Who Keeps Killing Poetry?
Source: www.awpwriter.org
Topic: Poetry
Sort Desciption: charge that poetry has become spiritually, politically,. and intellectually stagnant. ... “the ubiquity of lyric poetry, to the exclusion of other ...
Content Inside: “Will the next Walt Whitman be an MFA graduate? Somehow it seems hard to imagine.” —John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation E very few years, the experts decide that she is moribund, comatose, wounded, infected, deranged, or dead. The experts declare a state of emergency and the need for intervention to save her. Even when she is happily talking, laughing, and dining with her dearest friends—the paramedics barge in to drag Poetry away and force her into the ambulance. On a gurney, she is wheeled down corridors of the contagious hospital, where the experts apply defibrillators to her chest; then they apply scalpels and the device for cracking open her sternum so they may poke and prod her heart. John Barr claims that Poetry needs a new heart, preferably one of an invest- ment banker, like himself, or the heart of an insurance salesman, or an Irish rebel, or a doctor—any heart except that which belongs to a professor or any graduate with an MFA degree in creative writing. Barr claims “poets today don’t seem even to be aware that what they write will be influenced by how they live.” 1 MFA graduates and poets working in academe, he gripes, are not really curious enough about their world to go venturing into it. Out of touch with the American people, MFA graduates are appa- Who Keeps Killing Poetry? by D.W. Fenza D.W. Fenza is the executive director of AWP. He attended theWriting Seminars of Johns Hopkins University and the Writers Workshops of the University of Iowa. Those who argue, like John Barr, Joseph Epstein, and William Logan, that poetry is being extravagantly over-produced tend to overlook the exertions that have made it possible for our literature to reflect—more accurately and more variously— our humanity. The Writer’s Chronicle December 2006 Vol. 39 No. 3 Page 1 ratchiks, lost in a paper-chase of credentials and grant-grubbing. They are technicians devoid of soul. “LIVE BROADLY ...
