| For just over a year now I have been
attending a weekly adult ballet class. Every Monday evening,
five or so of us shuffle our way to a local Scout Hall and spend an
hour pointing and pliéing, curtseying and chasséing, and laughing
at one another. At twenty-four I am the youngest member of the class.
We are none of us particularly graceful or lithe of form. Our feet
turn determinedly inwards. Our thighs tremble desperately at every
movement. Foreheads wrinkled in concentration, we forget about our
arms and hands, allowing them to stick straight out as though in the
grip of temporary rigor mortis. Occasionally, friends in need of light
entertainment will watch us leap and thunder our way through bar and
floor work, the sounds of their mirth often drowning out the tinkly
piano music to which we dance. At the end of last year, the ballet
school which offers this adult class put on a concert, and we were
encouraged to participate. When we were able to stop laughing long
enough to speak, we offered to play either snowballs, rocks, or trees,
lumpish great props around which the light-footed and talented younger
classes could dance. In the end, we watched.
All writers are acquainted with an embarrassment unique to their trade. This embarrassment is twofold.
Firstly, there is the mortification, described with painful accuracy by George Steiner in his book Real presences, associated with "bearing witness to the poetic, to the entrance into our lives" of whatever it is that causes one to write. Each poem, each novel does indeed "bear witness", in the most obvious way, to its source of inspiration, and to the non-writer the process of inspiration is one emotionally demonstrative enough to be embarrassing in the way that weeping openly and persistently in public is embarrassing. This variety of embarrassment is, I think, most keenly felt by poets (or perhaps I am simply limited by my own experience). Admitting to being a poet is akin to admitting some peculiar bedroom fetish in unfamiliar company: people squirm, stammer and look away. One has the feeling one has given Too Much Information, or at least spoken about something that it is simply not polite to mention.
The second variety of embarrassment well-known to the writer has less to do with the mysteries of the Muse herself, and more to do with the common perception of the writer's life: scribbling an epic poem or chapter between breakfast (10 am) and lunch (12 pm) and then napping away the afternoon. At this rate, the lay mathematicians calculate, they themselves could produce a collection of poems in less than a month. The only explanation, therefore, for the remarkably slow speed at which writers publish is that they are taking extravagantly long holidays to boot.
There are thus two reactions available to strangers at the news that one is a writer. The first is squirm-and-look-away embarrassment. The second is the disbelieving, often openly patronising, sneering laugh reserved for writers and others who don't have Real Jobs. A Real Job usually involves an office (not at home, unless you have a photocopier there too), a dress code, and a regular salary; ergo, it involves Actual Work, rather than the erratic scrawling of lines that don't even rhyme. I mean, jeez, you'd think with all that time on their hands they could find time to rhyme at least.
Until recently, I thought that nothing could match, let alone better, the embarrassment of being a writer, even a sort of closet, part-time writer. I had learnt to lie by omission when asked about my work ("I … um … lecture …"), and felt that I, my friends and family, and all casual acquaintances were much happier for my complete silence on the subject of my writing. No doubt this was so, but at the beginning of 2003 I clambered my way to new and giddy heights of humiliation. I enrolled for a Masters degree in Creative Writing (poetry, nogal) at the University of Cape Town.
Creative writing courses have, during the past twenty years or so, taken a hard rap from writers and critics alike. Figures in American criticism - for the United States takes top honours for the sheer number and variety of such courses - like Dana Gioia and Joseph Epstein have questioned the worth of these degrees both for their students and for the literary world in general. Epstein, in a now-famous article entitled "Who Killed Poetry?", published in Commentary in 1988, turned the full force of his polemic on contemporary poets, contrasting their achievements with those of the great Modernist poets. Contemporary poets, Epstein claims in his paper, particularly in the United States, have become "poetry professionals", caught in the cycle of the creative writing education: starting as students in poetry programmes at university, they eventually become creative writing teachers themselves. This, more than any historical or social force, has resulted in poets and poetry becoming isolated from the population, outside of the academic world, who once constituted their readership. "Neither wholly academics nor wholly artists", these writers travel from university to university, giving readings to creative writing students and other poets, teaching courses as guest lecturers, and working as writers-in-residence at various institutions. Additionally, the proliferation of creative writing courses has meant an equal proliferation of "writers", recognisable as such because they bear a certificate to that effect from some or other Mid-Western liberal arts college.
Four years after Epstein, Gioia wrote a slightly more measured article on the demise of contemporary poetry. Though also phrased as a question (like Epstein's) the title seems to promise an investigatory rather than condemnatory approach to the subject: "Can Poetry Matter?" In it, Gioia discusses the position in which contemporary poetry finds itself - more or less that outlined by Epstein - and then offers suggestions about ways in which poetry might be revived, might be returned to its erstwhile audience outside of the university. Central to Gioia's thesis are the consequences of "the multiplication of creative writing programmes". He, like Epstein, outlines the shift in the "social and economic identity of the poet from artist to educator". Poets in today's society, he writes, are viewed as teachers; they are identified with academia, and with the running of creative writing courses. Once again, the blame for the isolation of poetry, and for its dilution with so much decidedly substandard art, is laid at the door of the creative writing programme.
The attitude of critics like Epstein and Gioia is that which one encounters nowadays - albeit in a far less eloquent form - in most people who have given any thought to the existence of creative writing courses, and in many who have given it no thought whatsoever. The logic behind this opinion seems to be simply (and simplistically) this: the ability to write is a gift, a natural talent. As such, it cannot be taught. Creative writing courses therefore serve no purpose. Quod erat demonstrandum.
What this argument fails to take into account, however, is the status of creative writing as one of the arts - like painting, music or dance. While each of these is a fine art, it is also a discipline, with all that the term entails. It would be ludicrous to suggest that drawing or painting classes and institutions have nothing to offer the amateur artist, just as it would be ludicrous to suggest that ballet or playing the violin was something the genuinely talented could pick up without any teaching. Of course a degree of natural ability is necessary: all the teaching in the world will not turn an ungifted child into a Fonteyn or a Menuhin. But to declare that all the skills involved in these disciplines are inborn is nothing short of absurd. The same is true, I would argue, of creative writing. There are aspects of the craft that can, and should, be taught - literary history and development, formal structure and metre; and indeed the very purpose of the art ought to be discussed in a classroom setting.
Another immensely valuable feature of the creative writing programme is the stringent set of requirements (at least in South Africa, or at least at UCT) for entry to the degree. In dance classes and at music schools, in art rooms and in studios, children who are no good at dancing, painting or playing an instrument are gradually made aware of it, if not told it straight out. Heavy ballerinas and deaf pianists are discouraged from hoping for an artistic career. The same service, that of weeding out the heavy-footed and the tin-eared, needs to be performed for aspiring creative writers. At the level of secondary education, learners are told that everyone can write; writing is just a way to express yourself, and if you succeed in churning out a sentence about why you are sad, you're a writer. These same learners are the students who arrive at university absolutely assured of their deserving to be published in literary journals and magazines, and even more assured of their place in the top three in any creative writing class. After all, they've been told for the past twelve years that they are writers. The application process for creative writing programmes, at least at postgraduate level, goes a little way towards disabusing these students of the notion that they are on their way to the Man Booker Prize. A committee reads the submissions of all applicants and, with discussion and argument, selects fewer rather than more of the total number of candidates for acceptance; and it is likely that of these, about half will not do particularly well in their degree. The world is a better place for having fewer amateur writers self-assured to the point of arrogance.
For me, however, the overwhelming benefit of the creative writing degree is that it provides an excuse, a justification, for focusing exclusively on one's writing. Writers do not often have such opportunities. In a society that places paramount importance on Real Work, and in a country where the dole is not an option, writing takes a backseat to everything else, and any time spent - "frivolously!" - on a poem when there are essays to be marked or reports to be prepared is time wasted. Furthermore, the guilt associated with this time is similar, I imagine, to the guilt associated with conducting an adulterous affair. Stolen moments with a poem during sunny afternoons when no one else is home provide the same guilty pleasure as such moments spent with a lover. Late-night abandonment of academic texts for poetry anthologies is like slipping from your husband's side into the bed of your paramour. In the context of a creative writing degree, however, it is your novel or collection of poems that takes up, quite naturally, the bulk of your time. For once, creative writing takes on the same status as any other field of study, and that alone makes the degree as blissful as an extended writer's retreat; that more than anything is how such a degree will benefit you.
A creative writing degree, then, will not make you a writer, just as my starting to take ballet lessons at this age will not make me a ballerina. A creative writing degree will not get you published, just as I will never take to the stage in feathers to the strains of Tchaikovsky. It will not get you a job, except, perhaps, as a creative writing teacher, heaven forbid. But it will remove, for a brief yet important time, the guilt associated with time spent on something that's not part of a Real Job. It will provide you with regular criticism, connections in the writing world, and the excuse to read as much poetry as you like. And the gut-clenching embarrassment of it all will, I assure you, turn you into a past master at the art of the white lie.
References
Epstein, J. 1988. Who killed poetry? Commentary 86:2 (pp 13-20).
Gioia, D. 1992. Can poetry matter? In Gioia, D. 1992. Can poetry matter: essays on poetry and American culture. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, pp 1-24.
|
Award-winning poet Sarah Johnson was
born in 1980 and has lived in Cape Town her entire life. She completed
her BA (Hons) in English and Linguistics at the University of Cape
Town, and most recently her MA in Creative Writing at the same institution.
She tutors in English and Linguistics at UCT, and lectures in Linguistics.
Her first collection of poems, Personae, has just been published
by UCT in association with Snailpress.
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