Poetry/Another Victim of Creative Writing

...Indeed, such recent events as the decision of Los Angeles Times Book Review editors to discontinue poetry reviewing altogether suggest that things are growing steadily worse...

...The work is subtly reasoned, magisterially informed, and on all counts superb?' Forrest McDonald "Frank Strong's well researched book illuminates a whole new perspective of economic liberty in the American Constitution...

...When they're students, they have to write them for homework...

...Study with the right person at the right university, and you'll stand a much better chance of getting your poems into the best magazines and journals, of having a book published, of receiving invitations to read, and of winning grants and awards...

...A small number of gifted poets meeting regularly with a dedicated, perceptive, selfless, and articulate teacher: certainly there can be some benefit in this sort of thing, for some poets, anyway...

...Why is this so...

...Sense and Nonsense is a bicentennial tour de force?' William Van Alstyne 1986 316 pp $24.95 Commentaries on the Constitution by Joseph Story intro...

...Oct...

...He published the work in two forms—a three-volume treatise and a one-volume abridgment...

...An important and provocative contribution to Tocqueville scholarship...

...Nowadays, therefore, the young college graduate who wants to be a poet usually goes straight into a program...

...There is little reason to believe that things will be any different twenty years from now...

...when they become teachers, they have to write them in order to accumulate enough publications to secure tenure and promotions...

...Koritansky's argument is cogently and subtly put and is well grounded in the text?' Choice 1986 170 pp index $1750 Natural Right and Political Right Essays in Honor of Harty V. Jaffa Thomas B. Silver and Peter W Schramm, editors In this festschrift honoring one of America's preeminent political philosophers, Harry V. Jaffa, twenty-four colleagues, former students, and friends have contributed a variety of essays attempting to present not only a philosophical wisdom but a practical wisdom, useful to those who must make choices in a changing world...

...That, in essence, is what makes the "better" creative-writingprograms better: the profs have superior connections...

...No, what these lucky students get out of the creative-writing program is connections...

...One reason why there are so many poems of this sort in circulation is that creative-writing teachers, aware of their inability to help most of their students to "find their voices," opt instead for what they apparently consider to be the next best thing: they teach their students to write poems that look professional...

...For in return for their parents' cash, these kids receive exactly what they need to make it as poets in the 1980s...

...Like scholars, in other words, poets in the academy are subject to that old academic dictum: publish or perish...

...is confusing stuff, and that to read it is a peculiar, idle, self-indulgent, and radical activity...

...on the contrary, most of them are quite competently written...

...It all goes back to the early part of the century—to the modernistic precept that poetry should be avant-garde and should epater le bourgeoisie, to T. S. Eliot's pronouncement that poetry must be difficult, to Ezra Pound's deliberate composition of poetry for an audience not of ordinary literate people but of poets...

...But these program poets have to write poems...

...But there are armies of successful program poets out there who do sound almost like clones of one anothEdmund Burke Prescription and Providence Francis Canavan Previous writers on Burke have seen him as a traditionalist, a utilitarian, or a forerunner of Hegel's historicism...

...A skillful account of the 1984 election by 15 academics, practitioners, and think tankers?' Choice 1987 302 pp $29.95 Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics An Interpretation of Democracy in America John C. Koritansky Little agreement exists today as to just what Tocqueville's "new" political science was...

...To be sure, many of the finer poets of our day—among them Donald Justice and Donald Peterson—are products of poetry workshops...

...Bruce Bawer/Poetry ANOTHER VICTIM OF CREATIVE WRITING In these United States in 1987, the paramount fact about poetry is that there are more poets—or at least would-be poets—than there are poetry readers...

...Some, of course, are highly distinctive...

...Orders must be prepaid or charged to VISA or MasterCard...

...Its inquiry into the antimonopoly features of due process is unsurpassed...

...Every month one of the journals or magazines will contain a poem perhaps by someone the reader has never heard of, that offers a glimmer of hope for the future of the art...

...Besides, how' can a teacher, even a well-meaning one, begin to have a clue of what most of his students' "own voices" might sound like, when the majority of them enter the program with only the crudest idea of what a poem is anyway, when he's exposed to them (typically) for a relatively brief period, and when he has ten or twenty or fifty of them to "teach" at any given time...

...This is not to say that all poets who have come out of programs sound alike...

...Spec...

...substantive due process had specific meanings...

...Carolina Academic Press P.O...

...There are poets in their middle years—such as C. K. Williams (Flesh and Blood, Random House), Robert Phillips (Personal Accounts, Ontario Review Press), and Tom Disch—who have distinctive and alluring voices, and who may well be among the art's gray eminences twenty years from now...

...And undistinctive, too: many a creative-writing-program poem is virtually interchangeable with dozens of other poems not only by its author but by any number of similar program poets...

...In this new commentary, Democracy in America is evaluated as a comprehensive teaching about politics and the nature of political life...

...1984, reprinted 1985 444 pp $35.00 special Am...

...As a result of the proliferation of these programs during the last decade or so, there are more American poets than ever before—hundreds, thousands more—most of them with some connection or other to the academy...

...by Ronald D. Rotunda and John E. Nowak Although this famous treatise has gone through several editions, the 1833 edition was the only one that Story himself worked on...

...The teachers often help their students to find jobs, too—as (what else...

...If anything, the isolation of poets from the general public has intensified in recent decades...

...Au contraire...

...Americans have grown used to the notion—young Americans nowadays seem to be born with it—that poetry Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer, a regular contributor to the New Criterion, and author of The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell (Archon Books...

...Nor are most of these students helped to "find their own voices...

...Many of them will get hired even though they're not particularly good poets or teachers—for the main qualification to teach poetry-writing at most American universities is not that one's work be first-rate but that one have a creative-writingprogram degree...

...Others have dismissed him as no more than a practicing politician with a gift for rhetoric...

...And yet many literate and self-absorbed young people, who take for granted the post-Beat anti-Modernist teaching that poetry is nothing but feeling poured onto a page, have continued to be interested in writing poetry (even though they may not have the patience to read much of it...

...W hat can we expect in the way of poetry from these program-bred poets...

...No additional discount off special prices...

...Most of their teachers are likely to be middling poets themselves, more interested in promoting their own careers and proselytizing for their own brand of poetry than in pursuing the painstaking task of helping someone else to discover himself as a writer...

...Signature UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS 329 Carruth, Lawrence KS 66045 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 69 fact that these programs have become enormously important in the making of poetic careers...

...Charge it by phone: 913-864-4154 Name Address City State Zip MasterCard VISA Expires Account no...

...price $19.95 All orders from individuals must be prepaid and, when citing this ad, may take a 15% discount from the listed price...

...His poetry has been published in Poetry, the Hudson Review, and other publications...

...Finally, one of the more encouragTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 71...

...I'm not speaking of an education: many a creative-writing student receives his degree without ever having looked at a poem by Milton, say, or Wordsworth...

...These poets have been trained to crank it out—whether or not they feel like it, whether or not they're inspired, whether or not they have a fresh and compelling topic...

...T his state of affairs does not bode 1 well for the future of American poetry...

...But during the past several years, the poetry workshop has become not just one optional element of a young poet's education, but rather the very center of most young poets' educations...

...1987 808 pp $39.95 cloth, $17.50 paper The 1984 Election and the Future of American Politics Peter W. Schramm and Dennis J. Mahoney, editors This book is a coherent and comprehensive account of the events and procedures involved in the 1984 elections, describing and analyzing key elements in the electoral process and in the election itself...

...This abridgment contains all of Story's mature thoughts on the nature of constitutional adjudication, the role of the courts, and his theories of judicial review and interpretation...

...And just as this dictum has led to the writing of innumerable volumes of gratuitous scholarly prose, so it has led, in recent years, to the creation of countless expendable poems...

...Though, in the years since World War II, the language of a good many American poets has become more comprehensible, this change has arrived too late...

...He looks at those original meanings and the breakdown of the traditional concepts by Supreme Court decisions past and present...

...the hard part is paying the tuition...

...But there are workshops and there are workshops...

...And this situation, of course, will make it all the more difficult, over the next twenty years, for truly valuable poets from outside the poetry bureaucracy to be published, read, and recognized...

...Which means that these teachers—acting on the (probably correct) assumption that the inclination of most young amateurs is to write nauseatingly sentimental effusions about the torments of young love—drill their students in the avoidance of bathos and the accumulation of objective detail (e.g., obscure plant names and odd place names...

...As with those volumes of scholarship, the problem with these poems is not that they're terrible, really...

...creative-writing teachers...

...In the last decade or so, as a matter of fact, many people in the poetry world have begun to take it for granted that the only serious way of preparing for a career as a poet is to enter a university creative-writing program...

...Given the way that the poetry world works, then, many of the students in today's creative-writing programs stand a frighteningly good chance of becoming the celebrated poets of twenty years from now...

...A nd yet, for all this, poems that are fresh, affecting, and intelligently crafted continue to be written...

...Indeed, because the tuition fees are so high and the admission standards so lax, many creative-writing programs—especially the most prestigious (i.e., most expensive) ones—have become, in large part, playgrounds for the modestly talented children of the rich and well-to-do...

...no longer "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," they became Talmudic scholars of a sort, communing with themselves and with one another in a language that was often deliberately private, uninviting, exclusionary...

...Frequently these poems concern personal topics—families, romances—but one sometimes has the impression, nevertheless, that their authors are trying desperately to avoid expressing a recognizable human feeling...

...Their poems remind us of the passion, the intensity, and the intelligence of which poetry is capable...

...Getting into one is no great trick...

...During the modern period, in short, poets effectively alienated themselves from the general public...

...And there are promising young poets...

...Make checks payable to University Press of Kansas...

...Among the younger poets who have produced promising work, and from whose ranks some of the major voices of two decades hence may well be drawn, are David Lehman, Peter Balakian, Katha Pollitt, Michael Ryan, David Baker, Barbara Elovic, Daniel Mark Epstein, Phillis Levin, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Elizabeth Spires...

...Such younger poets as Dana Gioia (Daily Horoscope, Graywolf Press), Charles Martin (Steal the Bacon, Johns Hopkins University Press), Timothy Steele (Sapphics Against Anger, Random House), William Logan (Difficulty, David R Godine), and Molly Peacock (Raw Heaven, Random House) have written wonderfully sensitive and thoughtful poems that reveal an impressive—and, in this Age of Creative Writing, a well-nigh astonishing—awareness of tradition and command of form...

...This circumstance has provided more and more poets, over the past generation, with a great way of making money—namely, as full-time faculty members in university creative-writing programs, where students take several poetry workshops over a two- or three-year period and are awarded a graduate degree...

...Contributors include: Charles R. Kesler, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Dennis J. Mahoney, and Francis Canavan...

...The problem, usually, is that they're dead—flat, arid, inert...

...Significantly, most of these poets are not products of creative-writing programs...

...For one thing, we can expect quantity...

...It differs from other standard works on recent elections in focusing on the issues dividing the candidates and the parties...

...What's more, such poets as Alfred Corn, Daryl Hine, Robert McDowell, and Frederick Turner (as well as Vikram Seth, an Indian who has written a very exciting, and a very American, book called The Golden Gate) have successfully explored different sectors of the vast abandoned territory of narrative verse—raising the pleasant possibility that, in the next few years, more poets will venture into non-lyric forms...

...They write stolid, desultory free-verse poems that often seem to be haphazardly lineated and pointlessly descriptive or anecdotal...

...1987 200 pp $24.95 Substantive Due Process of Law A Dichotomy of Sense and Nonsense Frank R. Strong Strong argues that historically...

...Canavan argues that although Burke's attack on the French Revolution was couched in rhetoric, it contained a carefully reasoned theory of political authority which was rooted in a coherent view of the world—a Christian and biblical metaphysical view of a created universe...

...The best one can hope for that poor battered craft known as American poetry is that, twenty years from now, at least some of these younger writers will have fulfilled their present promise, and that America's small community of poetry readers will have the sense to recognize them as being among the art's finest living practitioners...

...When Eliot or Stevens didn't feel like writing a poem, they didn't—they had jobs...

...The result: armies of poets who avoid sensitivity itself for fear of crossing the line into sentimentality.ing signs of recent years is the rise of a movement known as the "New Formalism...

...even the most distinguished of contemporary poets cannot count on having their names recognized outside their own little world of readings, conferences, English departments, and literary parties...

...an exciting intellectual adventure...

...Editors routinely receive more poetry manuscript submissions than they sell copies of poetry books or magazines...

...This would be perfectly unobjectionable—so what if a bunch of spoiled kids, who have nothing better to do anyway, pay poets to read and comment on their work?—if not for the "A witty and energetic study of the ideas and passions of the Framers" —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 10% discount to American Spectator readers with this coupon SEND Novus Ordo Seclorum ^ cloth, @$22.50 Novus Ordo Seclorum, ^ paper, @$8.95 Add $1.50 for postage/handling...

...Box 51879 Durham, NC 27717 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 er...