"I am an idealistic, naive, passionate, truth-seeking, spiritually motivated artist, unschooled in the science of law and finance." --Wesley Snipes

Monday, February 04, 2008

Note to UO MFAers

Poetry should be at least as well written as prose. Not well-written prose.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do you mean?

Anthony Robinson said...

Steve? Come on! Get a better alias!

Anonymous said...

Hmm...I'm just wondering what you're trying to say about poetry here. It's a bit confusing. What does it mean for poetry to be "as least as well-written as prose"?

Anthony Robinson said...

Get thee to thine Ezra Pound, young lady.

(And no, I don't really know what he means--We can argue about whether the Cantos are well-written, I suppose, but they certainly aren't prose.)

(and to explain further...sheesh...I'm making a predictable attack on an MFA program that "teaches" "poets" to write lineated, narrative prose almost exclusively.)

Anonymous said...

That's very true. It sucks, but there was some rebellion last year. Many people in the group aren't writing linear/narrative/"realist" at this point. I sure don't. It gets boring for me on multiple levels, and I truly suck at it anyway. I've never really written narrative realist poems, or been much interested in writing identity poetics -- because I don't think I have an identity, really -- and I guess I wasn't surprised when a certain professor told me I needed to write more plainly about "real" things. WTF, seriously. I almost transferred but decided it wasn't worth it in the end. Maybe it would have been worth it after all, but the thought of going through the whole app. process made my head hurt.

Anthony Robinson said...

Ah, I like to think that I led the original rebellion. Did it do any good? Perhaps. I'm rather disconnected.

Now, okay. I'm confused. I think I thought you were a different "Steve" than you are. That is, I thought you were a young woman poet, but not an Oregon one. I had someone in mind. Now I'm lost! Reveal yourself! We can talk about the importance of writing "real" things.

Anonymous said...

Oh dude, sorry. I forgot to reply to this. It's Sara. The workshop is pretty mixed right now, though not as mixed as I'd like. I've kinda detached myself from it from it anyway. Though I have to admit that the second year has been better. The first year was painful.