why I haven't gotten an MFA

I've wondered about getting the MFA in poetry. I haven't agonized about it, exactly. But I have thought seriously ... mainly as a way to get connected to other poets and mentors who would further my poetic career. I so hate the whole marketing thing -- even to choosing poems to print out and put in an envelope, but most especially rejection -- that months will pass between flurries of sending out. What would change after two years of grad school and, likely, thousands of dollars of debt? Surely I'd gain that motivation for getting my poems out to the world. Surely, surely.

Uh huh. Daniel Nestor has a post about the consequences of his stint at NYU. (If the preceding link doesn't get you to Nestor's blog, try this; it's the April 11 post.) I don't know Nestor's poetry but here's some fine disgruntled snarking about his former teachers:

My praise of these teachers ends with their poems. As part of the NYU creative writing program, Olds, Kinnell and Levine were all uniformly uninterested in students, limited their time to a minmum of access for fear of being "overwhelmed" by their students (that was a word we heard a lot), and most damningly, were not not empathetic with what students were doing in their poems. The only way to hold the interest of any of these teachers was to write a poem in their own style, except worse, so as to make them feel good, as well as give them something to say to improve it (i.e., make it one of their poems).

[...]

I remember once when a student asked Galway Kinnell what we should do when we get out of grad school -- should we apply for teaching jobs, send poems to journals?
Kinnell paused, looked at the ceiling -- dreaming, no doubt, about his garden's new Spring sprouts in his Vermont house, where he would haul ass to the day after this last workshop -- and said to "just be a poet" after grad school.

Har har.

At UC Berkeley I took an undergraduate workshop with Robert Hass and I know I tried to emulate Hass somewhat. Mostly unconscious, I think. I didn't realize how constricted my poetry had been until I was in Lyn Hejinian's workshop. I liked Lyn much more as a teacher. But I have no bitterness about Robert Hass. He struck me as a sweet man, honestly interested in his students. His reputation and those other students who were trying to be like him had something to do with what happened to my poetry.