Poet Tom Henihan has some harsh words for the "cottage industry" that has grown up around poetry in recent years:

The teaching of poetry has become epidemic. The question of having the ìgiftî never comes up; the assumption being that poetry can be acquired like everything else. I have to say that the poets who head up these little retreats are very sensitive, preferring to lie rather than give any genuine criticism that may offend the student. You see they must keep these aspiring poets coming back, year after year, stanza after stanza, by shamelessly lending credence to the most flat literal efforts. I have yet to meet anyone who has been told the truth about their work, (good or bad) at one of these little soirÈes in the woods.

The blame shouldnít go so much to the hapless souls that sign-up for these exercises but to the purveyors of snake oil that put them on. I am not suggesting that poets cannot teach one another a trick or two, but taking 10 to 15 aspirants to a nunnery in Sooke for a 3-day workshop is so sweet it could make one cry. It goes up against everything radical, wild and individual in poetry. These people would be better served and brought closer to poetry if they got drunk, got laid, or went dancing.

The teaching of poetry whether in university, college or high school is the single most damaging force to the creation and appreciation of the genre. One of the underlining advantages of studying poetry at a university or college is that if you fail to create any poetry of merit you can always fall back on teaching it. This ensures that the damage will be perpetuated onto the next generation. I think the people who elect to teach and de-mystify poetry and make it accessible should keep Mallarmeís dictum in mind. ìTo suggest is to create, to explain is to destroy.î This assertion is particularly important when the explanations offered are misguided and wrong. If someone wants to write they should work quietly, trust their instincts and study literature.

When student poets get up to read they almost always thank their teacher for making poetry fun. Poetry should be protected from fun. There is so much fun in the world it isnít funny anymore. Poetry is essentially a solemn and devotional form. Funny poetry is a contradiction in termsÖitís the equivalent of kneeling in a church and saying funny prayers or chanting at a funny ritual. I am not saying that there is no room for humour in poetry but I am saying that there is very little room. We need things that are serious. What could be more pessimistic that wanting everything to be funny? Like failed musicians and actors who become childrenís entertainers, I sometimes suspect that comedians that arenít that funny decide to be poets.

Henihan may come off as a snob at first glance. He may come off as one of those vaguely anti-intellectual artistes who hold critics and teachers--the people who try to analyze the why and the how of their art--in unapologetic contempt. But to read his essay that way would be to miss the point. There are some things that cannot be taught. Inspiration is one, creativity is another, having a "feel" for language a third. Skills can be taught, and those are certainly necessary if one wants to be a writer of any caliber. But too often creative writing courses are about far more than the teaching of skills--there is a dishonesty to them, as Henihan notes. Their premise is that everyone enrolled in the course can write; their guiding principle is that deep down, we all have a poet or a novelist in us just waiting to come out. We don't. But in premising themselves on the notion that we do--and on the notion that coursework can bring it out, that all we need is practice and encouragement (and a few good contacts)--creative writing courses encourage a level of self-deception and communal pretension that are positively damaging to the art.

I have over time developed quite similar feelings about literary and cultural criticism. Unlike more genuinely research-driven fields, where there truly are findings that truly require to be written up, most academic writing in the humanities is the result of trawling for material that will allow one to produce academic writing in the humanities. The briefest glance at the writing schedule built into doctoral programs and assistant professorships confirms that it has to be this way. The priorities are backwards: the professional need to produce a piece of writing occasions the search for something to write about, which then converts what should be the meaningful work of expressing ideas into the makework of trying on paper to pretend that one has them.

Link via the always excellent Bookslut.

UPDATE: Reader David W. writes with some additional thoughts. "One could argue that by moving into the university, writers (and philosophers) have gotten less interesting and less able to think originally. Perhaps the current collapse of liberal education is a reminder that much of it wasn't supported by a specific institution and no small amount of it was forcefully opposed by institutions at various times," he observes, noting that "there is little historical basis to the belief by some of your correspondents that their passion for the noble and the beautiful should be remunerative. If anything, this should be one of the reasons why they love it; ie., its apparent "uselessness" within the context of quotidian life. Allan Bloom makes this point in a couple of places so I can hardly claim to be original here. The true worth of the life of the mind is only knowable to those who live it." David cites Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, great twentieth-century poets who did their writing after doing their day jobs in an insurance agency and a bank, as models of how we might better conceptualize the where, the when, the why, and the how of the literary life.

I think that's right. Plenty of great writers have lived hand to mouth, writing to pay the bills and put food on the table--for a Dickens or a Thackeray or a Trollope, writing at top speed for money was not at all incompatible with tapping into their creativity and producing lasting works of art. But there is a difference between the nature of their work and the nature of the work of the academic writer (be he poet, novelist, or critic). These guys weren't expecting to get paid for their "passion," but for their product. They were highly professionalized--but they were also responsive to the marketplace rather than to a prefabricated set of aesthetic and intellectual norms designed to guard and police an elite and obscure academic culture. Obviously the marketplace is not an ideal arbiter of intellectual and artistic value. But it may at times be better--freer, more disinterested, and more honest--than the peer-reviewed, assembly-line system of compulsory, high-speed production and publication that regulates writing in the academic humanities.

UPDATE UPDATE: More at Blogfonte.