The possibility of poetry

Theoretically - and, indeed, empirically - a case can be made that there ought to be more first-class poets at the present than in earlier centuries. There are, after all, many more people, and more of them receive an education that could expose them to the possibility of poetry. There are all those workshops, throughout the country, which every year award diplomas to a new cohort of MFAs, among whom some significant percentage should have what it takes.

Whether or not workshops are, in fact, the most fertile grounds for the breeding of good poetry, I think that the twentieth century has produced a bumper crop of excellent to world-class poets in America[...] But [...] I think the great preponderance of the best poetry was written before our present laureate (Rita Dove, born in 1952) had indited her first poem to paper.

And for this simple reason - that the workshops, which have a monopoly on the training of poets, encourage indolence, incompetence, smugness and - most perniciously - that sense of victimization and special entitlement that poets have now come to share with other artists who depend on government or institutional patronage to sustain their art, pay their salaries, and provide free vacations.

[Furthermore, by ignoring canonical poetry in these workshops], at a time when Theory has taken over graduate English departments, where it was once possible to study poetry in a serious way [...] justice is done while at the same time drastically simplifying the curriculum. Why bother with dead white males when there are so many living poets who share Levinson's sense of the world they so systematically misrepresented?

In this devaluation of the past, academic theorists offer aid and comfort to the indolence of the workshops, where the poetry that is studied is, by and large, the poetry that is written there....[Yet], in the absence of critical standards, all poets are equal. [...And] what better way to compensate for the demands of Organic Chemistry that to twang the lyre?

I do believe there is a remedy and that is the disestablishment of the poetry workshops as an academic institution. The art of poetry is poorly served by its bureaucratization, and only the trade is advanced. I will even venture a prophecy (which is the prerogative of poets, if not of critics) - that they will, in my own lifetime, self-destruct. Not because of Jesse Helms, or his like, mandates a holy war against the poets funded by the NEA, but because students, wiser than their teachers, choose other electives.

- from "The Castle of Indolence," Thomas Disch