Ars poetica poems by Dave Read

Since the explosive growth of the Creative Writing Industry,* in the aftermath of the Famous Writers School being found fraudulent and sued out of business, I have been spent way too much time contemplating the nature of poetry itself. Since Random House CEO Bennett Cerf’s side hustle turned to vapor during the Nixon presidency, hundreds of creative writing programs have sprung up throughout the Higher Ed. sector of America’s cockeyed consumer economy!

*In a 1991 interview in the Paris Review, Donald Hall (1928-2018, U.S. Poet Laureate 2006-07) was asked, “Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?”

“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]

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Since the explosive growth of the Creative Writing Industry