I did find myself shouting "Amen, brother!" at parts of the interview, especially the bit just before what I quoted above:
Quote:
CD: [...] Would you describe for us some of the continuities and differences you’ve observed between the poetry of your generation and that of younger generations?
DP: There’s very little continuity. Some of the ways I write are generally regarded as having been superseded. That’s fair enough. But the progressive paradigm has become a more culturally broad and accelerationist one, which seems to be hastening some fundamental phase-shift. There’s still terrific stuff being written, and I read great poems every week. But fighting through the post-MFA noise of it all is almost impossible. Mostly poetry has become staggeringly self-absorbed, just when we desperately needed it to recruit a general readership.
Poetry is that function of language which makes it adequate to a new or changing reality. Some contemporary poetry takes this increasingly urgent responsibility seriously. But mostly, that kind of writing is being pushed into the margins by the poetry of identity, the New Whimsy, and what I think of as “Vibism,” all of which are styles that have some genuine capitalist value within the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme, namely the Creative Writing MFA.
CD: Would you elaborate for us on the idea of the Creative Writing MFA as the world’s first completely successful Ponzi scheme?
DP: I thought I was being tongue-in-cheek. Now that I think carefully about it, I’m less sure. The MFA in its present incarnation is a brilliant cash-cow: an unfailable degree, one that rejects almost no applicants, that anyone with the money can buy, and that will grant you the formal accreditation you need to go forth and preach the CW gospel. It’s almost the Scientology business model. But to make the degree unfailable, we had to ensure poetry was something that everyone could do. The current house style could not be more democratic: twenty-five lines of loosely related stuff adduced in evidence of a “vibe,” with “vibe” being the dominant aesthetic and often the sole organizing principle. This kind of work cannot be genuinely criticized, given that “vibes” are personal things and continuous with their hosts.
The pernicious circularity of such writing means that even the better poems often seem to be written in some kind of endless present, free of either historical perspective or future proposition. They start, keep going a while, and then stop, often having forgotten where they began, and millions of folk are writing them.
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The Ponzi scheme thing isn't new, but I enjoyed Paterson's formulation of it.
MFA programs do have value, because a lot of people whose work I respect have said that their work and their ability to figure out how to get it in front of an audience improved as a result. But all workshop-type groups, including Eratosphere, can have the effect of teaching poets how to write a particular type of poem that follows the fashion rules accepted within that group, at the cost of suppressing artistic impulses that might
successfully violate those rules and delight readers with something surprising/strange/unique.
We're social animals. We all want to stand out, but still fit in with our desired peer group (and to find validation there if we don't receive it from other people in our lives).