Abstract
Creative Writing was no sooner established than reformers set out to change it. First came those who wanted to do away with it altogether. In a famous broadside published in Poetry magazine in 1986, Greg Kuzma called it a catastrophe, demanding its abolition.1 But Kuzma was trying to take away the bone after the dog had already buried it. By 1980 the number of writing programs in the US had climbed to over a hundred, and by the end of the decade more than a thousand degrees in Creative Writing were being awarded annually. Creative Writing was not about to disappear. Next came those who granted its existence, but not without an improvement in its habits. ‘The question today’, concluded the poet Christopher Beach ten years after Kuzma wrote, ‘is not whether such programs should exist, but how and where they can and should exist within the academic structure of the English department and the university as a whole.’2 By the mid-nineties, in short, the question was bureaucratic.
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Notes
Christopher Beach, ’Careers in Creativity: The Poetry Academy in the 1990s,‘ Western Humanities Review50 (Spring 1996): 15.
David Radavich, ‘Creative Writing in the Academy,’ Profession1999: 106-12; D.W. Fenza, ‘Creative Writing and Its Discontents,’Writer’s Chronicle32 (March-April 2000): 52.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, ‘The Strangeness of Creative Writing: An Institutional Query,’Pedagogy3 (Spring 2003): 157.
Francine Prose, Blue Angel(New York: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 199; Paul Dawson, Creative Writing and the New Humanities(London: Routledge, 2005), p. 2. Subsequent references to Dawson’s book are inserted between parentheses.
D.G. Myers, The Elephants Teach, new edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 31-3. The book was first published in 1996.
Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 271.
Irving Babbitt, ‘On Being Creative,’ in On Being Creative and Other Essays(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), esp. pp. 25-6.
J.E. Spingarn, ‘The New Criticism’ (1910), in Creative Criticism and Other Essays, new and enlarged edn. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), p. 18.
Geoffrey Light, ‘From the Personal to the Public: Conceptions of Creative Writing in Higher Education,’ Higher Education43 (March 2002): 265-6.
Arthur Saltzman, On Not Being Nice: Sentimentality and the Creative Writing Class, Midwest Quarterly44 (Spring 2003): 324.
Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 90. Emphasis in the original.
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© 2012 David G. Myers
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Myers, D.G. (2012). On the Reform of Creative Writing. In: Teaching Creative Writing. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284464_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284464_4
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