Hyde Park Blvd

Robert Frost at Breadloaf (via New Yorker)

In his review of Mark McGurl’s “The Program Era” (New Yorker, June 8), Louis Menand reflects on an oversupply of navel-gazing about college writing programs and their relative merit.  He offers a perspective that has resonance for another would-be poet who benefited from the entrepreneurial environment of a would-be writing program, not to mention the mentorship of terrific teachers, writers, and friends, among them William Alfred, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Hecht, Jane Shore, and Kathleen Spivak:

For, in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work. I wrote poetry in college, and I was in a lot of workshops. I was a pretty untalented poet, but I was in a class with some very talented ones, including Garrett Hongo, who later directed the creative-writing program at the University of Oregon, and Brenda Hillman, who teaches in the M.F.A. program at St. Mary’s College, in California. Our teacher was a kind of Southern California Beat named Dick Barnes, a sly and wonderful poet who also taught medieval and Renaissance literature, and who could present well the great stone face of the hard-to-please. I’m sure that our undergraduate exchanges were callow enough, but my friends and I lived for poetry. We read the little magazines—Kayak and Big Table and Lillabulero—and we thought that discovering a new poet or a new poem was the most exciting thing in the world. When you are nineteen years old, it can be.

Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity? Not much. Was I concerned about belonging to an outside contained on the inside? I don’t think it ever occurred to me. I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Photo Credit: Jamie Tanaka for Time

He’s criticized for being cold and unsympathetic, for not loving his characters enough.  My view:  he sees to the root of both sides of even the most challenged relationship (an extraordinary talent), and there’s sympathy and insight (and, yes, humor) in the ability to parse the tangles that compose life in these parts.

Bottom line:  I’m a huge fan (if you haven’t, read The Corrections, whatever Oprah says).  He writes extraordinarily well and he gets my generation in ways that Updike got our parents.  Latest example is his story “Good Neighbors” in the June 8 New Yorker.  A snippet:

There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was, in any case, hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.

Digits, WSJ’s blog for Technology News and Insights, reports on 25-year old CalTech grad Virgil Griffith who plotted SAT scores and music choices aggregated from Facebook. The results attracted enough attention to crash the web sites on which they were displayed, but you can see a representative sample above.

As for books, Nabokov’s Lolita was the favorite of bright students.