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Confessions of a Journalism Major
I have taught on every level of education in 50 years of classrooms, from kindergarten to grad school and beyond, and I know one truth: that knowledge which can be measured and tested may get a paycheck and may be useful, but it is not the answer to a happy and liberated life.
—Grace Cavalieri
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
—W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"
Science is not my enemy
So President Obama announces new funding initiatives for math and science education, with hundreds of millions of dollars available from such organizations as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Meanwhile, the Washington National Opera—far from the first arts organization to do so, and certainly far from the last—announces massive staff and programming cuts for the 2010-11 season. It all seems to go a long way toward proving the thesis of Mark Slouka in "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school," in the September 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine. In ten pages of scintillatingly angry prose, Slouka—a novelist, creative writing teacher at the University of Chicago, and contributing editor of Harper's—pinpoints a pernicious trend. "(T)he essential drama of American education today…(is) a play I've been following for some time now," he writes. "It's about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It's about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can't. It's about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production."
 Do I agree with Slouka? For the most part I do, but I don't really view the question the same way he does. For one thing, I am not competent to judge trends within academia, the milieu in which Slouka has spent his life. Slouka, a Columbia Ph.D., has taught at Harvard as well as the University of Chicago. I have a bachelor's degree in journalism from a state university (the same academic credentials, I hasten to add lest someone do it for me, as Sarah Palin). For the past 32 years I have earned my living as a reporter for two business newspapers that cover the rubber product manufacturing and tire retailing industries. (That alone might cause Slouka to dismiss me as a shill for the enemy.) My teaching experience consists of one six-week poetry workshop at the Writer's Center Annex in Arlington, Va. Yet I am also the grateful beneficiary of funding for arts education, through the free-but-competitive Jenny McKean Moore program in creative writing at George Washington University.
As the host of a monthly poetry reading series and a former board member of a not-for-profit poetry publisher, I know many current and recent teachers and students in creative writing programs, and they corroborate Slouka on the state of arts funding. "In the sixties, seventies and eighties, I was able to run a publishing house and a radio show with funding for the arts," said Grace Cavalieri, host of "The Poet and the Poem" and a much-beloved leader of the Washington, D.C., poetry scene. "Now only a minuscule amount is available."
Yet despite the recent erosion of arts funding—a trend that can be pinpointed, with almost surgical accuracy, from the time Ronald Reagan was elected president—I wonder whether the patterns of thought Slouka notes are as new as he says they are. In an earlier Harper's essay, "Quitting the Paint Factory," Slouka writes, "In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that `the chief business of the American people is business,' the dominion of the ants has grown enormously." Yet weren't the "ants," as Slouka calls them, already dominant in the America of Coolidge's time? (Coolidge was Reagan's hero.)
 Pablo Medina—novelist, poet, and teacher of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston—agrees with Slouka generally, but sees the problem as beginning much earlier, and not in the U.S. "Educational institutions have abdicated their role as molders of responsible citizens, as well as repositories of humanistic culture, in favor of less civilized, more barbaric instincts—make more money, control more territory," Medina said. "I don't think any of this is a function of capitalism per se…but of our abandonment of spiritual pursuits in favor of materialistic ones." That abandonment, according to Medina, had its origins half a millennium ago. "The Reformation had a lot to do with it as did figures like Descartes and Erasmus, and—if you believe Milan Kundera, as I do—with Cervantes," he said.
Nor do I share Slouka's Us-Versus-Them mentality, his implication that science and math are the enemies of the arts and humanities. Slouka may declare his general respect for math and science, but the bitterness of his argument belies that. "There's something indecent about the way math and science gobble up market share," he writes. "Not content with being heavily subsidized by both government and private industry and with serving as a revenue-generation gold mine for higher education…math and science are now well on the way to becoming the default choice for anyone having trouble deciding where to park their (or the taxpayers') money."
Yet although Bill Gates may not be funding poetry journals, the crisis in American education does not begin and end with the arts. "Funding of basic science has diminished due to the emphasis of both business and government on applied research," said Ernst Benjamin, former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. "We are falling far behind other countries in math and science graduates and, indeed, some half of science Ph.D. graduates in the U.S. are now foreign-born."
Nor can business and government be blamed entirely for the decline of basic math and science, according to Benjamin. "While I agree that there is great emphasis on job preparation—though probably not enough on higher-level skills—much of the vocational emphasis reflects student demand—and the doctrine that the students are our customers," he said.
There are many reasons for this, but to identify and analyze them thoroughly is beyond the scope of this essay. People will always need to make a living, and college students don't always have a clear idea as to what they really need to study (as, indeed, I did not).
Slouka is correct in arguing for the importance—indeed, the overriding urgency—of his own discipline, but he undercuts his argument by withholding evidence. In one section of his essay, he asserts, mostly correctly, that poets and writers face much greater dangers from officialdom than scientists. "Science, by and large, keeps to its reservations, which explains why scientists tend to get in trouble only when they step outside the lab," he writes. Slouka also quotes science writer Dennis Overbye as saying, "Nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant." Yet Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov starved to death in the Gulag for espousing Mendelian genetics over the crackpot theories of Trofim Lysenko. Slouka mentions Andrei Sakharov, in a footnote, but not Vavilov. It is true that the Mandelstams, Babels, Meyerholds and Solzhenitsyns far outnumbered the Vavilovs. But why bury Vavilov again?
In any case, I see the crisis in education somewhat differently from Slouka. I too read the news of students at Berkeley protesting steep increases in tuition. Those rates are not going up for English and philosophy majors only. I do not live in California, but I have lots of family there: my sister, who chairs a high school English department; my niece, who graduated summa cum laude in civil engineering from Chico State and now heads the Napa River Flood Control Project; my niece's husband, who teaches an online engineering course but saw that course cut for the next semester, never mind that twenty-five students signed up for it; my niece's children, who are just entering the California primary school system. All of them are dealing, have dealt, will deal with Proposition 13, massive funding cuts, massive increases in class size, and the more general frustrations of the egregiously misnamed No Child Left Behind Act, which has turned out to be little more than an excuse to cut funding to public schools. I want my six-year-old grandniece to have the same educational opportunities her mother had. Will she?
California, because of Proposition 13, is a worst-case scenario. Nevertheless, we are seeing the same story playing out to varying degrees in every state in the Union. This is bigger than just the lack of regard for the arts and humanities, which has been widespread in the U.S. at least since Andrew Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams. We see federal and state governments starve public education systems, which in turn must cut programs and raise tuitions to the point where today's college students must shoulder decades of education-related debts to pay for ever narrower course offerings. At the same time, financial assistance—public and private—is drying up. Some will argue that this is an inevitable outcome of the current economy; but think of the people who created that economy. At the risk of sounding like a crackpot myself, all of this strikes me, at least on some level, as deliberate. As university and even community college and vocational school educations become unaffordable for middle-class students, we see higher education once again becoming the privilege of the rich. And we saw that tendency burgeon in the Reagan and Bush eras, in which we had government of the country club, by the country club, for the country club. Call it the Revenge of Henry Clay Frick.
In the future, will university educations be within reach for blue-collar kids like me? My father had the grades and the intellect to win a full scholarship to any college in this country. But he graduated from high school in 1936, with nine younger brothers and sisters at home, so college was out of the question. The similarities between the economy today and the economy of the 1930s have been noted with heartbreaking regularity over the past two years. People don't have ten children these days, but given the cost of a university education, they might as well.
My mother's father, a miner's son, was the guy everyone in the neighborhood came to when the car wouldn't start or the furnace was broken. (During one particularly harsh winter, he saved at least one family from freezing to death.) All the children came to him with their broken toys; "Herbie fix" was a byword in that little Ohio town for two generations.
My grandfather never had the chance to go beyond the third grade. Among his descendants, the one who most clearly inherited his ability was my niece, his great-granddaughter, the 4.0-average engineering graduate from Chico State. My father was a man of great verbal facility, and a joyous storyteller; my sister, the English department chairwoman, and I inherited that. Did my niece, my sister and I inhabit a lucky bubble of history, in which families of modest means could send their children to college without risking bankruptcy?
But this is all an aside to Slouka's thesis, and I agree with him that the arts and humanities are shunted aside in our society. In some influential circles, this disregard is worse than indifference, as Slouka knows all too well. Toward the end of his essay, Slouka accuses academicians of collaborating, however inadvertently, in their own marginalization. "Worried about indoctrination, we've short-circuited argument," he writes. "Fearful of propaganda, we've taken away the only tools that could detect and counter it. `Values' are now the province of the home. And the church. How convenient for the man." I would argue with Slouka that it depends on which homes and which churches you're talking about, but I think he and I agree on the definition of "the man." Yet within the precincts of "the man" are powerful forces hostile to all intellectual pursuit—scientific as well as artistic and humanistic—that might contradict their world-view. (Darwin, anyone?) Anyone in the U.S. who values higher education—who subscribes, to any degree or in any field, to the life of the mind—is in the same predicament. My niece the engineer is not my enemy.
The business of writing
The circumstances surrounding university creative writing departments could be seen as belying Slouka's thesis about the dire status of the arts in the U.S. They could even be used to advance an argument that the teaching of creative writing has itself become a sort of applied vocational training. Yet they also speak to the decreasing opportunities available to writers who want to make their names simply as writers.
The sheer numbers are overwhelming, as Louis Menand noted in his June 8, 2009 New Yorker article, "Show or Tell: Should creative writing be taught?" I am a noncombatant in the war over the question Menand poses in his title. I only note Menand's observation that in 1982—the year in which R.V. Cassill, one of the founders of Associated Writing Programs (AWP), scandalized the organization by urging that it disband—there were seventy-nine degree programs in creative writing in the U.S. Now there are eight hundred and twenty-two.
Since a Ph.D. or M.F.A. in creative writing does only one thing—give a student accreditation to teach creative writing—what can this mean? Why are so many students swelling an obviously overcrowded field? Not even creative writing department chairpersons claim a creative writing degree alone makes you a writer—though some, Cassill included, have suggested they are a golden key to publication in prestigious academic journals and consideration for major writing awards. But there are not enough jobs or journals to go around, and the number of publishers' mid-list fiction titles shrinks noticeably every year.
 Toward that question, I can only quote Grace Cavalieri. "Why do I teach creative writing if my students cannot buy a new car or get a good job by virtue of it?" she writes. "First, I believe the past goes nowhere at all. We can visit the past and through writing understand and maybe even forgive. Then we can share this so we are not alone and disconnected…People who tell their stories, even once, find they do not need to chatter constantly to fill the void. We are the only creatures on earth who can tell a story and so it is an obligation for our species. We need to know what is alike about us, to be able to feel for others what they (may have to learn to) feel for themselves. This is the humanness at the basis of HUMANITIES."
The value of creative writing, Cavalieri adds, is the permission it gives us to explore language and invent ways to make it new. "Were it not for poetry rinsing off language, we would all exist as Jerry Springers, TV commercials, or political speeches—language squeezed dry of all juice and meaning, devoid of real power," she writes.
Obviously, then, there are many thousands of young people in this country for whom storytelling and language—and the human connections they engender—are more important than any material gain. I myself can only speak secondhand of university creative writing departments. Unlike Slouka, I never had a prospective mother-in-law who asked me if I planned to open a philosophy store with my Ph.D.; I never went further than a Bachelor of Science in Journalism, and anyway I'm gay. From the time I was twelve I wanted to write, knew instinctively I would never be much good at anything else. I majored in journalism at Ohio University, although literature then as now was my great love: I surmised (correctly) that I had little vocation for teaching and (incorrectly, I discovered not too long out of college) that a journalism degree was the only way to get a writing job. There was (and is) a creative writing department at OU, which produced a distinguished journal, The Ohio Review. But creative writing at that time (the mid-seventies) was not distinct from the rest of the English Department. Though I took a couple of creative writing courses as part of my English minor, I do not recall meeting any students at OU who majored in creative writing. My father—a rural letter carrier who for years also worked as a school bus driver—and mother, a registered nurse, paid for my tuition, room, board and books out of their savings, with help from the dribs and drabs of scholarship money I was able to obtain. I left college free of government debt, ready to accept that job that I knew was waiting for me at The New Yorker. Except that the job that was waiting for me was at Rubber & Plastics News.
Much later, I mentioned to Pablo Medina—my teacher in the Jenny McKean Moore program in the early nineties—that I was toying with the idea of applying to an M.F.A. program. "Why?" he asked. The question was fair: I had no plans to teach, and my poetry was already getting accepted for publication. (I sometimes wonder whether I have come up against a glass ceiling for acceptance by certain journals, based on my lack of academic qualifications, but that is another story.) My friends report varying degrees of satisfaction with the M.F.A. process. One friend, currently enrolled in a prestigious program, finds it enriching and gratifying; another, a graduate of the same program, wants to bulldoze the buildings and plow the barren ground with salt. A few M.F.A.s I know are doing nothing with their degrees; a few are rising stars. Most are roughly at the same point in their literary careers that I am, though some are teaching, and some may have easier access to certain journals and grant programs than I do. Most have gone much further into debt than my parents and I ever had to.
All of us have two things in common. The first is that we share the excitement Grace Cavalieri describes—that need to tell our stories, seek out the stories of others, and forge the human and intellectual bonds that come as a consequence. The second is that not a single one of us can make a living from what we write for our own pleasure. We teach, we practice law, we work in libraries and government offices, we fight fires, we edit scientific texts, we write on assignment about computers or health care or automotive repair. Whether this taints us in Slouka's eyes, I don't know. What I do know is that it's a good year if we take in more than a few hundred dollars from our creative work.
So that begs the question of who does get to live off the proceeds of their writing, Timothy Egan asked the same question in "Typing Without a Clue," his op-ed piece in the Dec. 8, 2008, New York Times. The event that occasioned Egan's article was publication of the autobiography of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a/k/a Joe the Plumber.
"I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?" Egan wrote. "I didn't think so. And I don't want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished."
And too many good novelists, Egan adds, remain obscure even when published, while the book by Barbara Bush's springer spaniel soars to the top of the best-seller lists. "Publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print," he writes. "True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage."
In his column, Egan mentions the then-nascent book deal of Sarah Palin—the woman who, according to Robin Williams, was voted in high school the Least Likely to Read a Book and the Most Likely to Burn One. There are now 2.8 million copies of Going Rogue in print.
Language squeezed dry of all juice and meaning, devoid of real power…
The publisher of Going Rogue is HarperCollins. HarperCollins, in its (much) earlier incarnation as Harper & Brothers, was the publisher of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe—and Harper's Magazine.
An aside about the movies
Most Scene4 readers by now are wondering why I haven't yet mentioned the movies. That's because movies as an issue apart. Even the barest-bones independent movie costs an amount of money that would keep the average poetry journal going for decades.
Jane Alexander, during her tenure as chairwoman for the National Endowment of the Arts, thought she would find an ally in fellow actor Sen. Fred Thompson. Actually, he was one of her staunchest adversaries. Thompson's reasoning was that if an arts project couldn't attract Hollywood money, it couldn't be any good.
Thompson, of course, is no longer in the Senate. But senators with even less feeling for the arts than Thompson—who might even regard the arts as threats to God and country—decide whether your small press gets funded next year.
The hows and the whys
Grace Cavalieri's dentist attended the college where Cavalieri was a visiting poet for 28 years. "She said biology prepared her very well for dentistry, but the creative writing courses she took taught her about herself, who she was, and how to understand the world more than anything she studied," Cavalieri writes. The dentist's remarks were unsolicited, and she didn't know of Cavalieri's connection to her alma mater.
While I can't say my dentist ever told me anything like that, he likes my poetry and has bought all three books I've published so far. I don't brag about my poetry, but I don't hide it either, as Dana Gioia felt constrained to do when he worked at General Foods. My editor has even written editorials about my poetry, and readers comment on them in a very friendly way. They always ask me how the poetry is going, and some have even bought my books and attended my readings. The wife of a polyurethane products manufacturer, a widely published poet herself, started an e-mail correspondence with me that lasted several years. Meanwhile, I've written a few op-eds myself, including one titled, "Do You Think Shakespeare Can Get Me a Job with Goodyear?" (I stressed the advice Shakespeare gave on decision-making, such as The Merchant of Venice being a wise reminder to always read the fine print. Hubristically I sent a copy to Ian McKellen, who sent a gracious handwritten reply that I have unfortunately lost.)
The readers of Rubber & Plastics News and Tire Business may not consider the arts a front-burner issue, but in my experience neither are they hostile to them.
I in turn have the utmost respect for what the readers of Rubber & Plastics News and Tire Business do, which is to provide goods and services millions of people want and need. It would be wonderful if the guy who's fixing my car has read John Donne, but I'd much rather see him read the latest manuals on brake pads and fuel injection systems. I don't have that kind of knowledge, and I am grateful to those who do. People who concentrate on how things work will always be important to this world. Like Slouka, I believe in the urgency of the why, as well as the how; I could not agree with him more in the final section of his essay, that the arts and humanities should not bend—as they too often do—to the prevailing winds, should not evade discomfiting truths with jargon and rhetoric, but should stand up to the duty of advancing unfettered thought in a free society. But I do not regard science, math and vocational training as blocking the path to this goal. I think the arts and humanities can stand shoulder-to-shoulder and eye-to-eye with them, even in this materialistic society, as their friend—and their equal.
In the end, we are all involved in making things. Is it coy of me to quote Ecclesiastes? "Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?' There is joy in making things, whether they are houses or computers or poems. I feel joy in completing a poem to my reasonable (never complete) satisfaction. I'm not sure that what I write is as important as what my grandfather or father did, or what my sister and niece do. But I think that some of what I write can be important to people who fix furnaces, deliver the mail, prevent floods—and teach young people.
Slouka is right in arguing that those who deal in intangible things can make something that outlasts even the best-built house or best-programmed computer. I hold that, given the economy and general societal indifference, the best way for artists to assert their importance is to live their art. We must show by the example of our lives the value of what we do. Don't brag about it, but don't hide it either. We must be good neighbors. The lines by Auden that began this essay—so often misquoted, or quoted out of context—explain all. Poetry may not "make things happen" in the quantifiable way. But it points the way to happening; indeed, it can be considered a "happening" in itself.
I have never earned much money from my literary work, and—aside from the dreams of youth—I have never expected to. I do not like that, but still less do I like the idea of giving up what is important to me, on the basis that others don't care to pay for it. I continue hosting the readings the second Sunday of every month at Iota Club and Café in Arlington, Va., as I have done for the past fifteen years. Steve Negrey, the owner of Iota, has helped me and my fellow poets in more ways than I can count or repay. In turn, I guarantee him twenty-five or thirty paying customers at an hour when business normally would be slow. I can't pay any of the poets, or reimburse them for travel if they come from out of town. But I can provide them a place to read their poetry, sell their books, and find an audience that is sympathetic and appreciative. We at Iota are not getting rich, but in our way we are doing what Auden bid us do:
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night.
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice…
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start;
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
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