Seth Abramson: The Avant-Gardist's MFA: The Avant-Garde's ...

{This summer I'm reading for my Literary Studies doctoral program's preliminary exams. I'm using my blog as a sort of reading journal to chronicle that process for myself and, if any others are interested, for others. The resulting mini-essays will likely be as scattered and informal, at times, as is -- at present -- my own thinking on those topics I'm researching and writing on. Anything not demonstrably a "fact" in these essays is merely my opinion, and while I have a lot of opinions I also can and do enjoy changing them as new evidence comes to light; often, things I say in these mini-essays will be corrected or refined in later essays -- that's the point of spending months studying for preliminary exams -- and in some cases I will flat-out misread something and not realize it until later on. In such instances, I'll issue the correction in a subsequent essay rather than artfully editing the one I've already written. I want this journal to be a record of process, not merely result, and I certainly acknowledge that scholarly study is "professional" in at least one very important sense: One never really "has it down," and being better at what you do tomorrow than you were today is entirely a function of seeing one's work as a lifelong course of study, analysis, and self-criticism. I've left the comment-field open, below, because I don't intend in any way to stifle discussion or criticism of anything I've written, though the time I have to add to any discussion myself is very limited.}

C. Bernstein, "Wreading, Writing, Wresponding" [sic]

Do avant-gardists cling to their derision toward creative writing workshops in the same reflexive, unreflective way poor whites (according to our President) cling to their guns and religion? Charles Bernstein, who Wikipedia helpfully (and rightly) denominates "one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets," definitely seems to think so. So if you're a peon in the experimental poetry community and you detest MFA programs, realize that the officers' corps has already fled the country in a gold-plated Huey with rotors made of pure magic. Anyway, here's what Bernstein has to say about it:

"My phobia of creative writing poetry workshops, like all phobias, is exaggerated and no doubt unfair to the eccentric range offered under the rubric, but I cling to it as to an untrustworthy friend."

I originally had planned to write in this space the following: "Bernstein teaches what is inarguably a creative writing poetry workshop at University of Pennsylvania -- or did, at least, at the time he wrote the essay 'Wreading, Writing, Wresponding' [sic] -- and his entirely-rhetorical attempts to obscure that fact call to mind the immortal words of Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Donald Trump not two days ago: 'Donald, I have to say, you're starting to sound a little ridiculous.'" {Merely a joke; I wouldn't compare my worst enemy, let alone a writer and critic I greatly admire, to The Donald.} But the reality, I see now, is that it's far more complicated than that: I think there's some real ambivalence amongst the Language writers in defining what a workshop is or can be, and so what those of us who think exclusively pedagogically rather than bureaucratically might denominate a "workshop" may well be, in the minds of others, something else. So I've folded into this essay a consideration of just what is meant by "workshop" and, more particularly, what Bernstein means by it.

While there is much to admire (a great deal indeed) in Bernstein's own pedagogical elections -- which he details in this essay -- one must, as indicated above, take a dimmer view of his somewhat stunted definition of creative writing workshops and their purpose and operation, as well as his equally awkward attempts to redefine "creative writing" itself ("creative writing" being a phrase coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson 113 years before Bernstein was born, and 170 years before I showed up at my own creative writing MFA program; indeed, it's a term whose birth-sentence suggests -- given Bernstein's [and my own] principles -- that in fact no redefinition was ever needed: "There is then creative reading as well as creative writing," wrote Emerson in The American Scholar in 1837, which Bernstein himself essentially says in an essay he may well have considered radical when he published it more than 150 years later).

At various points in "Wreading, Writing, Wresponding," Bernstein refers to his own workshop as "research and development," "a lab experimenting in mutant forms," "a nonexpository writing class," "a course in anti- or para- or pluricomposition," "a lit'r'ture class" [sic], "a reading workshop in drag," and a "writing experiments seminar." (NB: To his credit, he ultimately concedes that he is teaching in "a very common space of creative writing," and does agree to denominate his literature classes "creative w(r)eading workshops...run as if they were creative writing classes"). Still, this is the problem with avant-garde essayists writing exclusively for one another: If one way to extricate oneself from the conundrum of being a creative writing professor who is also a seminal avant-gardist (and is therefore culturally obligated to detest creative writing professors) is to simply change the terms of the discussion -- an entirely rhetorical maneuver of which neither Plato nor Aristotle would approve -- the only reason such a maneuver is possible is because no one who actually knows what happens in a supposedly "conventional" creative writing classroom is likely to ever read an avant-garde essayist's redefinitions and be troubled by them. Most academic or quasi-academic scholarship is written and read by academics -- who detest MFA programs as much or more than anyone else -- or by those entirely outside the Academy, whose proclivities are often already known and counted upon.

Until now, I suppose. One benefit to University of Wisconsin-Madison's critical-dissertation Literary Studies Ph.D. having the only full-curriculum, all-for-credit creative writing Minor to ever be housed in such a program -- I did the equivalent of a second, same-genre, three-year MFA as part of my Ph.D. studies in English Literature -- is that I'm only the third MFA graduate to be in a position to not only write a critical dissertation for my doctoral program but to have a full complement of for-credit creative writing workshops (not merely seminars) be an ineluctable part of my scholarly preparation for that critical dissertation.

Bernstein says that he resists the term "creative writing" because "the prototypical poetry workshop is often focused on content-based exercises rather than experiments in form." In fact, the opposite is true: Indeed, one criticism of graduate-level poetry workshops is that they are intrinsically apolitical (in the most artificial and rudely enforced way) because discussion of content is almost never considered appropriate. It is in this way (and I mean this not unkindly) that Bernstein gives up the game: Though he never explicitly says so, his description of poetry workshops suggests that he is only referring to undergraduate workshops -- the sort he teaches in -- rather than the graduate-level workshops his ire is quite naturally applied to by the bulk of his highly-receptive readership. If it's true, in fact, that contrary to Bob Perelman's claim a large percentage of Language writers are "based in the Academy" -- and it is true -- it must be noted, too, that they are almost exclusively based in undergraduate creative writing programs. The problem, of course, is that an appropriate undergraduate creative writing pedagogy is not going to be the same, or even at all similar, to a richly innovative graduate-level creative writing pedagogy. Whereas in undergraduate workshops one is loath to have students spend the bulk of their class-time responding to one another's still-unformed poetics -- hence the sort of top-down, reading-assignment-heavy syllabi envisioned and employed (and itemized and publicized) by Bernstein -- because MFA students matriculate at an average age of 26 (recent demographic studies confirm) and routinely publish alongside their professors, vertical hierarchical instruction is nearly impossible and, too, it's infinitely more profitable to have students respond directly to one another's original work. Imagine: If a group of undergraduates has undergone the transformative experience of Charles Bernstein's undergraduate workshops at University of Pennsylvania, such that they're far more mature readers and producers of writing than ever they were previously, why wouldn't we want all that knowledge and skill and experience to then be situated amidst a dialogic, graduate-program learning space?

Bernstein generously uses a substantial portion of "Wreading, Writing, Wresponding" to describe his own pedagogy, and by all accounts it is superlative in both conception and effect. (Disclaimer: I myself wrote an essay for The Washington Post recently about the need to overhaul the workshop as we know it -- to transform it from a space geared toward aesthetics into one entirely focused on poetics -- and now see that, without realizing it, having not read this particular essay of Bernstein's until today, many of my ideas were Bernstein's as well. Ultimately the piece was rejected, after some deliberation, because it did not finally do what The Washington Post had hoped it would do, and which I imagine Bernstein might also have hoped it to do, which is argue for the abolition of graduate creative writing programs.) Bernstein's pedagogy has both positive and negative attributes; that is, it is both building from, and responding to, what Bernstein considers archetypal tendencies in the contemporary poetry workshop:

POSITIVE: Bernstein's Writing Experiments Seminar (English 111) features a semester-long serial collaboration amongst members of the class which will be familiar to those conversant with the history of the Flarf Collective (to wit, the "flarflist") or the Language poets' own Grand Piano experiment in collective autobiography. Of course, we also see the same tendency in the recent bevy of co-authored chapbooks and full-length collections produced by groups of individuals who first met and collaborated (sometimes in-class, sometimes out-of-class) in creative writing MFA programs.

POSITIVE: Bernstein, as an avant-gardist, is also naturally a formalist, and consequently his syllabus is heavy on various forms of constrained writing. We see the same principle at work in Oulipo, of course, but we also see it in the MFA system as well: At University of Wisconsin-Madison, professor Amy Quan Barry requires weekly writing in received (or self-delineated "nonce") forms, to use just one example.

NEGATIVE: Bernstein sees the ideal creative writing workshop as an "antidote" to Freshman Composition, an observation he bolsters with the assertion that conventional workshops explicitly promise to teach participants "how to write better poems" and "learn the craft of poetry." He seems to connect these purported assurances to Freshman Composition's emphasis on technical and rhetorical excellence (though I think that's an incredibly reductive view of where Composition Studies is in the present day; still, as that's beside the point of both my and Bernstein's analyses -- and it's really just an aside in Bernstein's essay -- I'll leave off on that for now). Bernstein counters this (again, alleged) impulse in conventional creative writing pedagogy by encouraging his students to be "proactive readers" and by "potentiating proactive approaches to writing." Part of that involves applying the principle that "the student is always right," which Bernstein means as an encouragement to students to pursue in their writing those linguistic loci in which others sees confusion or some sort of compositional "wrongness" (my term), and an encouragement to professors to allow for distraction and digression and humor in class in a way that emphasizes that there is no one right reading of anything and no one right way to write poetry.

The problem is that Bernstein is working off an archetype -- what he concedes is a "grossly caricatured creative writing workshop" -- in which professors are prescriptive, "expressive" writing is conspicuously favored, craft is emphasized, and affective responses are privileged. None of this resembles the contemporary poetry workshop, at least at the graduate level, though criticisms like Bernstein's are routinely wielded (not necessarily by Bernstein himself) as a bludgeon against MFAs. For instance, the Iowa Writers' Workshop separates craft seminars and workshop entirely, and when I was there I studied with Cole Swensen -- whose pedagogy comes out of the same tradition as Bernstein's, I think -- and aesthetics-based rather than poetics-based discussions were implicitly (and I'd say rightly, and profitably) discouraged. When Bernstein writes, "I do the best I can to direct attention to what is happening in the work, alternative means of construction, and the possibilities of the form," one can only respond: What creative writing professor would say (or believe) anything else about which workshop pedagogies are most generative? If anything, Bernstein's employment of the Poem Profiler (see the mini-essay below this one) -- an ingenious idea nevertheless most appropriate to an undergraduate than graduate setting, which is exactly where Bernstein uses it -- suggests that emphasis on "learning the craft of poetry" (for craft is always learned through reading, not writing, in Bernstein's workshop and everywhere else) that taken to an extreme Bernstein would rightly rail against.

Part of the problem, one supposes, is that avant-garde distrust of the MFA system is so deeply embedded that avant-gardists instinctively apply to their own pedagogies an instrumental cast (we create poetic taxonomies only to later trouble or elide them) whereas so-called "conventional" pedagogy is some sort of unquestioned, inherent-good monolith. In fact, most writing on innovative creative writing pedagogy comes from supposedly "conventional" origins -- because only those deeply invested in supporting creative writing in higher education care enough to really delve into esoteric questions of pedagogy -- and that's why a portion of my prelims reading list is comprised of treatises on creative writing pedagogy. It's to Bernstein's credit, then, that he concedes that teachers in "conventional" workshops often give the same sort of advice that he himself offers to his students.

NEGATIVE: Bernstein states that creative writing workshops aim to produce consensus, and as to this, at least, I can only respond with some degree of bewilderment. Anyone who has just completed a "conventional" graduate (or, for that matter, undergraduate) workshop, and is now holding in their hands 100 to 200 different individual observations from eight to twelve poet-peers, most of which comments are mutually exclusive/contradictory, would be hard-pressed to see where any consensus lay. For that matter, as mid-twenties writers with ten years of writing experience, and quite possibly some publication history, and probably some high school and college instruction in creative writing, MFA students are unlikely to give equal credence to each of their classmates, or to privilege consensus over the ways in which peer comments confirm or reject or amend their own, internally-generated/unilaterally-constructed suppositions. But I think there's a graver contradiction here: Bernstein has developed a complex pedagogy to encourage mature critical faculties in his students, yet when he envisions a conventional poetry workshop he envisions a student cadre entirely devoid of such faculties and therefore a manifest danger to their peers. Bernstein worries students will strive to make their peers' work "more fluid, less awkward, clearer, more direct and logical, more expressive," yet it is precisely the ability to re-program students away from such prescriptive, aesthetically-prejudiced tendencies that Bernstein attributes to his own pedagogy.

As Bernstein writes, "students in an 'experimental' class are as likely to play follow the teacher as students in a traditional forms class. And the moral of that is: leave no turn unstoned." The problem, then, is not the bureaucratic structure of creative writing programs, but their faculties. Yet who among the avant-garde will throw stones and name names, singling out which of their peers are responsible for the purportedly crappy critical faculties of students? I think avant-garde criticism of MFAs focuses on institutions rather than professors and pedagogy because a) avant-garde critics have absolutely no idea whatsoever what's happening in others' classrooms, b) the avant-garde has a hundred-year history of being hostile to pedagogical discussions of any kind (even before Stein), rendering avant-garde critics uniquely ill-suited to making such judgments, and c) one effect of recent efforts to quantitatively assess graduate creative writing programs is a de-fetishization of the personalities associated with such programs (without concurrently de-fetishizing the importance of teaching). Indeed, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, founded in 1967, published its seminal "Hallmarks for a Successful Graduate Program in Creative Writing" in 1996 (which document comprehensively details the many necessary attributes of a productive graduate creative writing program) but has more recently returned to the older view that MFA applicants can and should judge programs by their faculties. This pedagogical worldview is not only antithetical to avant-garde literary criticism -- which holds that the most normatively "successful" writers do not always make the best teachers (postmodernist and metafiction pioneer John Barth wrote in 1985 that "good writers are not necessarily good coaches of writing, and conversely. There's no correlation either way between these separate gifts") -- but also avant-garde pedagogy, which goes in fear of that creative writing program in which the faculty is presumed to know "what's good" and whose student body merely sits gaping and awestruck at the feet of its professorial class.

POSITIVE/NEGATIVE: Speaking of literature courses in which poetry is taught, Bernstein expresses disdain for what he terms a "culture of testing." I'm not sure I've encountered the culture he speaks of -- English Literature courses at the college level tend to be paper-, not exam-heavy -- but certainly such a concern would militate in favor of a curriculum in which grades are removed entirely or deemphasized, formal (quantitative) assessments of student work are nowhere to be found, and the acknowledgment of and emphasis upon students' individual courses of development is everywhere evident: i.e., the MFA system. The distinction Bernstein makes, even in speaking of testing-free workshops, is that such workshops (the conventional sort, that is) tend to emphasize analyzing poems rather than "reacting to" or "doing something with" the work. "Reacting" and "doing" is undoubtedly the language of art, not scholarship, but one wonders whether the distinction Bernstein draws between these terms and "analysis" is substantive, or merely rhetorical?

Many of the pedagogies (tactics) Bernstein employs are part of MFA curricula (strategies), including substitutions, homolinguistic translations, recombinations, homophonic translations, ekphrasis, chance operations (the aleatory), memorization, self-constraint, found poetry, new media, performance, transcription, self-analysis/-criticism, and journaling. Certainly, Bernstein's concession that "student discussion is central" to his pedagogy rings true as well of conventional poetry workshops. But the question remains: If Bernstein's undergraduate pedagogy were applied with equal fervor to an MFA workshop, would it not seem overdetermined in precisely the way critics of MFA programs fear? We can imagine MFA writers between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, with years of writing and publishing experience and college-level literature and creative writing instruction, being asked to perform exercise after exercise (form-based and not content-based) and the criticism coming down from critics of the MFA system, "Whither free play?"

It is here that Bernstein's emphases on distraction, digression, humor, and creative response seem most relevant. I tend to agree with Bernstein that the "conventional" workshop offers little opportunity for any of these things on a regularized basis. The problem, of course, is that speaking of the creative writing workshop at all is in essence an anachronism, if it's done in the absence of a concurrent discussion of MFA curricula. Workshops (let's say conventional ones) are one brand of pedagogical tool, and while they may be necessary to MFA programs they are by no means sufficient -- even the Iowa Writers' Workshop's 1930s workshops were supplemented, too, by mandatory, weekly, out-of-class one-on-one discussions between students and faculty. Just so, it doesn't do to criticize the MFA program (a holistic strategy) by isolating a single pedagogical setpiece (a localized tactic) and holding it up for censure.

Still, if we can agree that nothing in Bernstein's critique touches the utility of the MFA as a developmental strategy -- one often requiring craft seminars, literature courses, study of literary theory, first-hand experience with writing pedagogy, and much more -- one can accept that he's put his finger on much of what's troubling about the "conventional" writing workshop, even if graduate-level curricula are so hybridic and diverse now that to speak of what is "conventional" seems not a little quaint and even preposterous.

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