... sometimes cleverly written, like Elvis Costello lyrics, and sometimes translated into poetry words (vocabulary words or poetry sounding words or strings of words with thick consonant sounds surrounding the same vowel) - words that served as ornaments, not carriers of meaning. There was no density of content, no metaphor, and the language wasn't the language the narrative characters would use in the situation in which they'd been placed, and the narrator was always the poet himself or herself. I thought I had woken up on "Opposite Day," and I saw that nobody had gone in the direction I had taken at Holy Cross: tackle the big ideas, through a piece that hit the brain and the heart alike, through narratives that were rarely narrated by me, that were a combination of character study and story, that showed, not just by way of metaphor but by engineering the physical structure of the poem to convey the content - so that the body of the poem was designed with the same DNA as the content. This did not necessarily mean "concrete" poetry, and the secret to the engineering and the metaphors and symbols was that they weren't forced. This style fit my main philosophical thrust as I explore Bergsonian ideas and the Native American / Udege concept of a natural order in which the Creator lives in all things.
I also noticed that the content of most contemporary poetry was the poet's personal baggage and that many poets and writers had gone straight from a BA in writing to an MFA in writing. I didn't realize at first that an MFA was not a Renaissance Man / Woman program with an emphasis on writing or painting etc.... I didn't realize that my main problem with today's education - that it left graduates without what most educated people would call general cultural knowledge in my generation, especially at a Catholic college - wasn't directly addressed by MFA programs.
I started to write for publication. Then I took some workshops, first with a famous "New Sincerity" poet - which I found interesting but limiting, like.... Kate Bush or Siouxsie. It helped me understand how new poets come up - before most of them have things to write about and through a vetting process based on audiences having minimal time to consume the poem, muchess digest it, which I concluded was a factor in the lack of substance to digest in most modern poetry.
But while I have since written a few "drama" poems (kinetic, though not in the same vein as my workshop leader, and always with more to it than "pure, raw emotion"), I have mainly kept going in the direction I had taken up in college, and sourcing my ideas in nature documentaries, history, visual art, philosophy, and lately, essays conveying feminist critique of classical visual art. And I have had success in the submissions game. It's been a year and I have been published or accepted by many journals including a half dozen that are produced in MFA programs or state poetry societies. Perhaps they see a curiosity and like the vibe and don't fully grasp the concept. I don't know. But it's working. It's there to be read by an audience and some will "get it" and I don't think I have tricked anyone into accepting it. It might be the case that they see one form and don't know that I write in many forms, but I do list my updated publication history with each submission (on the other hand, if they don't actually read blind, then the pub history begets more acceptances - I don't know, as I am not in the room).
I think there might have been a battle but that it was already won? Unsure. At any rate, my two fears are that post-learning / post-knowledge is real and even the remote possibility of my sounding like other writers. I didn't eschew an MFA for the latter reason, however- I couldn't afford to pursue more education that wasn't "practical" - though, the practical, when juxtaposed with other material, makes for good content.
I am inspired by this post to make my own modest proposal, but I am personally not in favor of "bulldozing." I much prefer a wrecking ball, to be applied to political science departments far and wide, starting with Harvard (where I would welcome a bulldozer as well). Our minds have been lobotomized by the Orwellian lie that John ("Mr. Slavepower") Locke was the inspiration for the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. In graduate school I discovered smoking-gun proof otherwise: The 1776 congressional definition of "happiness" is the opposite of Locke. My paradigm-shattering research has been suppressed, to protect the delicate egos of ageing ivory-tower dinosaurs afflicted with Academic Superiority Syndrome (note the handy acronym) while our culture gets lobotomized: Happiness is actually the byproduct of being habitually good to others.
https://youtu.be/vWbFFUlCnlc?si=JTbLDwg05rsaLrCb
Thanks for the kind words
Great piece!
*yawn*
And yet the desire to comment betrays something less than impassivity or boredom. This IS the "morbid interregnum" of culture we are sitting in. You can "yawn" all you like, but I can hear you screaming.
You can hear your own hysteria
It's called MANIA you OAF
I support you raging against indifference. It's considered "bad form" for writers to hit back against TL;DR and vocal DNF-ers. (To be clear, no one is owed readership and people have every right to DNF, but people who are proud of it suck balls.) I, for one, am glad to see someone doing it. But this is not to say it is wise. If you want to be well-liked, take the opposite of my advice at every turn.
I got a free ride to an MFA program that included a teaching stipend, and I wanted an excuse to quit my job...so I took it.
I'm between semesters now. If my mood about the novel & publishing world were dim before, I'm pretty much in despair now—especially after an instructor brought a literary agent to speak with the class. The literary fiction market exists solely for the urban book club & brunch & "I heard on NPR..." crowd now. That's who's encouraged to write. That's who decides what gets published. That's who's reading. Everyone else has been pushed out.
The program I'm in recently changed directors. The outgoing head was an older Gen X author who was pretty much completely checked out and ready to leave during the final semester, but showed glimmers of enthusiasm while reminiscing about his acquaintance with David Foster Wallace and other writers in that milieu. A friend of mine put it brilliantly: the man's entire civilization has been destroyed. The literary edifice of his generation was bulldozed during the Cluster B Cultural Revolution and replaced by a relentlessly unchallenging and agreeable hugbox—and the extinction spiral of fiction's cultural capital effectively prevents any eventual reverse swing of the pendulum. The MFA industrial complex is permanently locked in.
The Empire has fallen. The Odovacer of YA and monster smut rules the land now. Even "uplifting voices" lit is dying now that the Democrats blame arabs, black men, and latinos for Trump. Every literary agent I've spoken to casually says the most "literary" product they're looking for is "upmarket fiction," which is just airport paperbacks masquerading as capital-L Literature. We are citizens of the ruins.
Well-put
wow - made me think back to my experience at the BA level trying to squeeze my way into the graces of the poetry clique and probably harming myself in the process
I call it Iowacore. Sure, some is good - I think Marilyn Robinson is amazing for example, and she's Iowa through-and-through, but most of it gets remaindered and forgotten.
the parallel between the emergence of realism & impressionism as a reaction against academicism highlights a conflict at the heart of the matter: it is a surer road to success to learn the rules before you try to break them. many of those painters came up through the academy, learned technique, and innovated because they were in touch with emergent modern culture. i think this also accounts for why minimalism is popular with young writers and in academic settings---fewer aesthetic variables lets you concentrate on whatever effect you're trying to concoct.
I dunno. People who manage to recoup some amount of their inner child or whatever on the heels of finishing an MFA don't go around rocking “I Survived MFA” tshirts, you just (eventually) go out and do your thing. It takes years to quell the anger and self-loathing and self-pity and careerism to manageable levels; I'm not tryna broadcast that I hung out at the gift shop afterwards.
An excellent blogger about the Freelance life (I forget who at the moment) did an experiment where she asked MFA programs how many professional writers they had created. Typically the answer was none, or unknown. When she asked one about this, they replied that MFA programs were not for creating professional writers, but for creating writing professors. In other words, the program exists solely to propagate itself. I found this incredibly helpful. Not that everyone in or out of the program fits this mold, but that the real purpose is made clear, and the outliers also made clear.
Holy based. I went to Concordia for the same fucking program and I agree with everything here. I fucking hate minimalist workshop core shit man, I fucking hate it with every fibre of my being.
Interesting piece, thanks. It brings to mind the words of Martin Amis: 'The foundation of good writing is the ability to craft a strong English sentence. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness and avoidance of ornamentation, but I often find it lacks a deeper rhythm. I suspect many writers are terse not by choice but because it’s the only way they can write.
The writers I admire—those I trust—build their prose on the English sentence, which serves as a poetic meter, a basic rhythm from which they can deviate in unexpected ways. To be blunt, it’s like trusting an abstract painter only if I know they can draw hands.
Under the prose of writers like Nabokov, Burgess, or my father’s early work, the English sentence is a living rhythm. Modern writing, by contrast, often feels like a “vow-of-poverty prose,” a depressed use of language. I prefer the richness of a king in his countinghouse—give me Updike'.
Hehe money printer go vzzzzzzzzz
I am surprised to read about "show, don't tell," in this respect- what drove me to start writing for publication in 2025, after 35 years since publishing poetry in college, was precisely that I had started reading new/recent material in 2024 and saw mostly telling - diary entries, aphorisms, Hallmark Cards..... IG posts.... sometimes cleverly written, like Elvis Costello lyrics, and sometimes translated into poetry words (vocabulary words or poetry sounding words or strings of words with thick consonant sounds surrounding the same vowel) - words that served as ornaments, not carriers of meaning. There was no density of content, no metaphor, and the language wasn't the language the narrative characters would use in the situation in which they'd been placed, and the narrator was always the poet himself or herself. I thought I had woken up on "Opposite Day," and I saw that nobody had gone in the direction I had taken at Holy Cross: tackle the big ideas, through a piece that hit the brain and the heart alike, through narratives that were rarely narrated by me, that were a combination of character study and story, that showed, not just by way of metaphor but by engineering the physical structure of the poem to convey the content - so that the body of the poem was designed with the same DNA as the content. This did not necessarily mean "concrete" poetry, and the secret to the engineering and the metaphors and symbols was that they weren't forced. This style fit my main philosophical thrust as I explore Bergsonian ideas and the Native American / Udege concept of a natural order in which the Creator lives in all things.
I also noticed that the content of most contemporary poetry was the poet's personal baggage and that many poets and writers had gone straight from a BA in writing to an MFA in writing. I didn't realize at first that an MFA was not a Renaissance Man / Woman program with an emphasis on writing or painting etc.... I didn't realize that my main problem with today's education - that it left graduates without what most educated people would call general cultural knowledge in my generation, especially at a Catholic college - wasn't directly addressed by MFA programs.
I started to write for publication. Then I took some workshops, first with a famous "New Sincerity" poet - which I found interesting but limiting, like.... Kate Bush or Siouxsie. It helped me understand how new poets come up - before most of them have things to write about and through a vetting process based on audiences having minimal time to consume the poem, muchess digest it, which I concluded was a factor in the lack of substance to digest in most modern poetry.
But while I have since written a few "drama" poems (kinetic, though not in the same vein as my workshop leader, and always with more to it than "pure, raw emotion"), I have mainly kept going in the direction I had taken up in college, and sourcing my ideas in nature documentaries, history, visual art, philosophy, and lately, essays conveying feminist critique of classical visual art. And I have had success in the submissions game. It's been a year and I have been published or accepted by many journals including a half dozen that are produced in MFA programs or state poetry societies. Perhaps they see a curiosity and like the vibe and don't fully grasp the concept. I don't know. But it's working. It's there to be read by an audience and some will "get it" and I don't think I have tricked anyone into accepting it. It might be the case that they see one form and don't know that I write in many forms, but I do list my updated publication history with each submission (on the other hand, if they don't actually read blind, then the pub history begets more acceptances - I don't know, as I am not in the room).
I think there might have been a battle but that it was already won? Unsure. At any rate, my two fears are that post-learning / post-knowledge is real and even the remote possibility of my sounding like other writers. I didn't eschew an MFA for the latter reason, however- I couldn't afford to pursue more education that wasn't "practical" - though, the practical, when juxtaposed with other material, makes for good content.