Editor's Note: "The Professionalization of Poetry" originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2003 and March/April 2003 issues of Poets & Writers Magazine. Reprinted (with author additions and corrections) by permission of the author and of the publisher, Poets & Writers, Inc., 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012. The subheading titles in this reprint are the Editor's.

Introduction.

A great and ongoing revolution in poetry began in 1922. It was not, at first, an aesthetic revolution (although 1922 was the year T.S. Eliot finished The Waste Land). Nor was it spearheaded by a poet or a group of poets as other great poetry revolutions have been: Wordsworth/Coleridge; Whitman; Eliot/ Pound; Snyder/Kerouac/Ginsberg; Lowell/Plath/Sexton. Still, it has had (and will continue to have) effects upon the art of poetry that may, over time, be longer lasting and more profound than aesthetic upheavals like those of the Romantics, Imagists, Modernists, Beats, or Confessionals.

The firebrand of this revolution was neither a poet nor a critic of poetry, but the dean of the graduate division in humanities at the University of Iowa. In 1922, Karl Seashore informed the Iowa English department that, in the future, creative work-fiction, drama, poetry-could be accepted in lieu of the traditional scholarly or critical thesis or dissertation hitherto required for an MA or PhD.

Seashore fired the first shot in a revolution that changed the way poets are educated, supported, published and rewarded in America. Once "creative writing" was recognized as worthy of academic study by a prestigious university, the establishment and growth of a poetry writing profession was inevitable. In 1936, Iowa founded its writers' workshop. One of its first directors was the poet, Paul Engle, who had been one of the first to receive a PhD from Iowa for writing. Stanford soon established its own program under the direction of poet-critic Yvor Winters. More colleges and universities followed suit, sporadically at first, then in droves.

By 1967 there were enough of them to merit the establishment of the Associated Writing Programs, or AWP, an umbrella organization that serves the interests of writing program institutions, teachers, and students. Other organizations closely allied, though not formally connected to the profession, include the Academy of American Poets (established 1934), whose chancellors are almost exclusively poet-teachers; Poets & Writers (established 1970), a service organization and the publisher of Poets & Writers Magazine, which professionals use to conduct what has become known as "po-biz" via articles and interviews, calls for submissions, and advertisements by booksellers and assorted other businesses; plus scores of poetry journals located at academic institutions, whose editors and board members are drawn almost exclusively from writing programs.

Explosion of Graduate Writing Programs.

In the title essay of his book Can Poetry Matter? (recently reissued in a 10th-anniversary edition by Graywolf Press), poet and chair of the NEA Dana Gioia noted that there were a thousand colleges and universities offering undergraduate writing programs, and over two hundred offering MFAs in creative writing. Gioia estimated that these programs were turning out approximately two thousand men and women per year with MFAs in poetry writing.

The math is stunning. In the decade since Gioia wrote that book, graduate writing programs have certified approximately 20,000 professional poets and will in the decade ahead (allowing for the fact that more colleges have come on board) certify approximately 25,000 more. These graduates have spent or will spend several years learning to write with such noted poets as Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds at NYU; Richard Howard at Columbia; Jorie Graham at Harvard; Marvin Bell at Iowa; Mark Doty and Edward Hirsch at Houston; Brenda Hillman at St. Mary's; Garrett Hongo and Dorianne Laux at Oregon-for today practically every highly acclaimed poet in America is teaching in a college or university writing program.

The profession has created what might be called a complete poetry career path. Today, an aspiring poet can earn an undergraduate degree with a major in writing and, a few years later, acquire an MFA with a specialization in poetry. A huge number of these certified poets will have to find other means of supporting themselves, since (unlike law or medicine) the poetry profession can find jobs for only a handful of newcomers each year; still, those who have impressed their poet-teachers as the cream of the crop can expect to be published in elite journals, receive a first book award, and (with the backing of mentors) secure a tenure-track writing post at a college or university.

Philip Levine, who attended the Iowa workshop in the heady days of the 1950's, when there was still a sense of excitement about the enterprise, has this to say in his collection of essays The Bread of Time about "one of the most amazing growth industries we have":

Today, anyone can become a poet: all he or she has to do is travel to the nearest college and enroll in Beginning Poetry Writing and Semi-Advanced Poetry Writing, all the way to Masterwork Poetry Writing, in which course one completes her epic on the sacking of Yale or his sonnet cycle on the paintings of Edward Hopper, or their elegies in a city dumpster, and thus earns not only an M.F.A. but a crown of plastic laurel leaves.

"Do I sound skeptical?" Levine asks-and answers: "Let me sound skeptical."

Educating Ritas.

Is a curriculum that concentrates so fiercely on poetry writing the best way to educate aspiring poets? No such system was available to the great generation of poets immediately preceding professionalization. Not only were there no writing programs available to Frost, Eliot, Williams, or Stevens at Dartmouth, Penn, or Harvard; there wasn't a single course at any college or university in America devoted to poetry writing. Aspiring poets had to learn the art by themselves. They had to construct their own personal poetics. They could and did use the university for related studies that provided subject matter and theory and models, particularly the study of languages and literature. But the process was ad hoc, without institutional support or mentors to nurse it along. Robert Frost studied Latin, Greek, psychology, and philosophy formally, and English poetry more or less informally (with the help of Palgrave's anthology). Eliot studied languages, philosophy, history, anthropology, and world literature, both in and out of Harvard. William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens received rounded undergraduate educations, and then went on to study medicine and law.

As Levine suggests, overconcentration on writing can Johnny-one-note an aspiring poet's education. Writing programs typically commit more than 50% of class time to the unpublished poetry of their students and to something called "the creative process." Contemporary poetry (not taught in universities at all in Frost or Eliot's time) routinely provides exemplary models for students to emulate. This emphasis on writing (as Thomas Bartlett notes in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education) is happening at the same time that English Literature is declining in popularity as a major (down a whopping 23% since 1970).

Bartlett cites a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University's fear that students are choosing writing courses because they perceive them as "less difficult" than traditional English classes. And although Bartlett notes that pressure from English department faculty has lead some programs to increase literature requirements, a sampling of university catalogues shows that many writing programs require little familiarity with the classics, foreign or domestic. When literature is required it is often skewed toward the modern and contemporary, studied within the context of the writing program's mission, less for its own sake than for its practical application to the student's writing. Although English and comparative literature students still study Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Donne, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickinson in depth, too often writing graduates emerge from universities sporting only a casual acquaintance with the master poets of their own language and those of world literature.

When reading becomes focused on a sliver of literary history (chosen by current taste and fashion) it's tempting for fledgling poets to mimic the prevailing mode, absorbing its mannerisms, limitations, and ephemeral or poetically correct subject matter and concerns. And it is much less likely that the poet will develop an original and authoritative poetic voice that can take its place and hold its own, not only among contemporaries, but within the wider literary tradition. For, as Eliot points out in his essay "Religion and Literature,"

The reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of diverse and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

Despite the emphasis on "voice" by poetry professionals, it is the nature of the institutional workshop process to turn what has traditionally been an individual, even solitary enterprise into a communal and collaborative one. No one would mistake Frost for Eliot or Eliot for Pound or Williams for Stevens or Moore for Bishop or Auden for Cummings. What is so striking about Modernist poets is how, absorbing a customized education and a unique amalgam of poetic antecedents, each blazes a previously untrodden poetic trail, an aesthetic road never before taken. The current winnowing of the young and impressionable through workshop programs that share similar models and methodologies leads to that herding of poets "in the same direction" that Eliot feared. What differentiation occurs is usually one of modality rather than individuation, a choice among different types of poetry: mainstream, new-formalist, new-narrative, neo-Beat, neo-New York School, or Language Poetry-different specialties associated with certain groups of poets and the institutions where they teach.

Beware the Scribes.

The Modernists chose nonpoetry-related careers that were as different, one from another, as their educations. Perhaps they were listening to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in his Biographia Literaria advised young authors to become lawyers, clergymen, physicians, businessmen, manufacturers, but to "never pursue literature as a trade," because:

Whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of life.

Coleridge bewailed the fact that he made his own living by writing poetry, articles, reviews and lecturing on literature. Blending career with art, he believed, lowered vitality and led to the production of journeywork. He envied writers who could come home from a world elsewhere and turn to writing, knowing their financial obligations had been met. Coleridge felt that the time such poets spent writing was more concentrated and exhilarating-in his word, "genial"-because the poet could devote himself wholly to the pleasures of the art.

In 1948, even as the poetry profession was gathering steam, W.H. Auden echoed Coleridge's concern, arguing in The Dyer's Hand that a poet "should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words" because "a too exclusively literary life" can be "directly detrimental to his poetry."

Take the New England farm out of Frost's poetry and there wouldn't be much left. And it would be hard to imagine how Williams could break away from continental models to write in what he called "the American grain" had he gone into a writing program rather than into the suburbs of New Jersey, where he daily heard a variety of nonliterary dialects and voices as he treated measles and delivered babies.

T.S. Eliot worked for Lloyds Bank, performing mundane, repetitive, necessary tasks. It can be argued that this had something to do with the powerful sense of ennui that pervades the music of The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, and The Hollow Men. And although he is famous for his allusiveness, for his weaving of literature into the fabric of the poem, with Eliot it is the result of reading, wide and deep, never the pretentious ornamentation of the whiz-kid graduate student trying to impress his teachers and peers.

Wallace Stevens was a dedicated corporate attorney for the Hartford Accident and Life Indemnity Company; so much so that when one of his colleagues heard that Stevens was famous for something quite different from defending the company against lawsuits, he cried: "What? Wally, a poet?" (Stevens declined Harvard's invitation to serve as the 1954 Charles Eliot Norton Professor, partly because he feared it would jeopardize his insurance career.)

One can imagine Stevens finishing up a brief or coming out of a meeting at noon, closing his office door, taking out pen and pad, propping his feet on the desk, and abandoning himself to what is one of the most profoundly imaginative poetic worlds ever created. What do "Sunday Morning," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man," or "The Idea of Order at Key West" have to do with Stevens' career as a corporate attorney? Nothing and everything; for that career provided the workaday backdrop that allowed Stevens to assume his liberating, restorative, holiday mood with the kind of purity and zest that Coleridge would have envied. As David Perkins observes about Steven's work in his History of Modern Poetry, the back and forth movement from mundane to imaginative worlds "connects with the central, continuing topics of his poetry, which revolved incessantly in meditation from 'things as they are' to 'things imagined' and back again."

The establishment of an academic writing career allows poets to immerse themselves wholly in poetry. Although this can accelerate technical competence, it can sequester and shelter a young poet, limiting and retarding experience of the world and commerce with people that are so vital to the health of poetry. Not only can the poet end up lacking the substance that a non-literary career brings to the writing desk; he runs the risk of becoming so bogged down in po-biz that his art can be affected in insidious ways.

Imagine our professional returning home after a day at the university: workshopping poems with students; chatting with them during office hours about publishing concerns; spending the afternoon reading manuscripts for a literary journal or a contest he is being paid to judge; meeting with a committee to review a student's poems and decide whether or not an MFA should be conferred; finishing up by writing a letter of recommendation for a colleague applying for a Guggenheim.

Imagine our professional driving home and turning to the 21st century pleasures of writing poetry. It's not quite the same turn, not quite so clean a break as that from the chickens, the patients, the bankers, or insurance executives. Worrisome career concerns are likely to bleed into the writing, making it part of a commercial enterprise-something that must be done to maintain status, to be considered for a lucrative award, or to be asked to participate in a conference, or to secure a traveling fellowship or prestigious reading.

Because creative writing teachers face the same publish-or-perish imperative as other academics, it's easy for attention to shift from quality to quantity. Nor can their students afford to wait for the muse; they need to produce regularly, so there will be plenty of poetry to discuss at the workshop table. Much time is spent devising exercises to deal with the profession's arch-bugaboo, "writer's block." Poetry and the process of writing it become one of poetry's favorite themes (not surprising since workshopping is the common experience and key concern of teachers and students alike). Emphasis on process and quantity leads to the production of tens of thousands of poems clamoring for publication.

As an editor or judge, the professional again finds himself in a compromised position. For teachers naturally want to support their students, before and after graduation. Graduates reciprocate by urging their students to buy the books of the mentor and attend his or her workshops, readings and conferences. The relationship between poet as editor or judge and poet as student or colleague can overshadow the work and make unbiased decisions difficult. The temptation to edit a magazine in order to advance one's own career, with the leverage that position affords, compromises editing. Publication swapping is a practice routinely engaged in and easily rationalized.

"Let's start a magazine!" Cummings cried, tongue-in-cheek, when there was just a handful devoted to poetry. Today, thousands are hardly enough to accommodate the publish-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mentality that the profession encourages. Each new publication sets the bar lower, allowing more journeywork in. And now the Internet promises to open vast intergalactic publishing opportunities-not thousands but potentially millions of outlets as we move towards po-biz nirvana, where it will be impossible to write a poem too dreadful to be published-somewhere, out there. The fact that the circulation of most of these "zines" (both online and off) is usually limited to contributors, their families, and friends deters no one. They look good on resumes and in bios on the back of subsidized or self-published collections. The mission of the average poetry journal these days is less about readership than it is about certification. Each publication adds one more stamp of approval to the poetry professional's resumé-one more reason for the writing department to grant tenure.

Po-biz anthologies that shuffle poems about under this or that fashionable or politically correct theme (rather than cutting through the crabgrass to find endangered flora) compound the problem. "The weeder is supremely needed," Pound observes in his ABC of Reading, "if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a Garden." The profession seems bent on turning the garden into a jungle.

The Outlook.

The revolution in the way poets are educated, published, honored, and supported is still a work very much in progress. It remains to be seen whether it will produce poets who can command the attention and respect of readers over long stretches of literary history. It's important to keep in mind that, although the profession takes little note of them, many poets continue to write more or less in the time-honored, unstructured, preprofessional way that has given us most of the world's great poetry, developing their craft without the help of MFA programs or funding from professionally controlled institutions. Many pursue nonliterary careers that provide a diversity of experience and a wealth of information and subject matter that often enriches their writing.

It is possible, even likely, that some of The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century may ultimately come not from the ranks of the university professionals but from men and women who, like Sappho, Rumi, Chaucer, Keats, and Dickinson, write not (in Dylan Thomas's words) "...for ambition or bread / Or the strut and charms / On the ivory stages," but out of love for what Coleridge and Auden argued should be approached always as an art, never as a trade or career. A poetry profession that focuses attention almost exclusively on its own runs the risk of alienating the common reader and diminishing the art it was established to nurture.

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