Dear Mr. Nowak:

I'm really interested in poetry and socioeconomic disadvantage so your posts and work in general intrigue me. However, I am extremely dismayed at the lack of understanding and the truly unfair jibes that you levy on MFA programs, students, and graduates. The generalizations that you make are off-base--way off-base--because of the sheer diversity of everything having to do with creative writing programs in English-speaking worlds. The progressive nature of your critiques really, really are damaged when you present the same poorly reasoned, un-rigorously sourced and gathered attacks on creative writing programs that so many people routinely present. In fact, your larger advocacy of worker's experiences with interview methods and poetry student are sully by these sometimes unrelated attacks. You are able to see the humanity in the workers that you have interphased with and that you ask your students to relate with; why are you not able to see that people who have found great use of MFA programs are also people with complex ideas, feelings, and they aren't the monolithic scourge that you and so many others imagine. Stop it. Spread your well-demonstrated humanity around and please stop it.

Joan

Dear Joan,

Since you don't provide a link to yourself and I can't find you on Google to address your concerns off-line, let me simply say I'm quite confused by your comments. Perhaps you could point to specific "truly unfair jibes" I have written about MFA students and graduates, and if you do I will certainly speak to those concerns. I have consistently advocated for the socio-economic, cultural, and aesthetic concerns of student-writers and all university workers for more than two decades--being invited to help/read/speak as poet-activist with graduate student organizing drives, pushing to raise adjunct and part-time teacher salaries (as well as clerical and other workers at schools), striving to move non-tenure to tenure lines, teaching for nearly two decades at an open-enrollment community college training the next generation of health-care workers (and teaching creative writing), helping unionize a Borders bookstore and working with other bookstore organizers across North America for better wages and working conditions (http://www.myspace.com/urww), etc.

So, please do point out the specific "truly unfair jibes" that I've made and I'll be happy to speak to them in more detail.

Mark

Mark,

Not everyone has a website, especially at my age. Why should that matter?!

I am really quite shocked that you suggested that you have never made unfair jibes at what you call "MFA-land" in this post and because you have gone out of your way to present unfair generalizations about MFA programs and students who present work that merely trots out the corporate values of "MFA-land, as you put it. And you link to a review of your writing that nicely summarizes your criticism.

Caroline Wilkinson, in her review of your book, said the following about your examination of "MFA-land": "At the heart of Workers of the Word lies an essay about MFAs in creative writing—an oddly popular degree in a country where literary reading is on the decline. Nowak incorporates the issue of book sales in his analysis of these programs. He reveals the ambitious breadth of his focus when he sets out to define the last term in his title: “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry.” He tells us that “the American MFA industry” is a “multimillion-dollar conglomeration of state and private enterprises.” This conglomeration includes publications and groups that encourage people to get degrees in creative writing. Poets and Writers magazine is named along with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Also mentioned as contributing to the industry’s “reproduction and expansion” are: “Publishing houses (large- and small press, for profit and not-for-profit), bookstores and book distributors (corporate, independent, and on-line), journals (academically affiliated and non-affiliated), writer’s retreats, contests and grants.” Nowak does not say here how publishing houses, bookstores and the other organizations at the end of the list support the growth of MFA programs. As in “Open Book, Case Closed,” he does not expound key aspects of his argument. But throughout the essay, he does express two theories that pertain to this last part of his definition of the MFA industry: 1) that what is being both published and rewarded in the U.S. is work that reinforces corporate values; and 2) that MFA programs are teaching students how to produce this sort of work." (See your “Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry.")

I'm sorry, but as the mother of a fine middle aged daughter who is finding a lot of meaning from an MFA program, who is not reproducing corporate values in her writing, and who is lower middle class just like her mother (me) I find your generalizations in that chapter to be a real problem. If you think differently that that book reviewer's overview than PLEASE post about it in detail so WORKING people like me and my daughter won't be confused. But in your book you actually do make lots of generalizations about MFA programs that do not always hold true. Those programs ARE people: they are the people who are within them.

As a person who has never been published with a daughter who has never been published I have a problem as well with corporate values and commercialism in publishing. As a writer myself with a blue-collar job, a former public school teaching job--yes, the old school schoolmarm type--(among other occupations) I am attracted to your work but you overstep and exaggerate. I was attracted to your book too! There isn't a lot of discussion of blue collar issues and poetry. Having you on Harriet is just fine indeed! It allows a woman like me to hear your voice!

There are hundreds of MFAers who do it and who cannot be called shills for corporate values; who do the program and who aren't necessarily looking for fame or fortune or even publication!

For example, low-residency MFA programs like the one my daughter is pursuing have opened up new avenues for learning for people who are outside of the corporate system and who just want a new kind of feedback and knowledge about writing. MFA programs in Children's and Popular Writing also give that kind of meaning...

Advocating for worker's rights is one thing. But why don't you talk to working people who are in MFA programs and get their view. THAT'S WHY I'M RESPONDING TO YOU! Not all of us are touting some evil corporate line or contributing to the downfall of literature or writing in the same exact manner. These are the criticisms that you and so many others routinely make and I'm so tired of it and, like I said before, given your excellent advocacy of other people's viewpoints, I'm surprised that you make the same generalizations about "MFA-land"...

BTW: I found your book ¡Workers of the Word, Unite and Fight! at Normals Bookstore here in my hometown, one of the few old-style bookstores with used and off-beat books left. I think my copy was used but it's in great condition.

Others who what to order your really good book and check out your criticisms of MFA-land (which I think are over-generalized and unfair at points) can buy your book from the Palm Press website:

http://www.palmpress.org/press/index.php?id=2

My daughter put your criticism this way: it's like attacking working people for grabbing McDonald's to eat when rushed rather than actually attacking McDonald's. But I have problems with the way she put her criticism.

What say you now?

Joan

Dear Joan,

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. In the long excerpt you cite from the Caroline Wilkinson review as well as the essay itself, I'd still insist that I am critiquing the system 100% and not those in the system--or to cite your daughter's way of putting it, critiquing McDonald's and not the people who go there (or, the people who work there). I worked at Wendy's for nearly a decade and have taught MFA students (and been one), too, and so I know the difficulties involved at each level. That a Big Mac can sustain a working person between her/his two or three jobs isn't my critique; that her or his only option is to have to quickly chow one down under those material and socio-economic circumstances is.

Mark

Can I suggest, Mark, that maybe a little more nuance is possible here, and that in fact your own analysis has had that nuance many times? I have no argument with the critique that the MFA industry is indeed an industry with all the capitalist problems that entails. But there are some good writers teaching in that industry and there are students who learn a lot in it and take away worthwhile things from that experience. The problem in this exchange is that a fast food restaurant is not a good analogy for MFA programs (I know you're not the one who initially made the analogy). Every Wendy's burger is more or less the same, although some I suppose are greasier. But even though many poems produced by writers in MFA programs may not be very interesting, some are, or at least might be, and in any case they're not all the same. And they certainly don't all reproduce corporate values; that would be a fairly reductive take. I'm no huge fan of MFA programs, but the McPoem argument is not only a tired one, but one that teachers in MFA programs regularly level at each other.

I'm not sure how "what is being both published and rewarded in the U.S. is work that reinforces corporate values" and how MFA programs are part of the system that perpetuates corporate value poetry. Is it because the work produced isn't explicitly political (and likewise vocally skeptical of neoliberalism)? And how can a series of diverse programs and presses (often small and not-for-profit) produce as type of stylistic (or value) conformity? I think your central concern is that programs are insufficiently anti-capitalist, but it isn't clear how a decentralized system of programs leads to a kind of corporate value espousing poetry.