Underemployed MFAs FTW
This Lady is a riot and also correct. Take a moment and read for yourself.
I, however, would argue that there IS a leper colony for MFAs. It is called the service industry.
...
On an unrelated (or perhaps intimately related) note, I just finished my first reading of Gregory Orr's Poetry As Survival after a week of restless commuting, staved somewhat by the Anodyne of words. I have to say, I like it - yes. But I also found Orr's too-neat compartmentalizing of the Romantic and Enlightenment ethos..es? ethoi? mindsets to be grating. He goes after my boy Pope and gives naught but one (arguably sarcastic) stanza as evidence. Sloppy scholarship, that.* And he writes Eliot off as a boy-toy of the Overculture** because of his later zeal for the Anglican Church. I'm no fan of the Church these days, but to say that Christianity = Overculture is a bit short-sighted. The CHURCH, often; CHRISTIANITY? Is actually about as subversive as any eye-battingly enthralled adherent of Commiepinko Romanticism could dream. Namely - minus the reinterpretation of politcally and misogynistically-motivated nancy pope boys.
I feel like I should have read the book a few years ago intellectually, but emotionally, I'm glad to have found it now. I'm on the outs with the Church. I'm on the outs as far as my involvement with poetry as an external happening (which is to assume that I ever was on the ins, which I was not). Namely, the bulk of my writerly growth comes from introspection. This book, of course, reminded me that that's sort of, you know, the POINT. That the processing and writing I do in my most isolated moments, in my most intense lonlinesses, is in and of itself a reaching out. IT (not the publishing, not the hobnobbing, not the oh-god-let-someone-publish-my-crap MSS., not even the academic-political-whatsit-whinefest listserv conversation) is an end in itself.
I'm okay, you're okay, let's all quietly change the world.
I, however, would argue that there IS a leper colony for MFAs. It is called the service industry.
...
On an unrelated (or perhaps intimately related) note, I just finished my first reading of Gregory Orr's Poetry As Survival after a week of restless commuting, staved somewhat by the Anodyne of words. I have to say, I like it - yes. But I also found Orr's too-neat compartmentalizing of the Romantic and Enlightenment ethos..es? ethoi? mindsets to be grating. He goes after my boy Pope and gives naught but one (arguably sarcastic) stanza as evidence. Sloppy scholarship, that.* And he writes Eliot off as a boy-toy of the Overculture** because of his later zeal for the Anglican Church. I'm no fan of the Church these days, but to say that Christianity = Overculture is a bit short-sighted. The CHURCH, often; CHRISTIANITY? Is actually about as subversive as any eye-battingly enthralled adherent of Commiepinko Romanticism could dream. Namely - minus the reinterpretation of politcally and misogynistically-motivated nancy pope boys.
I feel like I should have read the book a few years ago intellectually, but emotionally, I'm glad to have found it now. I'm on the outs with the Church. I'm on the outs as far as my involvement with poetry as an external happening (which is to assume that I ever was on the ins, which I was not). Namely, the bulk of my writerly growth comes from introspection. This book, of course, reminded me that that's sort of, you know, the POINT. That the processing and writing I do in my most isolated moments, in my most intense lonlinesses, is in and of itself a reaching out. IT (not the publishing, not the hobnobbing, not the oh-god-let-someone-publish-my-crap MSS., not even the academic-political-whatsit-whinefest listserv conversation) is an end in itself.
I'm okay, you're okay, let's all quietly change the world.
...
* Note: I am a blogger, not a scholar, and thus am not beholden to the laws and ethics of scholarship, nor the rules of basic grammar or decency.
** To my understanding, "Overculture" is the super sci-fi-ish notion of the hoi polloi. It would include figures such as Alexander Pope, the Pope, Cute Overload and Roman Polanski.
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