I'll match this guy's bitterness about the P&W MFA rankings with some bitterness of my own toward him for making fun of my program (San Marcos). I do agree that the rankings are sort of silly and that Columbia is better than it's ranked. But still, some serious sour grapes here.
On the other hand, here is a more rational response. Also not completely for the rankings system, but maybe they're not the dumbest thing in existence, either.
Neil Gaiman and a tweetathon for short stories!
Roald Dahl's writing shed needs to be saved. And one of you has to scrape together $790,000 to save it. Get on it!
The potential end for bookstores. Does anyone remember Blockbuster? Me neither.
Nostalgia and trying to save independent bookstores.
2 comments:
The link in the first line leads to this:
“Why would you take out large student loans if you're just going to publish a few chapbooks (with, say, a print run of 500 copies each), settle into a nice teaching residency at the University of Northern South Dakota making $35,000 a year (less, of course, your subscription to Poets & Writers), and achieve tenure based upon your trenchant stewardship of the student literary magazine?”
For a question, then, a question or two:
Is there is no longer the generative wonder as to the Great Matter? Are we are so overwhelmed with the
a la mode and the C.V. of it all that we have entirely forgotten the aspect of the luxury and sanctuary if not the sinecure of the arts, which are sort of supposed to be an extra?
The conversation seems always to be about the box, never about the piano. I do not so much mind, living in the serenity of community poetry as I do, but I am really getting sick of wise-ass, empty poems in which cannot be found a thing of consequence, or raison d’être in the subject matter, but only fashion, only money-ball.
Great poetry will find its way, but money-ball poetry drives good poetry out of existence.
I feel much better now, thank you. I am a little undone, perhaps, hankering after the New Criticism, longing for Ciardi on the TV set, sad to see this jejune insult to the teachers at the at the University of Northern South Dakota, who gave me everything I cherish in this life, everything good.
It is that a poem has not become a poem until there is a reader; it is that with the rarest exception involving genius, a reader has not become a reader until there is first a teacher.
And the candidates at Columbia do not so much need their teachers as do those at the kind of institutions "This Guy" who whines about the Poets & Writers ratings insults.
To teach is divine.
To respond as if the only writing is poetry is indeed to expose
my own elitism, but there is a phrase "This Guy" needs to consider: "Noblesse oblige."
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