Fuck the Poetry Police

“So many of us want to be great writers. Students clamor to take creative writing classes. MFA programs have proliferated. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people self-publish fiction online each year through Kindle Direct Publishing and fan fiction sites and Wattpad. Many compete to entice literary agents on Twitter. But vanishingly few become the kind of writer who achieves conventional success and wins lucrative literary prizes”

“The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat; a team of scholars has been working for almost 10 years to detail exactly how the rigging works”

“Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why”

“The wider they went, the hungrier they became to understand who gets to succeed as a writer in the United States today. They wanted to reveal the system, to see all of it”

“They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.””

“They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.””

“Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.””

“They found that “in recent years, about a quarter of the titles that won prizes were published by […] imprints of Penguin Random House; about half were published by an additional four presses: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan), Copper Canyon, Graywolf, and HarperCollins.””

“nonwhite writers needed elite credentials more than white ones. Black writers who won prizes, for example, were much more likely than white writers to hold Ivy League degrees and MFAs”

“All this power is routed through people. Grossman, Spahr, and Young show how a small group of writers who served often as judges wielded disproportionate influence”

“In short, if you want the recognition of a major prize, you ought to attend an elite university, then earn an MFA from Iowa”

“These institutions will induct you into the networks and train you in the sociolects you need to know. Publish with one of a few select houses. And, still, cross your fingers”

“The game is rigged — the prize game, anyway. It is mostly for the elite in our stratified, grotesquely unequal world”

“When students come to me now asking for advice about how to be a writer, I tell them: Find writing you love and follow it. Make those writers your writers. Read each other, publish each other, create forms of literature that speak from where you are”

“Take as your model Belt Publishing or Cave Canem or Deep Vellum or Dorothy: A Publishing Project or Hub City Press or Sublunary Editions”

“Learn from others. Think collectively. Make an aesthetic of your own”