Seth Abramson weighs in a number of times, but it's this post that got me thinking in a tangential direction. To keep everything on this page for the moment, here are the particular items that spark my own post:
Graduate creative writing programs graduate well over 2,000 individuals per year, with that number rising sufficiently for us to expect well over 25,000 new CW graduates over the next ten years--approximately 12,000 of them poets, each with 2-4 years of graduate training in creative writing and a manuscript of publishable quality.
and
Poetry can undoubtedly survive without MFAs; I was actually looking at it in the other direction, which is to ask the question, "What can we do with MFAs?"
Here's my question, which is related to the issue of relevancy: What exactly do we mean by manuscript of publishable quality? And is that really what we want of an MFA program?
To lay this all out, less as an argument than as a line of thought I haven't really seen pursued: A manuscript of publishable quality means one of the many, many presses out there is willing to either A) do a lot of work to make this volume sell, which means painting it as somehow relevant to a particular reading demographic, B) go into debt in order to produce the volume, knowing that poetry doesn't sell particularly well but thinking these poems worthy for some reason, or C) collect entry fees in a contest to offset the fact that the book itself will not sell well. Notice how B and especially C assume ahead of time that the poetry is not relevant, at least not to the point that economics back it up. That may be because I've weighted the options with my own verbiage, but part of the point here is in fact to weight things the "wrong" way.
Most MFA programs of which I'm aware want a poet to produce a collection of poetry by the end of his or her tenure. Said collection should fit one or more of the criteria above, which also tends to include publishing in journals, which are considered more ephemeral. But let's be honest - most of the books, despite their seeming permanence, will not last to the end of a calendar year. Now, you, dear reader, might rightly say that that's what reviews and best-of lists are for. Determining the best published books of the year. And yet the best book of the year almost certainly will not come from an MFA student, at least judging by the major awards.
I can nearly hear you clamoring for an alternative, so here goes: instead of a book-length collection of poems, produce one poem that will be worthy of reading 50 years from now.
Like I said, this isn't so much an argument as something to mull over (and probably reject in the end). But really, if we are asking an MFA student to show mastery of a subject, which in this case is the writing of poetry, why would we accept a lot of work that is good versus a small body of work that is masterful? Certainly encourage the students to publish in journals, which are passing, and acknowledge that most of what they do will fall by the wayside. Simultaneously encourage them to produce something that won't just get blurbed, won't just break even, but will be relevant (by which I mean, problematically, either splendidly indicative of that student's time/place/situation or splendidly counter to it, which would both be of value to the reader 50 years from now, or somehow transcending time and space to speak to that unknown yet anticipated reader). If the student can manage to produce a poetic sequence or, miracle of miracles, an entire book that fits this criterion, you'll know you have something really special on your hands.
Thoughts? C. Dale? Seth? Nancy? Barbara Jane? Regular readers of this blog? Really, I'm not wedded to the concept, and I'm not trying to call Seth out or anything silly like that, but I feel like a discussion around its problems could be useful in defining why an MFA and its productions are in fact relevant.
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