Answering Their Poetic Calling

Come to this remote corner of the Deep South for professor John Wood’s poetry class at McNeese State University and you can get an inkling of why poetry courses in graduate schools across the country are growing so fast.

Every desk is taken. No one arrives late or leaves early. Despite the sultry, 80-degree heat, no one dozes.

For Wood, a red-bearded giant of a man, can read from the work of Emily Dickinson and transport his audience to the front porch of a New England clapboard house. “A great line of poetry,” he says, “should raise bumps on our arms.”

On this steamy afternoon deep in the Louisiana bayous, Wood has set himself the challenge of teaching a T. S. Eliot poem called “The Journey of the Magi.” The three kings are paying homage to the infant Jesus in the bitter cold of a desert winter.

“A cold time we had of it, just the worst time of year for a journey,” Wood intones in his rolling baritone, oblivious to the ceiling panels that are peeling off from the Gulf Coast humidity.

“The ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter,” he proclaims, pacing back and forth in front of the class.

One young woman shivers slightly and pulls on a sweater.

Poetry may seem to be an alien intruder in the era of virtual reality, an anachronism in today’s dot-com culture.

Yet nearly 300 universities have established graduate poetry programs since the mid 1970s, and the best ones are overflowing. The University of Iowa’s poetry program accepts 5% of its 400 applicants, half the acceptance rate of even Harvard Law School. Stanford University admits five students a year to its two-year postgraduate program, one of the country’s most exclusive. Poet Carol Muske-Dukes is hoping to start a program at USC within the next year or two.

“Now there is hardly even a community college that doesn’t have a poet on the faculty teaching writing,” said George Garrett, a creative writing professor at the University of Virginia.

Why are so many young people from a generation raised on computer games flocking to a discipline that has changed little since the invention of the printing press? Not for the money. Top magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, pay $4 a line. “I do not think there’s a single poet in American history who was able to make a living by being a poet,” said Peter Davison, the Atlantic’s poetry editor.

And not for the fame. The number of subscribers to Poetry magazine (barely 8,000) is scarcely more than 0.01% of those who watched the final episode of “Seinfeld” (76 million).

No, the answer is largely to be found in poetry’s very essence: its capacity to communicate passion and sadness and beauty and love, its refusal to be reduced to a least common denominator.

Poetry offers an opportunity for individual expression in an increasingly mass culture. “The act of poetry, the act of the individual artist, comes in response to this suffocating popular culture that’s very controlled, very corporate,” said Joseph Parisi, the editor of Poetry magazine, the oldest continuously published poetry journal in the country.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas captured the sentiment in his 1940s poem titled “In My Craft or Sullen Art:”

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

The very process of writing poetry is antithetical to the three-speed American way of life: fast, faster and fastest.

“A line will take us hours maybe,” wrote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1902. Now, as then, the poet will chisel and fine-tune that line over and over again in a monumental effort to make it seem effortless--or, in Yeats’ words, “a moment’s thought.”

Despite the stampede, there is little prospect of hundreds of poets of the caliber of Thomas and Yeats. “There are only a few poets in any generation,” said Jonathan Galassi, president of the board of the Academy of American Poets and the poetry editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

If editors and poetry critics are right, most aspiring poets will remain just that--aspiring. The proliferation of programs has expanded the quantity of poetry being produced, but not its quality. “The increase,” sniffed Daniel Kunitz, managing editor of the Paris Review, “is of a mediocre level.”

Increase in Poetry Submissions

The New York-based Review, founded in 1953, is one of the oldest and most prestigious small publishers of fiction and poetry. It receives 500 to 700 poetry submissions for each quarterly issue--a tremendous increase over even five years ago--and publishes just 20. The Atlantic, one of the toughest of all, publishes about 50 poems a year from 50,000 submissions.

If today’s would-be poets are looking to escape from the influences of mass culture--”a way of taking life by the throat,” as the American poet Robert Frost characterized the act of committing sentiments to verse--they cannot get much farther away than Lake Charles and still be in the same country.

This down-at-the-heels oil town, two hours east of Houston and three hours west of New Orleans, is just past the back of beyond. Its main drag is lined with strip malls, crayfish stands and used car lots. Its only shiny new business is riverboat gambling.

Yet Lake Charles is home to McNeese State University, which has roughly a dozen graduate students studying poetry and is one of an ever-growing number of relatively obscure schools with fine programs. Its remoteness may be one of the reasons.

Wood, a two-time winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, hardly expected to stay when he happened upon this place in 1976. But he found that being far from the beaten track made it easier for him to indulge his first love--writing poetry--while he built a program of his own.

Like Wood a generation ago, his students are looking for somewhere to work on their writing in a community.

“There’s a real support network here,” said Tim Vanech, who came after graduating from Harvard. “It’s a close group and that really convinced me this would be a good place to work on my writing.”

Kayla Pobboravsky headed south after earning a degree in biotechnology from Rochester Institute of Technology. “Poetry is something you’re driven to do,” she said. “I know my poetry has improved but I’m much more critical of my work now and much less pleased with it than when I came.”

Pobboravsky finds poetry at least as exciting and rewarding as science. But she admits that she almost surely will earn her living in a laboratory full of petri dishes, not a garret littered with torn-up manuscripts.

Matthew Lany, a former minor league baseball player, moved here from Los Angeles, where he worked as a pizza cutter at Spago. Like just about everyone in a graduate poetry program, he dreams of becoming one of the select few whose work is published to the accolades of fellow poets and the reading public.

“I hope in a few years my mother can buy my stuff at a Barnes & Noble and I’ll make her proud,” he said.

In the 1960s, students who might have become poets joined communes or the anti-war movement. They almost surely did not go to school to learn poetry. Few universities then offered graduate programs in poetry writing.

In fact, most of the great modern poets never took a poetry writing class and many made a living in unrelated fields. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, Eliot worked in a bank, William Carlos Williams was a physician, and Marianne Moore was editor of Dial magazine, a popular literary journal.

“I wanted to be a writer but the opportunity of going somewhere and studying poetry or prose fiction didn’t exist,” said the University of Virginia’s Garrett, who studied English literature at graduate school in the 1950s before becoming a professor, poet and fiction writer.

With a few exceptions such as Amherst, where Frost served on the faculty, and Harvard (Archibald MacLeish), universities in the first half of this century felt it somehow unseemly to have a poet on the staff. “It was viewed like having elephants teach zoology,” said David Fenza, executive director of Associated Writing Programs, which represents university graduate programs in creative writing.

Then a trickle of schools, attracted by the cachet of having a poet on the faculty and intrigued by the popularity of visiting poet programs, began to hire their own. Soon the trickle became a flood.

Gradually, said Garrett, people began feeling poetry was a legitimate field of study even if it was no way to make a living. “We’re now into the second and third generation of writers patronized by American colleges and universities,” Garrett said.

Sales of poetry books have soared--by 10% at Barnes & Noble last year after a 30% leap the year before. Poetry readings are all the rage in cafes, bookstores, bars and university auditoriums. “Our sales tell us poetry is a happening part of the bookstore,” Galassi said.

Most graduates of McNeese’s poetry program, however, have published few poems or none at all. Typically they look for teaching jobs, even though that usually means embarking on a series of visiting professorships that force them to move every year.

“Parents who pay tuition fees would like their kids to come away with some prestige, and getting an M.A. in creative writing seems prestigious,” said Davison of the Atlantic. “But the only way any of them can make a living is to teach other people to do creative writing.”

Wood, who runs the McNeese program, agreed that much of the poetry writing of the last 20 years falls far short of the high standards set by poets of the first part of the century, not to mention the giants of earlier times.

Aim for the immortal themes, Wood advises his students: birth, death, guilt, love, religious faith. Avoid self-centered themes and arcane references that distance poetry from the common reader.

Poetry has lasted so long as an art form, he teaches, because it speaks to a primal longing--on the part of both listener and writer--to understand the agonies of their times and the deepest recesses of their character.

“The great narrative poem has been the holder of our history,” he tells his students. Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ Virgil’s ‘Aeneid,’ Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’--these, to Wood, are “the repository of what is most meaningful to us.”

“Poetry . . . [is] important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon it. . . . We do not admire what we cannot understand,” the 20th century poet Moore has written. Rather, poets must become “literalists of the imagination . . . above insolence and triviality.”

Few of Wood’s students are likely to end up as significant poets. One, however, is almost certainly on his way.

Morri Creech, the son of divorced parents, was brought up by his father in a small South Carolina town. He flunked five of his six subjects in 12th grade and had to repeat the grade. When he returned to his education, it was as a part-time student in psychology at a local vocational college. Then he discovered poetry.

In his last year at McNeese, at age 28, Creech won the coveted Ruth Lilly prize for aspiring poets. The $15,000 award made it a lot easier for Creech and his wife, who were planning to live hand-to-mouth on Creech’s $18,000 salary for teaching five courses at McNeese and her modest salary from a regional arts council.

Student Joins Ranks of the Published

But the crowning glory came when the editor of Poetry magazine accepted one of Creech’s poems. Being published in Poetry is like winning a prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

“It’s a kind of rite of passage,” critic Dana Gioia said. He noted that the magazine was the first to publish the leaders of the Modern Poetry movement: Eliot, Ezra Pound and Moore.

The subject of Creech’s winning poem would be familiar to any boy growing up in the South: the altar call, the moment when the Baptist preacher invites members of the congregation to publicly accept God. Creech’s father was a devout believer but Creech found himself struggling and in the end was unable to make the full leap of faith. As he himself wrote:

Though I still grip the pew at the closing hymn

and know the short walk down the aisle to the everlasting

I have yet to feel the swell and stir of mercy.

Creech has been writing from his own experience. He is trying, as Wood urged him, to reach for something larger. The best poets find the connections between the world they know and the sweeping truths of human existence.

Yeats, looking back on his life, concluded that his poetry grew out of small, familiar things--”a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, old kettles, old bottles and a broken can.” But its essential spirit, he wrote, reaches to the deeper essence, “to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”