A Public Art

- By Eric Lorberer

(Editor’s Note: What follows is a slightly edited version of a talk given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on March 28, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its Master of Fine Arts for Poets and Writers. As Lorberer comments, his overarching aim in this piece was to let loose “an eros-tipped arrow on behalf of MFA programs.” The full text was also posted by Route Nine.)

"You always have in your writing the resistance outside of you and inside of you, a shadow upon you, and the thing which you must express."
--Gertrude Stein, "How Writing is Written" (1935)

As I was returning from the annual AWP conference earlier this month, I read in England’s Telegraph that at a British literary festival that same weekend, Hanif Kureishi called creative writing programs a waste of time, despite the fact that he teaches in one. Now Kureishi is a gifted novelist and screenwriter, but judging from these comments, he is, let’s say, less skilled in some other areas of discourse; I was unmoved by his rant except to feel bad for his students, who he lambasted as talentless hacks throwing away time and money in the pursuit of both their academic degree and their artistic ambition. But as illogical, heartless, and downright bizarre as his argument was, it put into stark relief what I think creative writing programs actually strive to do, so I’ll attempt to nick these concepts with my arrow here today.

Of course, attacks on and anxieties about MFA culture have always existed, and to give them their due they make some acceptable points: talent is indeed a thing can’t be taught; institutional settings are prone to engender groupthink, a word and concept not much older than this program; the formulas to which groupthink might lead are of little value in any art that strives to be more than decorative. But here’s where those who wring their hands about these issues go so fundamentally wrong: these are the risks of instituting a pedagogy around the creation of literature, not the definition of it. To fail to realize that at least some of the people and places devoted to the life of the imagination would be capable of navigating these challenges is foolish, and to fail to recognize how the twin pillars of education and art have transformed human lives is even worse. One need only be half-awake to see that the outputs of education and art continually coil and spark like live wires in the dark—perhaps unruly and frightening, certainly not beholden to any one agenda, but relentlessly, defiantly, and quite often gorgeously there.

When one thinks of what education and art can do together, one begins to imagine a craft whose apotheosis just might be creative writing. If the discipline has a bad rap, that might be due to an impoverished binary thinking.  Let’s clear it up for these souls: it is not the blank page we teach and discuss here, not the potential of writing but rather the thing-that-is-written, and this demands that we hone and respect what it means to read. Of course I mean not only the primordial tool of literacy itself, as powerful an engine in human evolution as the control of fire, but to read well, to engage the critical faculty, for it’s only through this apperception of the world that we can hope to add anything of value to it. In opening a space for creative writing, this is the first arena: to understand that reading is not an output of writing, not some by-product and certainly not its opposite, but rather a core ingredient in how writing is written, to borrow Gertrude Stein’s simple yet mellifluous phrase. To enact this understanding, truly fertile MFA culture offers the literary acolyte a generous span of time, a rigorous program of instruction, and most importantly a powerful social context in which to explore and define one’s personal relationship to the task.  I’ll return to this last point in a moment, but for now I want to remark that this revaluation of reading sets the stage for a pedagogy based not on the handing over of secret knowledge, or skeleton keys, or special powers: we are not passing the torch, we are sharing the fire.

This shift in the paradigm of the relationship between reading and writing is, I think, part of what Susan Sontag meant when she famously stated, “Instead of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” And indeed the erotic is another hallmark of this place. I don’t mean the woefully inadequate dictionary definition of erotic as concerning sex, although sex is a great metaphor because it’s so easy to understand. For example, we all know that sex is for more than the propogation of the species—if you don’t know that, let me assure you, you’re doing it wrong. As with sex, so with writing: as Wallace Stevens put it in his 1942 masterpiece “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “It must give pleasure.” I want to focus not on the culminating paroxysm that is result of literary congress, but rather on the verb in Stevens’ four-word dictum. Figured as an agent within a gift economy, measured on a scale that goes from irrelevance to joy, good writing might be able to do something far greater than secure its author an important award, or a tenure track job, or a book contract.  Those are fine things to get out of writing, of course, but what I’m saying is that the value of writing is not defined by such things you might get, but rather by the pleasures you can offer the beloved who lies waiting patiently for you: your reader.

There is one more notion I want to discuss, and that is a conception of writing as, once again, not the mere transmission of words from author to reader, but as a locus they share that enables (or “turns on”) the strange telepathy of language: as a poem by John Ashbery I dearly love states, “It is not a conduit (confluence?), but a place.”  And in this, the always already site-specific art of writing seems to me to have such affinity with what I call “the place” of a MFA—a stratagem I resort to partly because I find the word “program” a tad limiting, not suggestive enough of the individuation that is the truest and best output of the teaching of creative writing, and partly because it seems to me that the energy so often initiated (here at UMass, for example), evinced in so many books and journals and laureateships and leadership activities throughout the years by those who have been made Masters of the Fine Art, happened not because we were afforded the chance to retreat from the world, but rather because we were encouraged to participate in it. Gertrude Stein wrote: “Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here.” In my view, to write is not to try to solve this koan, but rather to inhabit it.

It’s with this altered sense of place and the place of writing in mind that I look out these windows today and see a shockingly beautiful American vista, the sprawl of the UMass campus as the realization of that striking nineteenth-century idea of the land-grant institution. One can only be grateful to the planners of such that as they overtook the marshes and hollows and fields of Massachusetts to foster the study of things like agriculture and engineering, things that would be so needed in our increasingly complex world, they realized that more food and new machines could not best serve us unless we also continued to refine our gnosis of languages and literatures and histories and arts—that for our coming society and community we need a symbolic architecture that will adhere to the values of the social and the commons. We honor this legacy by continuing to build whatever we can build in the service of human evolution, brick by brick, word by word.

So reading, pleasure, and place: to me, this is what it is to write, and to learn how to write, two things I continue to do daily. I realize I have not said anything you don’t already know, you who already live the credo I have tried to describe and whose company I am proud to share. But I see now that I did not put these thoughts to paper for you, but rather for those who hunger to join our fellowship: to write, and to learn how to write. I hope you will join me in saying to those people that they are welcome; after all, ours isn’t a private party but a public art.