“Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety.
“I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. Workshops make workshop-poems.
“Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.”
For the sine qua non of the CWI, please see: “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers,” The Atlantic, July, 1970. [https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1970/07/226-1/132646324.pdf]
Since the explosive growth of the Creative Writing Industry