"We don’t view Legitimate Dangers as an anthology of poets, but as an anthology of poems. Instead of deciding on our contributors and then asking them for work of their choice to show us, as happens with some other anthologies, we spent over a year reading all the work we could find by an overwhelming number of poets and decided on which poems were particularly representative to what interested us in contemporary American poetry."

So why the poet photographs and the poet biographies? Isn't it disingenuous to claim that "it's all about the poem" (which is a debatable claim in any case, can poems be extracted from the poet) while at the same time providing poet CVs and photographs? This is the era of google, we don't need a paragraph of identifying which universities they studied or taught at...

Hi, Simon, and thank you for your interesting comment. This blog is
already in archive so I only recently became aware of your questions;
otherwise I would have replied sooner.

You, in essence are asking us four questions at once—(1) why did we
include photos? (2) why did we include contributor bios? (3) is it
somehow disingenuous of us to call a book with slightly-longer-than-
average contributor notes and photos an anthology of poems and not
poets? and (4) is it fair to ever say that “it’s all about the poem?”

You also make two assertions (the first explicit, the second implicit)—
(5) that in an “era of google,” there is no need to provide
biographical information in a book, and (6) that the contributor’s
notes are merely educational vitas telling you the reader who went to
what school and who teaches where, something that you the reader would
rather not see in the book itself.

There is a question you don’t raise that may be important to keep in
mind in terms of this discussion: what is the purpose of a
generational anthology exactly? Who is it for? Why are certain equally
accomplished and talented younger poets excluded? (I can think of at
least 85 that we recommended at the end of the book, but there are
plenty others).

While there have obviously been anthologies which try to delineate a
particular school, identify and showcase a very specific aesthetic,
proclaim a “Best-ness” (cf. David Lehman’s series), or reevalute “the
canon,” Legitimate Dangers, as Cate and I conceived it, is not
preoccupied with anything like that—beyond pointing out trends
prevalent among a wide range of newer writers, trends that we see as
being strikingly similar to those evident in the first half of the
20th century in the work of such modernists as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and Wallace
Stevens.

Instead, our book merely hopes to introduce readers currently familiar
with few if any poets under the age of 45 who haven’t been publishing
books for over a decade to the work that best represents my taste and
the taste of my coeditor—specifically, to the contemporary poems our
students, year after year, get most excited about when we teach them,
the poems that Cate and I, as readers, keep returning to time and
again. The work we chose seemed to be particularly well-suited to a
general readership who don’t currently know how phenomenal Lisa
Jarnot’s or Robyn Schiff’s or Tessa Rumsey’s poems are, who, through
the reading of their poems, may start investing more of their time
into hearing and reading poems by Jarnot, Schiff, Rumsey, and hundreds
of other newer writers who are continually making themselves known
through their experiments with language. So keep in mind that the
choices made not only with the poems but also with the photos and bios
had to do with our expectations of an audience who would encounter
this book in a library or a classroom, or acquire it because they’re
curious about contemporary poetry but don’t necessarily know where to
begin.

Now to your specific questions:

It is fairly common practice to include photos of poets next to poems,
especially in anthologies of younger poets, where the poets--through
the poems collected beside their photos—are being introduced to a
larger reading public, thus reminding a wider audience that the poems
were written by a living person at a particular time in his or her
life, in a particular historical moment. Anthologies that have done
this in the past include, but are not limited to, A. Poulin’s numerous
editions of Contemporary American Poetry, Michael Collier’s The New
American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, the Morrow Anthology edited by
Dave Smith and David Bottoms, and the anthology that most influenced
me personally in this project, Paul Carroll’s 1968 The Young American
Poets.

Carroll provided me (at age 14 or so) a much-needed introduction to
the poems of Ted Berrigan, Bob Hass, Clark Coolidge, Tom Clark, Anne
Waldman, Mark Strand, and James Tate, poets who have been meaningful
to me ever since. The photographs from the Paul Carroll anthology have
etched themselves into my memory, constant reminders that someone
actually wrote these poems, someone was young once, at the beginning
of a long life in poetry. Taken together, the photographs in the
Carroll anthology create exactly what Mark Doty in his preface to
Legitimate Dangers feels the photos in our book create—a group
portrait (naturally only as big as the lens of our independent
publisher could afford), of a smaller-than-one-would-like, but
nonetheless representative, segment of a generation of poets in a
particular historical moment.

Also, bluntly, I have found, time and again, that showing my students
the picture of a writer reinforces the notion that the poems on the
page in front of them are not just text but text authored by someone
not that much older than they are. It’s a way to demystify the poem
and underscore that there is a communication taking place between
writer and reader, even if it isn’t the kind of communication most of
us are used to having on a daily basis. Moreover, I personally wanted
to know what the writers of some of my favorite poems looked like, for
the same reason that I was excited when I first saw photographs of
Marianne Moore and John Berryman, for the same reason that I’m happy
when a collection of poems has an author photo on the back. It helps
some students to know who exactly is speaking to them. I like how, in
our anthology, the contributors’ choices of photos (the photographs of
G.C. Waldrep, Jeffrey McDaniel, Joshua Beckman, and Joe Wenderoth
might help illustrate my point) complement, to a general reader, the
poems themselves. The pose in the photo, the pose taken by the poem, I
hope you catch my drift.

We included contributor bios, in part for similar reasons. When I read
a poet I like, I want to find out more about them. When I was a
student applying to MFA programs, I didn’t so much care about the
ranking of a program or its reputation as I did about the quality and
style of the poems of the faculty and alumni. I almost decided to go
to Montana for my MFA instead of Iowa, because I loved the poems in
Mark Levine’s book Debt, knew he taught at Montana at the time, and
thought he’d be someone I’d like to study with. I went to the program
I went to primarily because I was so profoundly affected by my reading
of the poetry of Jorie Graham and Dean Young—who was a visitor at Iowa
my first semester there—but also because so many of the writers whose
poems I liked when I was 21 years old (Mark Strand, many of the poets
in the aforementioned Carroll anthology, Charles Wright, Denis
Johnson) had gone there. At 21, I wanted a similar graduate experience
to what they had. That’s why I think it’s important for a student to
know how the writers he’s most into arrived at where they are, to see
that they didn’t all go to the same graduate program (some didn’t go
to any), did not all attend the same undergraduate university, and
came from many walks of life, personally as well as academically.

Additionally, bio notes—alongside the photos—reinforce the notion that
the poems were written by someone who has not only written these three-
to-five poems, but also, over a period of time, assembled a steady
body of work. Poems obviously do not (as much as some New Critics
would have liked to have us think) exist in vacuums. Again, students
like to know something about the poets’ lives. If a contributor wanted
us to mention the names of their children, spouses, dogs, or wanted to
say something very specific about themselves (cf the contributor’s
notes for Noelle Kocot and Richard Siken), we let them. One
contributor told us she did not want her educational background
publicized. We had no problem with that either. We included
contributor’s notes the way almost all anthologies do—(again, take a
look at the much longer bios in the Prufer and Poulin anthologies, the
bios in the Carroll, Morrow, and Collier, etc). This is a convention
of anthologies—as well as of literary journals, who often have
similarly extensive bios—not a convention we saw any cogent reason to
depart from. I am sure you would agree with me that most literary
journals are about poems and not poets, but the majority of them try
to tell you a little bit about the poet as well. It’s a stylistic
question: some people never read contributor’s notes, while others are
grateful for the added information about the writer.

There is one other practical reason I would have regretted the
exclusion of bios: transparency. If we say that these are writers who
had no more than three books before 2004, published no book before
1995, and were born no earlier than 1960, we need to give their dates
of birth and book publications to show that we’re representing them
accurately. Similarly, if we didn’t list the schools they attended,
it’s possible that someone mght have taken issue with us not being
open about which writers went to Iowa and which didn’t, since the
identity of the school you studied at is often, in the writing world,
such a bizarrely public and contentious issue. I frankly no longer pay
attention to where people went to school or teach, unless I'm trying
to track them down, but I think this kind of information is useful to
others.

Yes, we live in the Google Epoch, but information on google is often
incomplete and contradictory (few good librarians would consider
googling all your information online to be genuine research, and the
internet is a notorious source of misinformation). You can also Google
people’s poems and find them online, then print them out to
disseminate to your students, but the versions online are
unfortunately not always accurate and I personally prefer getting most
of my information from books rather than looking everything up on the
internet, and doubt that I’m alone in this. I hardly see why having
pertinent information in the book itself could possibly be unhelpful
to anyone. Either read it, or if you find it distracting, skip over it.

A sidenote: when I googled “Simon De Deo” to find out more about who
I’d be corresponding with, I had to sift through about thirty websites
to see some of your poems (which by the way I very much enjoyed) and
find out a few things about where you are and where you’re coming from.

With all due respect, however, I can’t help but think it’s a little disingenuous
of you to call contributor’s bios that are significantly smaller than
an index card CV’s, especially considering that many anthologies
provide even more—occasionally invaluable, occasionally just mildly
interesting—information about contributors. If Google is correct,
you’re an astrophysicist by day, one who has attended Harvard,
Princeton, and Oxford, which means you know exactly what CV’s look
like. They tend to be at least 5-6 pages long and sure don’t look like
brief introductory summaries of somebody’s professional life. The only
reason anyone would possibly use the word CV instead of contributor’s
note is if they’re inexplicably trying to imply that when, say, Brenda Shaughnessy, not only offers a selection of five poems in the book but also mentions that she was born in Okinawa, attended UC-Santa Cruz and Columbia, edits a journal and teaches at a college in New York, she’s somehow guilty of being careerist, and not just honest, informative, and straightforward. To me she’s just telling her readers a little bit about herself, the same stuff most writers tell their readers in the bio
notes on the back covers of their individual books of poems.

I hope my answers give you some sense of where I stand on issues such
as bio notes and photos. Ultimately, to me, such stuff is far less
important than the actual poems in an anthology, and is only there for
those who find photographs and bio notes to be a useful resource.
While I find your questions to be highly engaging and apt, I worry
that this mode of inquiry could inadvertently lead to somebody judging
a book of poems by its cover, Sarabande press copy, and contributor
notes, instead of by the 400-450+ pages of poems inside it.

Yours and thank you once again,
Michael

Michael,

You bring out intriguing points about the process of selecting poems for anthologies. I like the idea of a loose structure, which allows you with your anthology to have a wide range of quite diverse poets, but I am not quite sure I am buying the metaphor of architecture, of a structure within the poem "leading to its content," as Cate has put it previously.

I think notably of Olena Kalytiak Davis, since you were using her as an example, where her "shattered" use of language seems to alienate the reader from the experience she is describing, yet her innovative use of writing (syntax, typography and so on) pulls the reader back into the experience of the poem-in-itself like a roller-coaster ride.

When you talk about these "rhetorical models" and "architectural designs" can you be more specific? What poets are you thinking of? I mean, can you point to some poems and poets that fill out this range you're talking about?

Great question.

I'm not interested in formless poems. Every word, every line break in a poem should be intentional. I'm talking aout poems in traditional form (sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, etc) and free-verse poems that employ stanzas (couplets, terccets, quatrains, etc)-- poems that have short lines, or long lines. Prose poems. The structure of the poem creates the vessel for the poem's content.

I'm also talking about the poets and poems Michael and I included in our anthology, Legitimate Dangers. If you go to the url I posted and google some of the contributors I think you'll see that many of the poets have formal concerns and think hard about the structure (visual and aural) of their poems. It's craft.

The line is the unit for for poetry (as the paragraph is the unti for prose), and there's a lot you do with it: the length of the lines affects how the words weigh the line; where you break the line affects the motion and meaning of the poem.

Here are a few poets in the anthology. . .Rick Barot, Dan Beachy-Quick, Joshua Beckman,
Joshua Bell, David Berman, Erica Bernheim,
Mark Bibbins, Sherwin Bitsui, Richard Blanco ,
Joel Brouwer, Oni Buchanan, Julianne Buchsbaum,
Stephen Burt, Dan Chiasson, Carrie St. George Comer ,
Olena Kalytiak Davis, Monica de la Torre, Timothy Donnelly ,
Ben Doyle ,Thomas Sayers Ellis, Andrew Feld ,
Monica Ferrell, Miranda Field, Nick Flynn ,
Katie Ford, Arielle Greenberg, Jennifer Grotz ,
Matthea Harvey, Terrance Hayes, Steve Healey ,
Thomas Heise, Brian Henry, Christine Hume ,etc (there are many more! 85 poets in all.)

Michael's two cents: In response to Johnathan's question, some of the particular rhetorical techniques that seem to particularly "in fashion" with the poets we collected include:

(a) comic deflation-cf. Monica de la Torre's "How to Look at Mexican Highways," David Berman's "Community College in the Rain," Erica Bernheim's "Anne Boleyn," Matthew Zapruder's "Canada," Josh Bell's "Sleeping with Artemis," as well as poems by Matt Rohrer, Steve Healey, Jeffrey Mc Daniel, Arielle Greenberg, and Joe Wenderoth.

(b)prose blocks and sequences of prose blocks--consider the poems of Sabrina Orah Mark, Monica de la Torre, Joe Wenderoth's "Send New Beasts" and "Where I Stand in Regard to the Game," Ethan Paquin's "Capstone," Richard Blanco's "We're Not Going to Malta" and "Perfect City Code," Mark Wunderlich's "Predictions about a Black Car," Joel Brouwer's "Aesthetics" and "Divorce," Sherwin Bitsui's "The Northern Sun"--the list goes on and on...

(c) the accumulation of energy through litanies, listing, anaphora, and other forms of repetition. Poets particularly invested in this technique include Olena Kalytiak Davis, Lisa Jarnot, Juliana Spahr, Joshua Beckman, Richard Siken, and Suzanne Wise.

(d) the preponderance of sometimes deliberately hyperbolic direct statement: G.C. Waldrep writes, "Everything in the world is a knife, everything in the world cuts a little from you," in his poem "Hotel d'Avignon." Ilya Kaminsky, in "Author's Prayer," writes "whatever I say/is a kind of petition/and the darkest of days must I praise." Olena Davis ends her poem "All the Natural Movements of the Soul": "The situation is grave://the way we lean over each other, the way years/later we emerge: hunchbacked, hooded, with full grown tender things called souls." And Spencer Reece declares at the end of his poem "The Clerk's Tale," "We are alone. There is no longer any need to express ourselves."

(e) a fondness for dramatic monologue and performative soliloquy: cf Stephen Burt's "Persephone (Unplugged)," Jennifer Grotz's "Kiss of Judas," Oni Buchanan's talking yak in "The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia," Natasha Trethewey taking on the persona of a black Civil War Soldier in "Native Guard" and the persona of a brothel madam in "Countess P--'s Advice for New Girls," Nick Flynn taking the POV of bees in "Swarm" and "Hive," Suji Kwock Kim's "Monologue for an Onion," and Dan Chiasson's "The Elephant."

Other common interests among the 85 poets we anthologized would include a tendency to rapidly shift between a variety of tones and subject matters in the same poem (Robyn Schiff, Joyelle McSweeney, and Noelle Kocot are among the poets particularly adept at this), a large number of poems addressed to an unspecified the 2nd person "you," poems that announce themselves as "songs"--Dan Chiasson's "Song for a Play," Lisa Jarnot's "Song of the Chinchilla," and Sally Keith's "Subtraction Song" and "Orphean Song," among others, and poems that take on particularly unusual shapes--for instance, Matthea Harvey has a poem called "Definition of Weather,' which takes the form of a dictionary definition.

Hope this gives you a good idea of some of the predominant architectures & rhetorical modes I think Cate is referring to.

Michael

Dear Cate and Michael:

I am interested in poetry as autobiography, specifically poems that address the self in reference to the larger self. I look for poems that communicate the human spirit—what it means to be human—especially since my father is a fundamentalist preacher whose sermons address(ed) the celebrations, trials and tribulations of the soul. After reading the anthology After Confessions, edited by Kate Sontag and David Bottom, I became more aware of arguments concerning confessional / neo-confessional poets. Still, I have some unanswered questions: In terms of contextual value of a poem, do you think that the present academic community frowns upon confessional and / or neo-confessional poetry? Furthermore, what is the distinction between confessional and neo-confessional poetry, and did these questions on aesthetics have any role in your selection of poets included in the anthology?

Scott,

I am not quite sure as to what you refer to when you write "the present academic community." Are you talking about critics like Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom or about writers who teach in writing programs? Regardless, I don't think academia is a unified body. As such, I doubt there is an encompassing trend against confessionalism. For example, after visiting your website, I saw you were a student at NYU, where you will, are, have studied with Sharon Olds.

As for neo-confessional poets, I guess the term refers to poets who want to go back to a narrative of the self while acknowledging experimental techniques, like Olena Kalytiak Davis ...

I am writing a lot about Olena Kalytiak Davis, am I not?

Francois

It's rather fascinating to see how anthologies play a central role in American poetry and in the formative years of a poet. In interviews or elsewhere, many poets mention one anthology or another as their introduction to poetry, rather than a teacher or a mentor: Kenneth Koch, Tony Hoagland, ... Even John Ashbery frequently mentions the Louis Untermeyer anthology.

Yet, at the same time, anthologies seem to be preponderant only in the United States (or at least in English-speaking countries). They are not as widely circulated in France, for example, and do not usually have such a broad range of aesthetics. They seem to be much more thematic, like Robert Brasillach's Anthologie de la poesie grecque or Georges Pompidou's Anthologie de la poesie francaise, which really stops with Eluard's 1930's poems.

I'm curious about your anthology's focus on poets of your own generation. Did any qualities begin to strike you as characteristic of your generation as you put the anthology together? Or are the poets of your generations as various as the architectures of their poems?

Francois,

Interesting, too, to note the predominance of MFA programs in the United States as compared to other countries.

I think this says a lot about the American writing community, and I have so much I could say about this topic it's not even funny . . . but I am due for a dinner date, and it will have to wait.

Scott, I address your question in part in my response to Johnathan Weeks's question above. But I would also say other characteristics I find particularly prevalent in our generation are a suspicion of the straightforward "literal-narrative-of-experience," an eagerness to tackle the "big questions," a preference for elliptical discourse, renewed interest in the lyric, alternation between the irreverent and the emotionally vulnerable, and an interest in being in dialogue, both in terms of form in content, with poets as varied as Hopkins, John Donne, Whitman, Dickinson, Lowell, Stevens, Berryman, Marianne Moore, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Simic. There also seems to be a great investment in mass culture, with quite a few poets turning to film, television, popular music, etc. for inspiration.

Cate,

I think MFA programs are indeed a more American phenomena (although there are some in the UK, I heard). For example, while there are writing workshops in France (OuLiPo organizes at least one every year), they are not located within academia. I am not sure about the countries of the former Warsaw bloc. I will not talk about the education of Adam Zagajewski and other Polish poets, which you already know in detail.

On the other hand, I am not sure there is a correlation between the importance of anthologies and the predominance of MFA programs (for the record, I am not enrolled in one, as Michael might tell you).

Francois,

Michael replying: to my mind, the MFA program really began as a way to create writing communities, give young writers time to focus exclusively on their craft, and also to pay fiction writers and poets for their presence on campus. The popularity of writing programs in the United States can actually be correlated with WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam, and the GI Bill, which enabled veterans to go to grad school(instead of immediately to a job), and many chose to enroll in MFA programs to write about their experiences in wartime. Can writing be taught in MFA programs? Well, writers can get inspiration and ideas from being a part of a community, get an increased familiarity with literature--especially contemporary literature--and apply that familiarity to their poetry and fiction, and they can also learn a variety of techniques and creative approaches that will enable them to try new things in their own creative work. An MFA program will not make a bad writer into a good one, but it can make a strong writer into a more polished, stronger writer. Most importantly, MFA programs--sice there are deadlines to hand in poems and stories when you are in school and since you spend so much of your time in writing school surrounded by literature--prevent students from stopping writing altogether. At a talk he gave recently at the college I teach at, Nebraska Wesleyan, the poet Dean Young posited that he is a successful writer not because he wrote better poems than his peers in middle school, high school, and college, but because his school peers stopped writing, while he kept going. MFA programs certainly encourage you to keep going. You are no longer a poet when you stop poetry and devote yourself strictly to other pursuits, horticulture, law, the stock market, blogging. There is so little time. So that's why I am not an adversary of the MFA program. As far as their existence abroad, in Russia and Western Europe, people have often been very suspect of the notion that writing can be "taught"--I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in an MFA program. However, writing groups, colonies for writers, and literary salons have existed the world over for a very long time, and in some ways, the serve a very similar function as the MFA program. However, the current trend abroad is also toward academicizing the teaching of writing, especially in England, but also, notably, in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

As far as anthologies, I don't think there's any connection between MFA programs and anthologies. I think there's a connection between anthologies shared aesthetic communities wishing to create a book representative of that community, and an interest on the part of many readers to familiarize themselves with poetry through compilations--the way gallery shows of multiple artists in 19th-and-early 20th century France created a sense of artistic schools and trends, and popularized a large number of artists to a mass audience. But anthologies have certainly existed in other countries for a very long time--Dadaists and Surrealists would gather their work together, Russian poets would produce books with several authors represented in the same volume. My first real exposure to poetry in Russian (my first and native language) came from reading a crappy little book of Socialist Realist poems called Imena Na Poverki, representing the work of young poets killed while fighting on the Russian Front in the Second World War. I remember noticing thematic and technical trends in that book, and immediately having access to a large number of poets and poetries through that one book. Likewise, my introduction to poetry in English also had to do with a younger poets anthology. In this case, it was Paul Carroll's 1968 The Young American Poets, which my father bought for loose change at a rummage sale. I remember immersing myself in the book, fascinated both by the connections between authors and by the diversity of voices represented. The Carroll anthology led me to some sense of what kind of poetry was being written in the 1960's and a first feeling that their WAS a vibrant community of terrific, idiosyncratic poets in this country--that poetry indeed did matter to a greater number of people than some critics and booksellers would have you believe.

Michael

Michael,

Perhaps I should have been more explicit with my reply to Cate. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against MFA programs (as our previous conversations when you were still in Houston), although I am rather skeptic to the arguments of both opponents (like August Kleinzahler) and proponents of MFA programs.

On the other hand, I totally agree with you that they create a sense of community, which is necessary for any poet. I guess my concern here has more to do with an examination between the health of poetry within a certain place and the impact writing programs and anthologies have on it.

As I was discussing with Jennifer Grotz and you at Gulf Coast's offices, I really consider contemporary French poetry comatose. Nothing new or interesting is coming out of this scene at the moment. There are no writing programs in an academic setting there and as I have already written previously, the few anthologies that are released there are redundant, spanning from Villon (if one is lucky) to Eluard. On the other hand, I remember Sasha (West) telling me of the time she saw in Krakow people gathering fervently to see Milosz read. Of course, neither Milosz nor Zagajewski spent much, if any, time in the official writers' guild, but this may point at something about the exposure of the public to poetry.

Finally, there is the case of Japan where poets like Tanikawa Shuntaro and those of Arechi (the Wasteland movement) are still selling fairly well. Yet there are no writing programs there.

Francois

Well... I question the correlation of MFA programs and the presence of veterans on campuses. If what I have read is true, there were about 25 MFA programs in the US in 1980, and there are now about 125, which suggests the dramatic expansion of such programs is a relatively recent phenomenon.

We will not know how healthy a development this is for a generation or two, I suppose. Personally, I think the quality of poems published in journals is on the average somewhat higher now than it was in the 1960s or 1970s -- and I'm willing to suppose the many graduate writing programs have something to do with that.

Scott, a valid point about the recent proliferation of new MFA programs. On the other hand, support for my claim that the root of the creative writing program’s popularity can be traced to the GI Bill can be found in the Michael Martone essay collection, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art (University of Georgia Press, 2005), where he writes,

“I graduated from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in 1979, a member of the first generation of American literary writers to be completely naturalized into the curious notion (inaugurated by the cadre of World War II-benefited GIs who originated the idea) that the job of writer could be professionalized with a stint in a university workshop” (3-4).

Before World War II, one of the only places to study writing on a graduate level was the University of Iowa Workshop. To go from 1 or 2 programs pre-WWII to 25 by 1980 is, to me, evidence of a war-related first wave of MFA program proliferation, since many of those programs were founded during or in the aftermath of wars, Johns Hopkins shortly after WWII, University of Arizona and others during the Vietnam period (not just a way to write about war experiences but also a way to avoid the draft). In the period between 1945 and 1980, a high percentage of MFA students at Iowa and elsewhere were recent veterans.

I agree that there is now a second wave of MFA program popularity that has nothing to do with military combat. I see two primary reasons for this: (1) the success and fame of writers who have attended MFA programs (Iowa alone boasted Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, Mark Strand, Phil Levine, Rita Dove, Robert Bly, Raymond Carver, etc) in the period between 1945 and 1980 caused more and more aspiring writers to want to follow in their footsteps and clamor for the opportunity to receive feedback on their creative efforts from the likes of John Berryman and Kurt Vonnegut and (2) MFA programs are cash cows for universities, since there are so many aspiring writers who want to be given time to write in a community of writers and have romanticized notions of being a published author that they will gladly shell out tuition or live below poverty level TA-ing composition classes, thus providing money and cheap labor for the university. An interesting question would be, have any MFA programs had to disband due to insufficient enrollment? Because it seems, from this vantage point, that they all tend to be quite profitable.

Awesome blog. Peace out until next time TabathaOster