Why To Study Creative Writing

An allegedly positive follow-up to my previous post is . . . why might one take a creative-writing course--in the community, informally (a writing-group), at a college, or at an M.F.A. program?

Let's try for ten reasons--no particular order:

1. Structure: sometimes it's good for artists to learn within a structure of some kind. It provides some discipline, some routine, etc. It brings tradition on board, in a good way. When someone takes a ballet class, he or she is doing something specific that day but also joining a long, long tradition. What's not to like? Same goes for creative writing.
2. It saves time. You can learn about all sorts of moves to make and mistakes to avoid in a hurry. I borrow this argument from Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town.
3.You get to "test" your work with a real audience. You will get varying responses. You will have to sort them out. No need, usually, automatically to dismiss people's reactions to your work--or to take them to heart. Consider them.
4. You get to meet other writers--at whatever level of expertise. Misery and creativity sometimes love company.
5. You get to look at, to study (if you will) literature from a different angle--the angle of the ones who produce it.
6. Imitation. An ancient idea, going back at least 2,000 years but really much further. To learn how to do X, you practice by imitating an example of X produced by someone else. Read a sonnet, write a sonnet. Look at Quintillian's program for the liberal arts, way back when. It involved reading and then imitating good writing.
7. Stretch. Often in a creative-writing class (of whatever kind), you'll be pushed, usually not rudely, to try something in your writing you might not otherwise try. It's kind of like going to a yoga class and stretching a tendon you thought would never stretch. It's a way to experiment.
8. "Give it a try." If you never "thought of" yourself as a writer but you think you'd like to try it, a class might be the place to do so. Often in my introductory poetry class (e.g.) I'll get a senior majoring in business, and she (for example) will find out she can write good poetry. What a nice discovery.
9. Make connections. Whatever one's interests are, it's often nice to share them with a community.
10. You get to represent--in writing (as opposed to in conversation, painting, or repression--something, anything, important to you: ideas, experiences, whatever. You get to share the representation with others to see how it goes. To see if it does what you wanted it to do.

For every one of the 10, there's also a good reason NOT to take a creative-writing class. Much depends at what stage you are in as a writer, and on where you are in your life. Maybe you don't need structure. Maybe you already have learned the basics and saved time, maybe you're at a point where you just need to put backside in chair and write. Maybe your experience in the class isn't productive. Whatever.

It's not an either/or situation. Studying creative writing in a group or a class can be just the ticket. It can also be not right for someone at a particular time. This avoidance of dumb binary-thinking is another reason to dismiss the lame, simple-minded thinking about "abolishing" creative writing classes. Why not keep all the options open?

Creative-Writing Under Almost-Attack

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Periodically, someone dusts off the old argument against teaching creative writing (especially in any kind of academic setting) and launches it like a rusted scud missile that lands harmlessly in a dry field. (Thanks to Fran for alerting me to this most recent harmless launch.)

This time it's Louis Menard in (gasp!) The New Yorker. I teach creative writing, so I think I'm supposed to be offended, but I can't quite muster offense. I'll make myself a candidate for the New Yorker's "block that metaphor" feature by saying that the "attack" isn't even rusted-scud material but more like that of a wet noodle, or a glob of wet noodles. Ouch, not the wet noodles again. Oh, stop. Oh, not the New Yorker.

How quickly can I summarize the argument (but fairly, too)? Let me try. Creative writing as a subject is bad because students can't teach students, writers can't teach students, teachers can't teach students, "genius" and "talent" can't be taught, some writers who have taught creative writing later disavowed it, some writers-in-residence are just louts pocketing cash, Somebody or Some Place Famous (Iowa) said it can't be taught (but will cash your tuition check), there are too many programs, if you write poems "for tenure," you've been compromised, the products of creative-writing classes are derivative, and I think that's about it.

I'll make this easy. Substitute the words "music," "reading," "painting," "dance," or "sculpting" for "creative writing" and then ask the same question. I don't believe I've ever heard an argument against teaching such things in an academic setting (or other settings).

Second, creative writing is, more than a little, another way to study literature and reading. It demystifies those parts of writing that can be demystified, and that makes for better readers. It is also a humbling process. Try to write a sonnet, for example. Or a successful five-page short story. Setting aside the question of how well you do, you will have deepened your appreciation for sonnets and short stories--and also, perhaps, cleared away a lot of rubbish about "artistes." Creative writing is--this will come as a huge surprise to dancers--a lot of damned hard work.

As to the "if you write poems 'for tenure', you've been compromised" argument: please. Not another wet noodle! When have writers not been compromised--by the State they live in (as in nation-state), by agents (if they're novelists), by publishers (who are now owned by multi-national corporations, which care deeply about literature), by their own tattered souls, etc.? Academia is no picnic, but it's no more corrupting to poets than fussy, misguided editors or having to work in a factory to make a living or growing up in poverty or growing up in wealth.

As to the "derivative" argument--all art is derivative, even when it sets out not to be. Creative-writing classes neither accelerate nor retard that process. Look at how derivative poetry was in any era--Renaissance, 18th century, Victorian (to settle on England). If you reach past the famous poets and the Norton anthologies to what was being written and published in general, you will say, "Gee, this all sounds the same." Well, of course it does. That's what happens with art. And then a breakthrough of sorts happens, or technology changes, or the tectonic plates of history shift, and "new" art arises.

Oh, and the article comes with the standard black-and-white photo of Robert Frost at Bread Loaf or wherever. Old photograph, old argument.

Social scientists would probably have a better shot than I or anyone who's closely involved with the topic at explaining what's going on, but what may be going on is that, as usual, Americans, including allegedly literate, "cultivated" (whatever) ones are habitually ambivalent toward academia in general, teaching in particular, art in general, and writing in particular. Get all four in the same room, and there's just too much to despise. The bile rises, and some clever fellow like Menard launches an almost-attack and suggests the teaching of creative writing be abolished. Enter Seinfeld. Yadda. (Yawn.) Yadda. Or in this case Yaddo. Yaddo.

Dang, and I was going to post a poem--by me or someone else. Much more interesting, even if it had been one of mine.

Writers Born in June

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(The photo is of John Edgar Wideman)
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Other writers who have or had birthdays in June: Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries), William Styron, Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), John Edgar Wideman, and Maurice Sendak.

Poets Born In June

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The photo is of Alfred Lord Tennyson. I wonder if anyone called him "Al." I'm thinking not.

Anyway, Tennyson was born in June, as were poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Judith Wright (Australian), and William Campbell (Canadian). I'm sure each was tempted at least one to rhyme "June" with "moon"; it's just an occupational hazard.

August Kleinzahler Wins Awards

Poet August Kleinzahler has won awards recently from the Lannan Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle for his poetry, which appears in such books as Sleeping It off in Rapid City and The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Here is a link to a good article about Kleinzahler; the article appears on SF Gate, the online home of The San Francisco Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/02/DDKU17RF3B.DTL

Digital Technology

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(photo courtesy of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell--in connection with a lecture by Prof. Stine Grodal, Boston University, on “The Nanotechnology Label Across Communities: Categorizing a New Field.”)
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Digital Equipment

This digital equipment changes daily, rearranging
how technology's pointillism delivers the itsy-bits
which represent what's seen and heard. Our calls
are screened. Our screens are called something
different and become much bigger or much smaller,
as if designers were torn between an impulse
toward sky and one toward earthly atoms:
storm-large screens vs. nano-invisibility.

Among the demotic, consuming herd, I buy
what I must to keep within mooing-distance
of what's new. True, I could have been happy
with tubular black-and-white TV and stone-heavy
phones forever. It's all magic to me. I liked
the charcoal of Old TV, the clumsy heft of phones
bolted to walls. I sit beside a Heraclitan

river of research, development, manufacturing,
and marketing. Periodically, I reach and pick
something from the surface of mass-production.
I learn its basic applications without enthusiasm.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poetry-Dust-up at Oxford University

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Something of a scandal has erupted at Oxford University over the appointment--and subsequent rapid resignation--of Ruth Padel as an Oxford professor poetry. Apparently Padel had some involvement with eroding the candidacy of Derek Walcott for the same position. The story raises lots of persistent questions about "writer-in-residence" positions, tensions between "the artist" and higher education, writers who are in residence vs. writers who teach (or professors who write), gender, race, and sexual harassment--just to name a few topics left in the wake of the story. Here is a link (and thanks to Dr. Dolen for the heads-up on this story--see Dr. Dolen's Divinations" on the blog-roll):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/weekinreview/31orr.html

Rhino

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Apparently the official (Latin) name for the "white" rhinoceros (which, as the photo suggests, isn't white, but it's a bit of a long story) is Ceratotherium simum, just in case someone should ask you about that today.
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Rhinoceros

Evolution left rhinoceros holding
a heavy load, freighted down with
muscle, bone, horns, and heft, all
held up by four short legs.

Rhino, you're an envoi from dinosaurs.
People are your predators, as ubiquitous
as sunlight, as shifty as shadow,
lethal and silly: grinding your horn
into powder? I like the way you stare

sadly straight down the tunnel of
history. I like that rough-hewn
stone spike you carry on your face
but would never want to own it.

Let hummingbirds be nuanced. Some
creatures must be as subtle
as an avalanche. Big leathery
rhino, you're one of them, and not
that your large ears will process
this word as meant, but Thanks.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Friends Old and New

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I'm a piano-hack, at best, but I do especially enjoy playing the rich chords in ballads from the 30s, 40s, and early 50s--and in some Simon & Garfunkel songs (well, they are actually Simon songs), including "Old Friends." I just thought I'd mention that as a more or less irrelevant introduction to a poem.



Friends Old, Friends New


It is difficult to discuss old friends
with new ones, new ones with old ones. You feel
as if they're characters from novels whose
pages cannot be inter-collated. You didn't
write these novels. You're of them, too, but
in them both, and you may travel from each
to each. You realize you're the only go-between,
the one who knows both stories, knows who
did why to what so whereily and how with whom
it may well have concerned. As always, you seem

to be the point at which your life converges--
well, duh. But yet you yearn legitimately for
variation, for someone else to unify the narratives
of you, of yours. Maybe a new friend could befriend
an old one and then collaborate to help explain
you to you and them to them.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

New Site For Scrapper Poet

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(The photo is courtesy of Jamestown Community College)

Note: The Scrapper Poet's site has moved to

www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com

Saunter on over to Wordpress and pay a visit.

Misbehaving Animals

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Animals Misbehave

Some frogs drive by at dusk in a green car.
One of them gets out, puts a continuous-loop
broadcasting device under a fern, hits "play,"
gets back in the car, and off the frogs go
to drink and laugh at a moist cocktail lounge.
Meanwhile, I listen to a "frog" croak all night.

The gray squirrel has become so large eating
seed put out for birds that he can barely
fit into his fur. "Are you sure you're not
drinking beer" I ask him one morning. He stares
at me, keeps chewing, and finally says,
"Yes, I'm sure."

The crows have contacted a realtor and are
going to offer to buy our house. We're going
to listen to the offer, out of respect, which
crows demand. Our neighbor is trying to trap
a raccoon that's eating decorative fish. The
raccoon is a known felon. It never checks in

with its parole officer. It's also an
escape-artist. I didn't have the heart
to tell my neighbor this. Under the earth,
worms live a lovely life. I assume they
don't writhe unless we dig them up.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

On Hobbema's Painting

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(the Hobbema painting is owned by the Getty Museum now)


About Hobbema's Landscape

(Meindert Hobbema, 1638-1709)


In Hobbema's "A Wooded Landscape with Travelers
on a Path through a Hamlet," clouds, trees,
and shadows overwhelm travelers and buildings.
Even a patch of sunlight, mid-painting, might
be ominous, a precursor to thunderstorm. Villages,
hamlets, and no-account small towns live on
the edge of being devoured, one way or another.
They are beside nature's point--are one tornado,
flood, avalanche, or economic downturn away from
obliteration. I'm sure Hobbema had something else
in mind with these pigments, the tracks left by
his brush-strokes, but I do like how he knew
foliage, clouds, and shadow lord over a mere
hamlet made of brick and milled wood.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Under Fluorescence

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Under Fluorescence

I'm sitting under fluorescent lights,
waiting for the others to arrive. This
light reminds me of snow-light, denatured,
gathered from peaks around the world
and stored in these humming, nervous tubes
above my head. Topics we'll quibble about
in the meeting around this illuminated
table shall be small but intricate like
snowflakes. We'll have to wait and see
if they'll add up, if they'll reflect.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Those Phrases

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So far, I haven't noticed too many similarities between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon--not that I've been looking for them very hard. I did think of the two in conjunction when I heard Obama say several times, "Let me be clear." Nixon used to say, "Let me be crystal clear" or "Let me make this crystal clear." Of course, Nixon was and Obama is ambitious, bright, and politically shrewd: how do you get to be president without being so? Even Gerald Ford had to be smarter than he seemed, and he became president only because Nixon resigned.

Nixon and Obama both chose tough, hardened, bare-knuckles men as chiefs of staff--Obama's is Rahm Emanuel, and Nixon's was H.R. Haldeman. Obama's the far better orator, and at least so far, Obama seems to have none of the Nixonian paranoia or tendency toward self-destruction. I do think Obama, like most if not all politicians, has some interesting contradictions to work out, including the issue of gay and lesbian citizens and civil rights. Most politicians choose simply not to work them out but to finesse them, so this will be interesting to watch. Constitutionally, there just seems to be no good reason to treat gay and lesbian citizens differently, but then again, I'm no Constitutional scholar. Morally and ethically, I can't think of a reason to treat such citizens differently either, in terms of civil rights, etc.--the purview of politicians.


Those Phrases

To be honest, I don't know why
I'd start a sentence with "to be
honest," unless I were implying honesty
might be a new technique I was about
to try out. In all candor, I don't
have to say I don't like "in all
candor," but I don't. "I must say"
nothing. When people say, "Just let
me say . . .," to me, they've already
started saying it, so it's not a
question of my letting them. Quite
frankly, I prefer the phrase
"Somewhat frankly" because it's
more entertaining and honest. To
tell you the truth, "to tell you
the truth" is just an expression,
neither truth nor lie but a dweller
on the idiomatic frontier. Let me
be clear, or let me be obscure:
your choice! Confidentially,
and just between you and me, there
seems to be no confidentiality.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Tables And Chairs In Trouble

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Cafe, Early Morning

Outside a cafe, tables and chairs
have been arrested and detained,
gathered and restrained by a cable.
Obviously, last night they'd disturbed
the peace. Chairs had shouted protest
about all the asses they must endure.
Tables had rocked and moaned, pounding
on themselves. This morning the furniture
is silent but not ashamed. Tentatively,
the manager releases and arranges first
the tables, then the chairs. One chair
squeaks. A hungover table wobbles.
Customers arrive, unaware of
last night's misdemeanors.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

"Words Crowded Together"

I was reading a book of poems by William Stafford this morning, An Oregon Message, and the opening stanzas of a poem titled "Scripture" reminded me of why I like to read poetry. Okay, I really didn't need reminding, but nonetheless, here are the lines (from p. 91 of the book):

[From "Scripture," by William Stafford]

In the dark book where words crowded together,
a land with spirits waited, and they rose and walked
every night when the book opened by candlelight--

A sacred land where the words touched the trees
and their leaves turned into fire. We carried in wherever
we went, our hidden scene; and in the sigh of snow coming down.

For Charles Epps

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For Charles Epps

(1953-1971)

What's left these 38 years after Charlie
died? The same as what was left a minute
after he died: an avalanche of absence.
I've visited the grave. I always go alone. I
let morbidity, a pettiness, arise, think
of what's under ground, including
the baseball uniform in which they put
his body. It's easy to move past small,
awful thoughts. What's left to resolve?

Everything. He ought to be alive. God
knows that as well as I. My knowledge
stops there. I don't know why he died,
only how, when, where, and with whom--
Sonny Ellis. Their death numbed,
scandalized, and scarred me, but so what?
I got to live at least 38 years more
than they. When I die, so will my grief,

and so it goes. Like an instinctive,
migratory mourner, I think of Charlie
at least four times a year and every May
and try to think of something more to say.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

What Would Bukowski Say?

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What Would Bukowski Say?


A fat man trying
to exercise in hot
sun walked past a
fat man sitting in
a fat American car
eating a hamburger
the size of a Pacific
atoll and sitting on
white cow-hide seats,
and one fat man nodded
at the other, knowing
each other's story
well, and about as
concerned with the word
"fat" as a rattlesnake
is with who will be
the new Secretary of
the Interior. And when
I saw this scene, I
thought of what Charles
Bukowski might say.The
last and only time
I saw Bukowski was
in Davis, California.
His face looked like
it had gone through
a cyclone full of rivets.
He drank a six-pack of
beer and read poetry,
pacing himself in each
task. Bukowski always
had interesting things
to say about almost
everything, including
a fat man in a car and
a fat man trying to exercise,
and anyway, I wish he
were still alive, writing.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Artistic Woman

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Artistic Woman

She did and was art. She might make and wear
a nurturing kerchief, let's say, or transform
with shears and thread an old dress into a new
shawl. Often she carried a purse full of verse.

Ears and fingers teased light with rings. Food
was not simply baked or boiled into submission.
She concocted it like magic, revealed it with
a flourish, delighted in delicious noises guests

might make while eating. She listened artistically,
wanting to seize well said words. Even with pain,
propped with a cane, she turned a walk into a
subtle scene. Envious dull ones liked to accuse

her of showing off. They were right and wrong.
Off? Not so much. Showing? Sure. For her notion
was that life, a surprise, came from darkness
like nothing, showed itself, revised itself:

a pageant, a play, a making, a day to dramatize night.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Top 50 Science Fiction Novels

The photo is of Arthur C. Clarke



I just posted on this topic over on my department's blog, but if by chance you like lists and/or are looking for a list of sci-fi novels to work through, here is one:

http://www.epic-fantasy.com/

I'd describe myself as a reader who's always dabbled in science fiction, but I'm about as far from being an expert on the subject as Pluto (which is still a planet, in my opinion) is from Mercury. However, I know quite a few people who do qualify as experts, and they tend to have strong opinions that don't mesh with the opinions of other experts. Also, the fact that list rather loosely mixes sci-fi, fantasy, and more-or-less realistic fiction that is merely speculative (like On the Beach) is no doubt a bone of contention, like the bone that goes up in the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Please pretend the titles are in Italics.

I don't know of any well known poets who also dabbled in sci-fi writing, but I'm sure there must be, or must have been, some. Richard Hugo wrote one genre-novel--a detective novel with a great title: Death and the Good Life. Karl Shapiro wrote a realistic novel, Edsel. As far as I know, neither writer tried more than one novel. Poet Stephen Dobyns became a bona fide writer of crime fiction.

I'll just add that a lot of sci-novels have terrific poetry-like title. I mean, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,--what a great title for a poem that would have been! In cinematic form, it became Blade Runner, but you knew that.

Anyway, the list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer