Seth Abramson: A Brief History of the MFA, As Told By the Avant ...

{NB: Charles Bernstein has been and is incredibly gracious re: this ongoing dialogue and debate; my ire is largely reserved for non-poet scholars whose research specializes in theorizations of the avant-garde, which research whitewashes institutionalization altogether or else kicks its down the road for someone else to deal with. While I don't necessarily agree with Bernstein's conclusions, and in some instances challenge his facts, I see his commitment to this issue as being significantly greater -- likely because he is a writer himself, and so a member of the literary arts community in America -- than is the case with most in the academy. The tone of the rant below owes mostly to my feeling that some people out there need to be shaken a bit and woken up and reminded of what makes for lasting, responsible, pragmatic scholarship.}

"Imperceptibly, the norms [in contemporary poetry] have become those of the teleculture that 'poetry' supposedly scorns. At the same time, the radical poetries of the past few decades, whatever their particular differences, have come to reconceive the 'opening of the field,' not as an entrance into authenticity, but on the contrary, as a turn toward artifice, toward poetry as making of praxis rather than poetry as impassioned speech, as self-expression....[this latter view] may prompt withdrawal into a world of one's own, where 'natural' speech and authentic feeling still reign supreme. But once it is recognized that the 'Romantic formula 'irreducible human values'" is itself 'fabricated,' withdrawal tends to give way to the urge to come to terms with the 'unabsorbability' ?of other discourses." -- Marjorie Perloff, "The Changing Face of Common Intercourse" (emphasis in original; Perloff is quoting liberally from an essay by Ch. Bernstein)

For Perloff, this is a typically astute assessment of avant-garde first principles -- the understanding of which she has built an entire scholarly career upon -- and a typically slapdash, hamfisted articulation of everyone else's first principles, as these have formed no element of her scholarly research (or, seemingly, personal interest) whatsoever. If anyone in America has spent absolutely no time assessing the nature of institutionalization's influence on American poetics, it's Perloff, who does not appear to have had the stomach to a) do any research into the literary history of institutionalization, or b) spent much time at all with the poetry or prose or pedagogical essays of those poets and educators who have been and are critical to that 132-year process. Whenever Perloff needs straw men for her exegeses of the literary avant-garde -- the better to underscore (in an act of purest rhetoric) the abiding vitality of her own scholarship -- she speaks darkly of "self-expression" and the "'direct speech, direct feeling' model dominant in the sixties and early seventies." If that time period (and that particular string of avant-garde coding) is starting to sound familiar to those who've been reading my recent essays in this space, it's because "self-expressive" is the old-new and new-old terminology for any poems ever written (or not yet written) by an MFA graduate, and the "sixties and early seventies" is the completely arbitrary time-frame within which the American avant-garde has decided creative writing in academia became a phenomenon, though there's no historical evidence whatsoever to support the claim. And you know what -- not for nothing! -- but for those of you about to charge that the only reason avant-garde poets and critics have selected this arbitrary time-frame as their straw man is because it's when their own literary and scholarly careers started, and one can't have an origin-story without a super-villain, can you, well...?shame on you. The least we can do in the face of scholars who've not done their research for what appear to be self-serving reasons is to take their word for it. To do otherwise would be to exhibit that same crippling anxiety of self-identity that has typified the American avant-garde in both bohemia and the academy since 1914, and by all means we must avoid that.

In all seriousness, though, while we must avoid falling victim to genetic fallacy, it really is the case that (for instance) the Language poets have rendered as phenomenological a series of personal experiences they themselves had in purely anecdotal, strikingly narrow contexts. The avant-garde's history of the MFA is just the sort of self-mythologizing the avant-garde does best; no, say Language writers, it wasn't merely that my dog died in 1968, it's that all dogs everywhere died on that day. No, say scholars of the avant-garde, it wasn't merely that I entered the academy as a Contemporary Poetry Studies scholar in that year, it's that Contemporary Poetry Studies was the single most popular academic subject in Kazakhstan that year. I'm sorry; it isn't so. But knowing that it isn't so requires just the sort of research into the history of creative writing programs that the avant-garde finds distasteful -- or worse, fundamentally amateurish -- and so what we get instead is the Mr. Rogers Version of History, in which everyone in the Neighboorhood gets their teeth cleaned twice a year, takes their shoes off in front of a TelePrompter, and has sex with their clothes on.

To the extent non-institutional bohemian literary arts communities cohere, it is on the basis of shared values. One need simply read any first-hand account of any of the great avant-garde literary movements of the twentieth century to see this; and indeed, often one cannot help but see it because these first-hand accounts are usually littered with sanctimonious pap about how the values of the Outside were simply incompatible with the imaginative capacities of what would become -- in these accounts -- a new, closed, fully-privatized Inside.

In contrast, the formulation of graduate creative writing programs is a largely aleatory process; even if we ignore -- or deny -- that aesthetic diversity is generally a first- or second-order value in the creation of an initial faculty, we cannot deny that aesthetics (while indeed political) are not coextensive with the naive insistence on "irreducible human values" Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein have decried as endemic to Official Verse Culture. What is even more certain is that the "human values" of prospective MFA candidates are a) unknown to faculties at the time they make their selections of matriculants, and b) already formed once the mid-twenty-somethings who make up the average MFA cohort make their separate ways across the country to become a nominal "community" -- or so the psychologists tell us -- and for all its flaws workshop pedagogy performs poorly as a value-inculcation system (unless, to return to the beginning, we treat values and aesthetics as entirely co-extensive, a fallacy now de rigeur in avant-garde criticism).

Incredibly, it is the first type of community described above -- the one in which aesthetics and values are equated, in which communal bonds consequently form on the basis of shared values, in which tacit or express approval of the poetics of other group members is a primary feature of community membership -- which loudly and insistently rejects the charge that it is imbued with false belief in a single set of irreducible values. Equally incredibly, it is the second type of community -- that ephemeral, twenty-one-month community comprised in the first instance of individuals who have never met one another, and who (rightly or wrongly) do not equate aesthetic and political philosophy -- that is constantly slapped with the accusation that it is their members (theirs!) who are consumed by the need to normalize and standardize all human values existing anywhere at any time.

It's not an argument that ever made much sense, but then again it's also an argument made entirely deductively from "first facts" which have never been investigated, fact-checked, or confirmed. It is an argument, in fact, which relies upon the same sort of normative and normalizing assumptions about "values" which the argument itself is designed to undercut. There is, too, the question of from whence these generalizations come. Are we to presume members of non-institutional bohemian communities regularly "check in" with one another to ensure no consensus as to first principles has inadvertently been reached? Or do such bohemians -- like the scholars who feast on their work for their professional sustenance -- simply read one another's work and "deduce" from what they see that, in terms of first principles, a pleasing anarchy has been and is being maintained? Just so, do such bohemians hide in bushes outside the classrooms in which workshops are being held at the 350+ graduate creative writing programs operating in ten countries across the globe? Do they conduct exit interviews? Or have they merely -- lacking better recourse -- "deduced" from the aesthetics of creative writers with institutional experience that, in the heart of hearts of these benighted souls beats the still tinier heart of a Romantic Humanist? It's no matter either way: The better question is simply to ask yourself, if you are reading this and if you are a person, whether you have often read a single poem by a single poet and felt confidence in that poem as a reification of a system of living? And if you are such a person, could you summarize -- in but a few sentences, if you will -- Robert Hass's system of living on the basis of the thirty-one lines of "Meditation at Lagunitas"? And once you've concluded that deduction -- once you have the soul of Hass (man and poet) in your sights, would you append, if you'll be so kind, a percentage (out of 100) to your degree of certainty that you now know the soul of the man? Would you then -- for surely prose disgorges the irreducible human values of its author as readily as poetry -- read Majorie Perloff's essay "The Changing Face of Common Intercourse" and give me a quickie read of the contours of her spirit? I promise you she won't begrudge you the attempt: She's done it many times herself on even less evidence.

The argument for avant-garde criticism of the sort performed -- in public, no less! -- by Perloff and Bernstein is one that presumes the rectitude of its conclusion as an ineluctable feature of its logic-chain. In its purest form we'd call this sort of thinking a tautology; unfortunately, the sort of thinking in play in the sort of criticism I'm speaking of is the sort of thinking significantly less pure and refined than all that, so it'd be better to say "two-bit tautology" or "five-finger-discount tautology" or a kind of "everything-must-go, dollar-store, found-change tautology." I mean to say there is a not-insignificant volume of scholarship on creative writing pedagogy from the 1990s and 2000s and there is no evidence Perloff has read a scrap of it, because there's no evidence she acknowledges its bearing on anything or anyone and certainly least of all the absolute entirety of her oeuvre as a literary critic. But one assumes that if the graduate creative workshop is a century-old conspiracy to engender in its participants a series of irreducible human values applicable not only in poems but in all other endeavors imagined or imaginable, there would likely be some evidence of a standardized curricula aimed at effectuating same. Surely we'd expect the conspirators to have gotten their act together sufficiently prior to the "sixties or early seventies" -- at the time, close to a century into The Conspiracy -- to permit us some window into their deviance in any decade between the 1880s and 1950s? Unless -- as Ron Silliman charges -- absence is indeed the only acceptable proof of presence, and we can only be absolutely certainly the Workshop Conspiracy exists because no one will talk about it. That no one is talking about it because no one else believes in it or sees it or approves of the premise in the first instance is not to be considered. It's easier to just scrawl "aesthetics = politics = values" on a chalkboard somewhere and dust off one's hands entirely.

If I seem to be in mid-diatribe here, it's because I'm now experiencing as an aspiring scholar the same sort of one-person ping-pong match Silliman has himself decried for years: One wishes to enjoin avant-garde critics in substantial discussion of the influence of creative writing's institutionalization on American poetics, but there is absolutely nothing left behind in the writings of such critics to engage. I have found almost nothing of positive value in such texts, only evidence of gaps in the literature so broad it would take thirteen of me to fill them. The point, they happily concede, is already conceded; their battle is already won; the particulars will undoubtedly be printed up in field notes to be distributed later on by a person to be named and at a time not yet selected.

The avant-garde is very, very good at discussing itself; it is absolute bollocks at providing any other form of exegesis. And so someone with my research interest is left without a partner for discussion or debate, unless I accept in full the fallacious premises on which the smug conclusions of Perloff and others depend. I do not accept those premises -- not out of petulance but merely, I can honestly say, because they are asinine and intellectually bankrupt.

So here's my message to the avant-garde, whose poems I sincerely adore and whose poetics I earnestly admire and whose scholarship I find distinctly risible: If you want your claims about creative writing's institutionalization to be taken seriously, open a book and do some damn research!

[NB: A comment I received on this essay/rant on Facebook prompts me to add the following note: The fact that scholars of the avant-garde are unwilling to identify any literary movement arising during the years of the (Graduate) Program Era (~1982-2012) as "avant-garde" suggests a whitewashing of American literary history to ensure MFA programs are not credited with producing any work that operates "counter to form" -- i.e., counter to the expectations of scholars. Even Conceptual writing and flarf, generally deemed by scholars too "new" to clearly constitute avant-garde literary movements of a proper sort, are painstakingly "written out of" Program Era histories in a way that artificially locates them well outside the academy: For instance, Conceptual writing is largely associated with one Canadian [aha!] poet, and one poet who professes a belief only in "uncreative writing"; flarf is made "discreet" by artificial, self-mythologizing condensation into a "flarf collective" whose members' educational backgrounds are pointedly difficult to determine -- though when and where they can be determined, we find either evidence of Program Era-involvement or evidence that the poet in question was educated before the (Graduate) Program Era began. Very, very suspicious, no?]

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