Update: Here's Some Fantastic Poetry from MFA-Land

The MFA is bad for literature, but even writers with MFAs can and do work magic

The best way to get attention on the internet is simple: criticize people. Roundly. Whether you’re blogging, YouTubing, or writing long-form journalism, criticism is the magic sauce, so don’t hold back. Lay on the snark; be trenchant; make it personal. Your troops will rally ecstatically to your side and the opposition will huff angrily. This angry huffing is good; it translates to attention, and attention is the currency of the realm.

Well, I’m not immune. It’s more fun to write snarky critiques of others than to research and write a detailed Substack article about, say, some obscure scientific finding. This is in no small part because it’s nice to get new subscribers who discovered you from an angry repost somewhere and who, by selection, hate the same stuff you do. By the same token, it’s not much fun to publish an exhaustively worked-over, well balanced, mature think piece only to watch it plop into the waters and sink immediately, like a bad joke at a dinner party.

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Earlier this month, I took some of this infernal delight in attacking a fellow poet, Lee Upton (I didn’t mention her name then but will here, for reasons that will quickly become obvious), for the sake of illustrating some of the ways in which contemporary poetry mostly sucks. The post in which I did this was about why I never got an MFA (Master of Fine Arts — for some reason I neglected to define it there).

It was a fun post to write, because it provided so many opportunities to make fun of others, and it rallied quite a number of new readers to my Substack: readers who, like me, think that contemporary poetry mostly sucks, or at least that MFA programs are a parasitic barnacle on the world of literature.

Now, I’m not retracting a word of it. The poem I deconstructed in that post was and still is a basically bad poem; most literature written now isn’t very good; MFA programs are a substantial part of the reason why.

But…

I’ve written some pretty schlocky poems, too.

Thankfully, most of my really bad poems have never seen the light of day. Why? What I do is unpopular. I mostly write formalist poetry in an era of prejudice against formalism. I have the bad taste to be a white dude at a time when (new) white dudes are as hip as toe fungus. So my worst stuff mostly stays hidden. It doesn't get published. (Some of my very best stuff does, but that’s a topic for another post.)

But what if my style of bad poems was, for some inscrutable reason, currently popular among the literary set? What if the poetic gatekeepers had a trendy weakness for my characteristic white-dude brand of bad poetry?

Well, then maybe my bad poems would get published widely. They’d be anthologized. I’d get invited to give readings at private events on the Upper West Side and teach workshops at Bard. Soon, lean, hungry counter-elites would start attacking my poems, deservedly, in Substack posts as a symbol of everything that’s decadent and wretched about today’s literary scene.

And maybe they’d be right. But if they ignored all my good poems while they were at it (assuming I had any good poems), I think that would irk me. I’d feel like a mere symbol of some unpleasant impersonal feature of contemporary high culture, not a human being or artist. And isn’t art supposed to forge connection between humans?

This is all a long way of saying that I found some poems by Lee Upton that I actually kind of liked, and I wanted to share them and talk about why I think they’re good.

Parents and Bills

The first poem is wrenching. It’s called “Doing the Bills,” and it’s very compact — only 12 lines, shorter than a sonnet. It begins with the poet recalling her “father impaling bills/on a nail…then putting his head in his hands.”

This image pops with bitter clarity. If you grew up wearing hand-me-down clothes and overhearing fights about money and layoffs, you recognize the scene. You remember the worry on parents’ faces, the electric tension in the air, the walking-on-eggshells snappishness in the kitchen. These lines capture it all with clarity so businesslike it stings.

But they don’t go into detail about it. The poem’s approach is gestural, sketching only the barest outlines of a memory and forcing the reader to fill in or infer the rest. The result is a disciplined understatement that turns the screw, allows the full ache of desperation to dawn on the reader offhandedly. Like a tossed-off line in a classic movie, the simple image conveys far more than it at first seems to.

The scene then swims uneasily into the present, where both a character addressed in the second person and the speaker are likewise holding their heads in their hands. The “you” — presumably the speaker’s partner or husband — reflects the image of the father, now long in the past, and the speaker herself completes the triad.

Three adults, grown and weary, spanning decades, separated perhaps by time and sex, but confronting the same dread, their heads in their hands: this unhappy synod opens the way back into the past for the poem’s conclusion. Her head in her hands, her husband’s head in his hands, the speaker suddenly recalls another image from decades prior: her father, the work of dealing with the bills finished, “crumbling bread in a bowl/and pouring milk over the bread/and spooning in sugar.”

And that’s the end of the poem. The image is powerful because it’s simple, because it illustrates the reality of financial struggle in a vignette you can taste and see concretely, because it doesn’t beat you over the head. It simply leaves you, the reader, with a real picture of profound ache.

For me, this painful conclusion calls to mind one of my very favorite 20th-century poems: “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden. Hayden, raised unknowingly by foster parents, had a rocky relationship with the man he called father. Yet in what is perhaps his most famous poem, he wrote regretfully about his lack of gratitude for the sacrifices of his foster father, who woke before the rest of the family “in the blueblack cold,” stoked the fire, and drove out the chill with hands “cracked…from labor in the weekday weather.”

Hayden’s poem concludes with one of the most heartbreaking and poignant couplets in all of English-language poetry. After recalling “Speaking indifferently to him” who had not only started the fire but “polished my good shoes as well,” the poet laments, now with the wisdom of age, “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

Parents sacrifice for children. We, as children, only dimly comprehend the scope and depth of those sacrifices at the time — if it all. But as we age, we look back and understand, maybe with chagrin, what it really meant for our folks to choose to pay the rent but not the gas bill that month, to drive us constantly to practices for sports we ourselves were indifferent toward, or to eat bread in a bowl so their kids could have more for lunch the next day. “Doing the Bills” brings that awful knowledge to life in a terse and majestic few lines.

The Love Drug and Its Discontents

The second, very different, poem is called “And Maidens Call It ‘Love-in-Idleness.’” The title is a reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In that play, “love-in-idleness” is a pansy flower that, if placed on a sleeping person’s eyes, makes them fall in love with the first person they see after waking up. (It received its power and its purple color from a misaimed arrow of Cupid’s.) This aphrodisiac flower drives the play’s plot, allowing the fairy king Oberon and his mischievous servant, Puck, to manipulate other characters’s love lives to suit their comedic plans.

Unusually for a contemporary poem but appropriately for its allusions, this poem is deeply playful — even puckish, you might say. Equally unusual is the fact that it rhymes. In fact, every line but one has the same rhyme.

After an epigraph from Shakespeare’s play, the poem begins “Others call it love in laziness/or violence in loveliness.” It then skips into a breathless enumeration of alternative names for the flower with delightfully sibilant endings, such as “affectation on the couchness” and “You’re prurient, yes you are, Sis.” The ensuing pileup of comedically forced “-ess” and “-is” endings cumulates to a farcical effect, carrying the reader along, primed for a punchline.

Inventing words is one of poetry’s great callings, one unfortunately much neglected in the cautious, credentialed, New Yorker-y poetry world of today. But here, Upton throws caution to the winds and coins neologisms left and right: “couchness,” “lunchness,” “glassness.” The second stanza (of two) begins with “In old jokes a monarch is referred to as Your Lowness,” then scurries on to a line whose agonized syntax and awkward rhythm trip up the reader pleasurably, like a slapstick comedian stumbling ludicrously over a rake onstage: “Maidens exist, but no one anymore calls them this.”

Racing from there to its denouement, the poem returns to the name of the eponymous flower, which is “this thing you’re going to find for us.” The unexpected appearance of a second-person addressee portends a shift in the poem’s direction, and indeed its nature. Until now, we’ve been more or less on a merry-go-round ride, skipping cheerfully through a list of appellations for a love drug, enjoying what seems to be basically good, old-fashioned nonsense poetry. No more.

Nonsense poems are great art. The poets of our dour age could benefit us all by rediscovering and writing more of them. But this poem turns out to be a different kind of ride. The “you” promises to provide the speaker with love-in-idleness, but this means offering a drug, a kind of manipulation. That is, the kind of love conjured by a fairy king’s pansy “means less is less, unless love is a business.”

The double rhyme in this line seems to amplify the playfulness only to heighten its contrast with the final breakdown of the rhyme in the concluding lines: “and then we’re not talking idleness/we’re talking work.” This sudden conclusion, unrhymed with the rest of the poem, at first seems like still more comedy. It’s a kind of ludicrous squash dropped from the rafters, ending the play with a wet thud. Its incongruity elicits the laugh of shock at the absurd.

But is the addressee of this poem promising an illusion, a drug, or a kind of work? Is the proffered love going to be idleness, as insubstantial as a play whose final lines mockingly question whether the plot was reality or dream? Or will it not be idleness, will it be something much less frivolous and jokey, less fun maybe, but more substantial and redoubtable? What kind of story are we embarking on?

“And Maidens Call It ‘Love-in-Idleness’” is a trickster poem alluding to a play about the fancies of magical tricksters, but it ends up concerning some of the most real questions life poses.

Just as the manipulative fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are ultimately benign, the poem initially promises a kind of comedic entertainment, a diversionary romp through the joys of pure language. Yet all plays end, and when the lights go up, the real world crashes in with all its dissonance. Love that promises to be the real deal turns out to be a trick of the light, the transient action of potent chemicals on our brains. Romance that lasts turns out not to be breathless diversion, but the hardest of hard labor. In asking which it will be, Upton’s poem masters both illusion and reality while (thank God) flouting the joyless, diploma-clutching conventions that make most 21st-century poetry so hopelessly dull.

Art and Trains

I wanted to share these excellent poems for two reasons. First, as rare examples of outstanding 21st-century poetry, they deserve to be read widely and shared. Second, my critique of contemporary poetry and the MFA world isn’t personal. I like getting new subscribers (subscribe if you haven’t yet!), but I don’t simply want to tear down the many poets and writers who have, for reasons that probably seemed valid to them at the time, hopped onboard the MFA train.

Let’s be honest: I wouldn’t have written that post if I hadn’t at one point been mooching around that same station, luggage uncertainly clutched in hand.

Ultimately, I didn’t like the look of that particular train, so I went elsewhere to pursue my adventures. But I never stopped loving literature or writing. Those who chose otherwise, who rode the MFA line to its final station (wherever that is), are fellow lovers of literature, and I don’t want the easy dopamine fix of online criticism to obscure that fellowship.

This Substack is ostensibly about culture, and poetry (often in the form of song) has been central to human cultures since time before time. Art of all kinds, in fact, is a sine qua non of human culture — if you don’t have it, you don’t have culture. So as the various crises of our current civilization stack up, questions of art and literature, story and song, become more important, not less.

A viable culture needs to produce art that’s more mature, vibrant, playful, and (paradoxically) serious than what we’re coughing up these days or what MFA programs teach people to make. I’m convinced that the church, as the best anchor for a living culture and crafter of souls, has a vital role to play in setting up the social and intellectual conditions for a post-MFA art landscape.

But that’s getting ahead of things. For now, I encourage you to read the poems I’ve linked to — once aloud, the way poetry should be, and once silently, to grapple with the meanings — and enjoy the gift of language that reaches beyond the everyday.