-
A Call for Simple Information
It may be just end-of-year fogginess, but I have been searching for—and failing to find—current statistics on how many writers, by genre, graduate from America’s 300-plus graduate writing programs each year. Have any of you Birders run across these numbers? If so, please drop a link into the comment stream.Read More
-
Retro-Garde
Anyone fishing around in the buzzworthy poetry mags these days will recognize the fragmentarian described in this article. The piece was published in 2007, but Mr. Taylor’s publishability has gone off the charts over the past half-dozen years. Of course, he writes under hundreds of pseudonyms with a raft of different MFA credentials attached to each one.Read More
-
In Key with the Times
Donald Hall Seth Abramson One can only feel grateful for Seth Abramson’s “myth-busting” posts at The Huffington Post (see here and here). They constitute a reply to Donald Hall and his statements about “the McPoem,” set forth in his influential essay “Poetry and Ambition” (1983). “The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem,” Hall wrote, “which is ‘a mold in plaster, / Made with no loss of time,’ with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit.” This is false, according to my own experience, but that doesn’t matter.Read More
-
A Blogger’s Notebook 12
The following found poem stitches together 19 headlines from ads for MFA programs published in the January / February 2010 issue of Poets and Writers—an issue focused on “inspiration.” Each discreet sentence is a headline; those presented as parenthetical statements are, of course, not in parentheses in the ads themselves. The headlines appear in the same order as the ads appear in the publication. To Writing Programs: A Canticle This way, that way, that way, this, Here and there a fresh love is.Read More
-
His poems weren’t bad…
Here’s a brief excerpt from Roberto Bolaño’s amazing posthumous novel 2666. It concerns a young poet who is hanging around in the hope that an older poet whom he admires will take a look at his poems. The speaker, a woman, is also there to see the famous poet: His poems weren’t bad. His only problem was that he wrote just like the poet. These things can’t have happened to you, I said, you’re too young to have suffered this much. He made a gesture as if to say that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.Read More
-
Poetic-Critical Complex Langpo Advocates Rationing Pierian Springwater
From a 2/6/08 blog post by Ron Silliman: “I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
