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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Yes, but.

The model for the MFA fiction writer is her program counterpart, the poet. Poets have long been professionally bound to academia; decades before the blanketing of the country with MFA programs requiring professors, the poets took to the grad schools, earning Ph.D.s in English and other literary disciplines to finance their real vocation. Thus came of age the concept of the poet-teacher. The poet earns money as a teacher; and, at a higher level of professional accomplishment, from grants and prizes; and, at an even higher level, from appearance fees at other colleges. She does not, as a rule, earn money by publishing books of poems—it has become almost inconceivable that anyone outside a university library will read them. The consequences of this economic arrangement for the quality of American poetry have been often bemoaned (poems are insular, arcane, gratuitously allusive, etc.), if poorly understood. Of more interest here is the economic arrangement proper, and the ways in which it has become that of a large number of fiction writers as well.
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Posted by Suzanne at 10:21 AM
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About Me

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Suzanne
Author of four poetry books including Whipsaw (Anhinga Press 2024) and Fixed Star (JackLeg Press 2022), as well as five chapbooks.

My poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander Magazine, South Dakota Review, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, and elsewhere.

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Blog Archive

Whipsaw

Whipsaw

Fixed Star

Fixed Star

Girl on a Bridge

Girl on a Bridge

Lit Windowpane

Lit Windowpane

Chapbooks

  • American Flamingo (2008)
  • Spring Tide (2005)
  • Red Paper Flower (2004)
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