MFA: My Final Answer

Meeting another academic invariably means revealing my degrees, but I feel sheepish telling them I have an MA and an MFA. Somewhere, I have the framed diplomas, but my MA is 25 years old—I can barely picture my girlfriend from that time, so how can I be expected to remember “interstitial transcendence in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam“? And my MFA, at age six, grows old even faster. For the sake of my resume, I’m glad degrees don’t come with expiration dates… though maybe they should.

Academics seem particularly curious about the MFA. To them—and to me, actually—it’s a peculiar degree, and they want to know, “Was it worth it?” I’d love to offer my answer once and for all:

financially, ugh.
personally, yes.
professionally, most probably.
experientially, well, duh!

Overall, I’m glad I did it. You may notice, however, I deliberately skipped over “artistically.” There my answer is a decided “hmmmm.” My MFA decorates my vita, but the profession it professed to prepare me for—artist—doesn’t require a degree. As long as you sidestep debates about “quality,” anyone can be an artist. It only requires experience and, some would argue, not the academic sort. “Artists don’t need no shoolin’,” they might say, or, more devastatingly, “MFAs interfere with the development of a true artist.”

I have a more complicated response to that issue.

My MFA is in writing poetry, and one of the books I read during the program was Written in Water, Written in Stone, (University of Michigan Press, 1996) a collection of essays about the practice of poetry. As such it offers an invaluable window into the creative process. However, it also contains considerable ire about the MFA industry. In an interview with Wayne Dodd, Robert Bly says, “MFA students are winning because they are receiving the knowledge that you have received in fifteen years of writing poetry and you are giving it to them and they are accepting it.” Then Wayne Dodd gets in his own licks, asking, “You would agree, then, the system is a system of avoidance of pain? It seems to me that is the exact opposite way of going about discovering how to write profound poetry.”

Donald Hall, in another essay in this anthology, “Poetry and Ambition,” shouts the battle cry, “Abolish the M. F. A!” He says MFA programs create “‘a mold in plaster, / Made with no loss of time,’ with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit.” Studying how to write poetry contributes to what Hall calls the “McPoem,” a barely passable work that bears a striking resemblance to hundreds of other passable poems manufactured that year. John Haines, in “The Hole in the Bucket,” describes American poetry as “disposable,” because our poems, “convey certain information and mood, a few images, but which read once and understood, offer little to return to.”

Ouch. The criticisms of Bly and Hall are particularly hard for me to take, as they were two of the poets associated with my MFA program at Bennington. I attended their lectures and seminars. If they reject MFAs, where does that put me?

It gets worse. Consider Hall’s description of the staple of creative writing programs, the workshop:

The poetry workshop resembles a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair. Here is the homemade airplane for which the crazed inventor forgot to provide wings; here is the internal combustion engine all finished except that it lacks a carburetor; here is the rowboat without oarlocks, the ladder without rungs, the motorcycle without wheels. We advance our nonfunctioning machine into a circle of other apprentice inventors and one or two senior Edisons. ‘Very good’ they say, ‘it almost flies . . . how about, uh . . . How about wings?’ or ‘Let me show you how to build a carburetor.’”

I have no trouble identifying with this scene. Though I participated in many excellent workshops while I was getting my MFA, I remember confusion about whether my machines were functioning or not. I presented my own “constructions” in hopes that they would “work”—for if they didn’t work, I feared I would not be able to repair them. During my time at school, my shelf grew heavy with owners manuals, and I gained an intellectual understanding. A few years down the road, however, the practice and theory now seem largely separate. Sometimes it seems one can only contaminate the other. I’ve discovered the question of effectiveness is more basic than those manuals led me to believe.

That said, every learner has visited the workshop participant’s state of mind—the place where you are paralyzed with all of the intellectual choices you’ve been offered. Creative writing teachers are wrong, however, if they think the process painless. You just hope the pain is temporary. You look for a hand, an answer, a teacher. You ask, “Which of these images should I pay attention to, which of these techniques?” And you accept help, hoping—perhaps unrealistically—that someday you will no longer need to ask, that you will know without asking…because you so desperately want to say what you feel and want it to reach someone.

I’m still not sure I know what a carburetor really is, where it belongs, or what it does, but I’m grateful I had the chance to ask. I’m farther along. It’s taken me six years, but now I’m learning to forget the manual, and just fix stuff. In addtion to the books and work of other writers, what I needed—and what a creative writing program can’t give you, at least not by itself—was practice.

In his interview with Dodd, Robert Bly waxes nostalgic for the days of Renaissance painters where an eager pupil might appear at a master’s studio and beg to be taught. “Sure,” the master would answer, and set the pupil to work, probably making the paint or stretching the canvases for a few years, doing his own drawing on the side. As he swept the floor, the apprentice would listen to conversations about art between the master and other artists or between the master and more experienced students. If he caught the eye of the master, the pupil might eventually get to paint a cherub or two. Bly applauds these young artists who “went to a studio and entered into a deep father-son relationship with a painter, privately one-to-one in a studio.”

Bly prefers, however, the model of Ch’an Buddhism. “Their method doesn’t resemble a workshop,” Bly says, “They didn’t teach politeness or the smooth surface . . . [The teacher's] plan would involve something entirely outside the building.” Bly imagines a teacher who rebuffs questions and sends students off to work for a few months to build something or go on a pilgrimage for a few years. When the pupil returns, the teacher’s job would be to be rebuff him or her again. “One might tell a student,” says Bly,

“After you have built your hut, translate twenty-five poems from a Rumanian Poet.”
“But I don’t know Rumanian.”
“Well then, that’s your first job. You learn Rumanian, translate the twenty-five poems, and then come back to see me, and I’ll tell you what I think about ‘the deep image.’”

I think I prefer getting an MFA. I can see how translating Rumanian would do me good, how it might send me back to my inner resources. But any effective student could, should, would do somthing like that in an MFA program as well. What Bly forgets—or, more likely, doesn’t notice—is the discomfort creative writing students feel. Perhaps he remembers his own hard knocks and laments “kids these days.” As a teacher myself, I can understand why he would like them to get more lost before they cry for help. However, while he would rather I spend years meditating on how little I know, I never planned to avoid it and didn’t. He made me more aware of my ignorance than almost anything else. I never felt I was “winning.” It’s just that—while he was busy telling me what to think about and do—I thought I ought to listen.

In the best of all possible worlds, should the MFA be the only solution to learning how to write? No, but it is A way, and as long as you know not to expect THE answer, it’s worth doing.

In The Shape of Content, Ben Shahn says, “to create anything at all in any field and especially anything of outstanding worth requires nonconformity, or a want of satisfaction with things as the are.” It bears remembering that students often ask for help because they too are dissatisfied with things as they are. My most ambitious students want to know everything. True, if they simply dwell in a half-light of ignorance or seek my guidance at every turn, they shouldn’t expect progress. Their basic impulse, however, is sound—they should want to know. If they can mix in a little nonconformity, some mulishness, a critical outlook on the wisdom they are offered, they will learn.

Another essay in Written in Water, Written in Stone is a funny piece by Robert Francis called “Four Pots Shots in Poetry.” In one of his “pot shots” he describes his teaching as a pie comprised of six sections. The first two slices are “What I told them that they already knew,” and “what I told them they could have found out just as well or better from books.” But Francis’ pie starts to get more interesting after that. The third slice is, “What I told them that they refused to accept.” The fourth is, “What I told them that they were willing to accept and may have thought they accepted but couldn’t accept since they couldn’t fully understand,” and the last is “what I didn’t tell them, for I didn’t try to tell them all I knew.”

Was the MFA worth it? I spent two years eating that pie, and I’ve spent the last six years trying to find the rest. I’m glad I’ve eaten…and happy more pie remains.