Yo Poet, Drop Out!

Is the Creative Writing Industry corrupt?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 31, 2025 – Pre-poem patter: The MAGArian era is even uglier because, during Dubya’s presidency, we failed to resolve questions whether waterboarding is torture and whether torture is consistent with what it means to be an American. The Creative Writing Industry* spreads now, like a virus, throughout the Higher Ed. sector, since taking root there during Tricky Dick’s presidency.

A Rose Versus Prof’s Nosegay

Beware of the scribes who like to go about in long robes, and love salutations in the marketplaces and the places of honor at feasts; Luke 20: 46

Genius is a free born trait, a centripetal force
that keeps fanciful thought in sensible orbit.

Eyes, ears, and fingertips find genius everywhere;
it’s also found in galleries, concert halls, and books.

Even though it won’t be bought, genius is for sale on campus,
where, once mortarboarded, scribes act like lawyers.

Post-poem matter

*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]