To the Editors:
In “Formal Poetry in the Land of the Free” (November 1990), Bruce Bawer leads us from the futility of a poetry workshop to an encomium on traditional verse forms. Unfortunately, Mr. Bawer arrives at an impasse about how his analysis might change such workshops. As for what creative-writing pedagogues seek in their students, Robert Burns prefigures it in his “Dean of Faculty”: “In your servants this is striking—/ The more in capacity they bring, / The more they’re to your liking.”
Indeed, it is the pseudo-professionalism and artificial society of the workshops themselves that encourages conformity to turgid expression. As the young in America lack the social and family ties that would promote intimateness with in dividuality in their verse, the creative-writing hustlers have been able to make students write verses for them, in a public forum strikingly remi niscent of the Salem witchcraft trials. How en lightening!
To get the young to appreciate traditional verse forms, perhaps we poets should designate the poetry workshop as an obscure phenomenon in social anthropology, then start from scratch. The workshops mainly offer a means for expression and reinforcement of narcissism, which is why un controlled free-verse soliloquies predominate in them. You can’t teach a tradition this way, let alone artistic creation. Their prevailing sensibility, rampant careerism, is no substitute.
1 will never forget the Victorian Studies gradu ate student who wandered into the first meeting of Derek Wakott’s workshop at Harvard, claim ing “it’s unfair
