One Poet’s Journey
1.
I dropped out of Syracuse University’s creative writing MA program in May of 1985, when I was twenty-three years old. They did not have an MFA back then. Philip Booth, one of the program’s founders and a multiple award-winning poet in his own right, called me into his office near the end of that semester. “You’re a talented writer,“ he said. ”Of this there’s no doubt, but I don’t see in the work you’ve done so far a coherent question or set of concerns around which to build the thesis you’ll have to write starting in September.” Then he gently reminded me just how young I was and suggested that perhaps what I needed was more life experience, not time in a classroom. “Remember,” he said, “you don’t need a creative writing degree to be a poet.”
Booth’s words stood in stark contrast to what the previous semester’s workshop leader told me when she’d called me into her office. (I’m not naming her because I’m not writing this to settle old scores.) My application to the program had not been particularly strong, she said, but my writing sample, even with all its flaws, had shown that I was willing to write about my feelings in a way most male poets seemed not to be. She’d persuaded the admissions committee to give me a chance to develop that strength, but the work I’d been submitting to workshop made me sound like “a graduate of the Rod McKuen school of poetics.” (Broadly speaking, you can think of him as the Rupi Kaur of his time.) If I didn’t start to show her soon that I was capable of writing more than “bubble gum poetry,” she would have no choice but to ask me to leave the program.
When I look back on those two meetings now, it’s clear to me that Booth was responding directly to what that other poet had said. Ironically, though, it was advice that other poet gave me that helped me both to hear the truth in Booth’s words and to find the strength to act on them. “I think,” she said towards the end of our meeting, “you should read Robert Creeley. You could learn a lot from his syntax.” She was right. I did learn a lot. I haven’t read Creeley in decades, but I can trace characteristics of the poems I write today to what I gleaned from the month-long self-directed seminar I gave myself in his work—self-directed being the operative word here, since as far as I recall, that do-or-die meeting was the last time that other poet and I ever discussed my writing.
I had no idea, in other words, if the difference studying Creeley had made made any difference at all in the fact that I’d been allowed to remain at Syracuse for at least one more semester. The answer to that question, however, was less important to me than the feeling of self-reliance that came from knowing I’d made that difference on my own. This newfound confidence was what Booth’s words affirmed when he reminded me I didn’t need a degree to be a poet. Those words may be no less true today than they were back then, but I wonder if a young poet in 2025 would hear in them the kind of permission they were for me in 1985 to chart my own course.
I’ve thought a lot about my time at Syracuse ever since an exchange I had on Twitter, when it still was Twitter, with a poet who did not have an MFA, but who’d decided to pursue one anyway, despite publishing credentials at least as substantial as many poets already teaching in MFA programs: two award-winning full-length collections, along with a couple of prize-winning chapbooks. Despite her success, she said, she’d been feeling very alone as a poet, missing the kind of community and support she’d seen poets with MFAs provide for one another. I understood how she felt. I’m sure the reality is more complex, but it is hard not to notice that many MFA graduates evince a proactive, mutually supportive literary citizenship, lifting up and celebrating each other’s work whenever they have the chance. I’d be lying if I said I too haven’t sometimes wished for a similarly committed group of peers.
I felt this very strongly when, after a decade of service, I stepped down at the end of 2021 as one of my faculty union’s two vice presidents. I hadn’t not been writing during those ten years—I managed to publish my second book, for example—but the demands of union work had left me little time for meaningful participation in the literary community. Once I started to reengage, I was not prepared for how much things had changed, perhaps most prominently in the near ubiquity of poets with MFA degrees. Indeed, from who was running and getting published in literary magazines, to who ran reading series, to who got invited to give lectures, workshops, or readings at major venues, to who was reviewing whose books and whose books got reviewed, to who put together panels for AWP and who won contests, it was much less common than I remembered to see someone listed who did not have an MFA, or who was not enrolled or teaching in an MFA program.
The numbers support me here. According to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), when I left Syracuse in 1985, there were only thirty-one MFA programs in the country. Now, there are more than two hundred fifty, and, as AWP’s most recent data show, much of that growth overlapped significantly with the ten years I was working for my union. The MFA, in other words, like the jar Wallace Stevens placed on that hill in Tennessee, has become the center around which much of the literary landscape has organized itself, making it ironic that there are those in the MFA world who try to pretend, or at least ask MFA students to pretend, that the degree is not part of a professional and professionalizing ecosystem.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, Naomi Kanakia described how, despite the fact that the MFA is the minimum qualification for teaching creative writing in higher education, the faculty in her MFA program told her class right from the start not to see the degree as the starting point of an academic career, but rather as an opportunity for “time and space away from your normal life, so you can write.” Nor is this a new phenomenon. One of the AWP reports I referred to above, for example, quotes University of Alabama at Birmingham Professor Adam Vines in 2018 as telling his potentially MFA-bound undergraduates that they should “apply only to fully-funded programs” and think of the time they will spend getting the degree “as a paid residency,” not an investment in their future academic careers. Most MFA graduates, he explains, will “never get a tenure-track position” in creative writing.
Here, too, the proof is in the numbers. According to AWP, there were ninety-eight open tenure track lines in creative writing in 2008. A decade later, by which time there were nearly one hundred additional MFA programs in existence, the number of open tenure track lines increased by seven to just one-hundred-and-five, a paltry sum when compared to the number of MFA graduates eligible to apply for those positions.
Given this reality neither Professor Vines nor Kanakia’s instructors were wrong to warn students away from a career goal that is increasingly unachievable. The metaphor they relied on, though—that students should treat an MFA program as if it were a residency—is still deeply flawed. Even as it dismisses the practical importance of the degree students are in MFA programs to earn, it perpetuates the notion that a degree-granting program is nonetheless the best place for those students to become the writers they want to be, the precise antithesis of the advice I was given almost forty years ago.
2.
I packed an awful lot of living into the years immediately following the day in May of 1985 that I drove away from Syracuse in my red Chevy Malibu station wagon, and it all found its way into the poems I was writing: the summer I spent studying 20th-century Scottish literature at Edinburgh University; being accused of corporate espionage when instead of reformatting a new, five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk, I accidentally reformatted the entire hard drive belonging to the attorney of a business start-up that had hired me to write for them; helping, as a Hillel director at a private university, a graduate student who needed to hide from his compatriot peers the fact that he had converted from Islam to Judaism, his mother’s faith, a potentially capital crime in the country he was from; and the many experiences I had during the year I spent teaching English in Seoul, South Korea.
I have no memory of what the poems I wrote during that time actually said, however, because at some point in the mid-1990s I destroyed everything I’d written from 1985 to that point. I don’t remember specifically what compelled me to do that, but I do remember that those poems made me feel tethered me to an apprenticeship I needed to leave behind. I also remember sitting at my desk, shredding those poems a few pages at a time, and wondering if I would be okay with it if it turned out that I had no more poems in me. The last poem I held above the shredder’s teeth was the one I’d sent Booth a few months after I left Syracuse, the first in which I tried to commit to the page my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence.
I’m holding in my hand now the letter Booth wrote in response. Four decades later, his words can still bring tears to my eyes. This, in part, is what he wrote:
That’s … an important and … considerable poem by any standard. What it means to have written it, to have found such terms for such experience, I don’t want to presume to guess. The important thing now is that [the experience] is no longer entirely inside you but out there on the page, an act of courage and an event in its own right, a way of exploring in order to come to terms, to arrive in order—again—to begin.
I’d recognized that poem immediately after I wrote it as the kind of breakthrough I had not made during my year at Syracuse, and I sent it to Booth because I wanted him to know he’d been right, that leaving had been precisely what I needed to do. It’s hard to overstate just how much his response was what I needed to hear. Back then, our still unfinished cultural reckoning with men’s sexual violence against women was just beginning. No one, and I mean no one, was talking about the sexual abuse of boys, or, when they did, it was deeply mired in myth and misconception—like the one, which sadly persists even today, that says sexual abuse by men transforms boys into homosexuals who then go on to become abusers themselves.
I had no reason to believe my classmates would have endorsed any of those myths had I brought a poem like that to workshop, but I also had no reason to trust they would not have done so. I sometimes wonder, in fact, if the “bubble gum poetry” that almost got me kicked out of Syracuse’s program didn’t result from all the ways in which I allowed that fear to keep me from writing the poems I really needed to write. For Booth to state so unequivocally that what I’d sent to him was a poem, therefore—given its content, I initially had no idea if I could call it that—affirmed for me that making meaning from what the men who violated me did to me when I was a boy could be the central concern the poems I’d written at Syracuse had not yet revealed. The leap of faith I took when I fed that poem into the shredder is the moment I honor as the true beginning of my life as a poet.
I have one more letter from Booth, dated almost exactly a year later, in November 1986. I’d written to congratulate him on the occasion of his retirement, to thank him for his teaching and his wisdom, and to let him know that I’d decided to give up completely on the idea of a graduate degree in creative writing, choosing instead to pursue a masters degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). He was as affirming as ever. “TESOL,” he wrote, “makes for wonderfully important teaching … All best to you with that…” After I earned my degree, I took year-long a job at a small, private language school in Yeoksam-dong, South Korea, and that experience helped me land the position I still have now as a professor in the English Department of a large suburban community college.
My first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, was published in 2006, seventeen years after I was hired and twenty-one years after I left Syracuse. I wrote Booth to share my good news with him, but he never responded. I learned later that he’d been living with Alzheimer’s for some time. He died the following year.
3.
At the beginning of my academic career, I focused my energies almost entirely on my campus’ English as a Second Language program and what might be called ESL-adjacent initiatives, like the International Education Committee. Once The Silence Of Men came out, though, my identity on campus began to shift. Publishing a book credentialed me as a poet in a way that occasionally publishing in journals did not, and this allowed me for the first time to teach the creative writing courses my department offered. The fact that I did not have an MFA was at first irrelevant to this shift, but that changed once we instituted a creative writing associates degree. No one doubted that writers without an MFA could teach creative writing effectively, but because we now had to meet the state’s standards for such programs, we had no choice but to account in our minimum teaching qualifications for the fact that the MFA is the gateway credential for teaching creative writing in higher education.
In the end, we found a way to “grandfather in” non-MFA’d faculty like myself, but the fact that we had to make such an accommodation nonetheless located our program firmly within the professionalization of creative writing that the MFA represents. We were, in other words, in a way we had not been before, formally part of the shrinking creative writing labor market that I described above. Adrianna Kezar, Tom Depaola, and Daniel T. Scott describe the mechanism behind the shrinking of that market—a phenomenon not limited to creative writing—in their book, The Gig Academy:
Universities’ need for highly trained workers means that they must produce their own cheap workforce. For years, they have simultaneously expanded the number of [terminal] degrees granted while constricting the number of [tenure track] jobs, creating a system in which [the] low wages and precariousness [of contingent and adjunct teaching positions] are standard terms of employment.
The result of this process, often called ”the adjunctification of higher ed,” has been a shift at institutions throughout the country from a faculty that is mostly tenured or tenure-track to one that is mostly part time and contingent, made up of at-will employees without the benefits or job protections that tenure and the tenure track provide.
Usually justified as an unavoidable cost-cutting measure, adjunctification, as Claire Goldstene shows in “The Politics of Contingent Academic Labor,” is in fact central to the right-wing strategy for shifting higher education’s mission from intellectual inquiry in the name of the public good to institutions’ “ability to attract ‘customers,’ increase endowment funds, reduce labor costs, and act as businesses in a market-driven economy[.]” The original blueprint for this strategy, Goldstene goes on to show, can be traced to a document from the 1970s known as the Powell Memorandum. Written by then Supreme-Court-Justice-to-be Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and addressed to the Education Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce, this document proposes a plan for defending the “American economic system” and the “American political system of democracy” against what Powell and other conservatives saw as a “broadly based and consistently pursued” attack from the left, particularly in the “intellectual” and ”literary” journals, which Powell called out as among the “most dynamic source[s]” of the left’s “chorus of criticism.”
Powell did not go so far as to advocate for adjunctification per se, but it is one logical result of his insistence that the only way to fight back against the left’s attack was for business “to confront [it] as a primary responsibility of corporate management”—for example by making sure business leaders and business-friendly appointees were well-represented on university boards of trustees. It was only a matter of time before the business sensibility those trustees brought to bear resulted in the realization that tenure and the tenure-track are expensive and that institutions of higher education could save a lot of money by reducing the ranks of their tenured faculty to the bare minimum, if not eliminating them entirely.
Adjunctification, however, is not only an attack on academic workers; it is also an attack on tenure and the academic freedom that tenure helps to protect. The due-process guarantees that tenure provides, precisely because they immunize tenured faculty from the vicissitudes of the marketplace, both encourage and enable what Goldstene calls the “inherently progressive” modes of inquiry that academia is known for, and she defines progressive here as “any movement [that disturbs the status quo] toward a greater equality of publicly effective power, separate from any attachment to specific policy positions or political party platforms.”
Understood in this way, adjunctification goes hand in hand with the ideologically motivated legislation either passed or pending in states throughout the country that ban from higher education curricula and classrooms any subject that runs afoul of the right’s political agenda. The level of organization and solidarity among students and faculty nationwide that it would take to fight this agenda effectively does not now exist, but—and here my experience as a union leader comes to the fore—when MFA programs encourage their students to turn a blind eye to structural issues like adjunctification, which is what happens when students treat their course of study like a residency, the programs short-circuit that kind of organizing before it even has a chance to begin.
To put this more sympathetically, the process of adjunctification all but compels a fundamental dishonesty on the part of MFA programs and their faculty. In order to stay in business—and in order for their full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty to remain employed, many of whom are among our most beloved and well-respected writers—they need to enroll students year after year. The only way to do that, though, is for the programs either to hold out the possibility that stable academic careers in creative writing are real and achievable, a disingenuous move at best, or to convince those students that immersion in their discipline, not a career in it, should be the reason they pursue the degree in the first place.
The irony of this double bind is that even as it forces MFA programs to be complicit in the process of adjunctification, that complicity does not protect them. When David R. Reingold, Purdue University’s Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, for example, forced that university’s very highly respected, fully-funded MFA program to shut its doors as of Spring 2024, he blamed the decision on the English Department’s alleged mismanagement of its budget. The department, as you might imagine, contested that charge, arguing instead that Reingold was using budgetary issues to mask the ideological agenda he outlined in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post in 2018. In that piece, he defined the goal of an undergraduate education as “prepar[ing] business leaders, well-rounded scientists and good citizens,” and he talked about the need
to build a new model of graduate education in the humanities, one in which our programs exist not merely to deliver undergraduate education but to offer important research opportunities alongside teaching experiences.
An MFA in creative writing fits neither of those goals, which locate the value of post-secondary degrees, both graduate and undergraduate, primarily in students’ return-on-investment relative to the tuition they paid. This was the logic used to justify closing both the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s Low-Residency MFA program and the highly respected Gettysburg Review; and it was the same logic that West Virginia University tried to use to justify shutting down that institution’s MFA program, though organized opposition did cause the administration to back off. Indeed, as Calvin Hennick wrote last year in Poets & Writers Magazine, the list of program closures in which shifting budgetary and educational priorities played a role is quite long. He lists twelve in addition to the one I mentioned above. It is not hyperbolic, then, to think of MFA programs as fighting a war of attrition. That metaphor, however, begs this question: given that they both serve and are at the mercy of forces anathema to the writing life the students who enroll in them want to pursue, what is the cultural role that MFA programs actually play?
In 1965, the Australian poet A. D. Hope began his essay called “The Three Faces of Love” with this statement: “No one, so far as I know, has thought much about the education of poets in our society. This is hardly surprising in a society which makes no provision for poets even to live.” Hope’s goal in this essay was not to define what a poet’s course of study might actually look like or to argue for how, specifically, such an education should enable a poet “to live,” by which I assume he meant to earn a living. Rather, Hope was concerned with making visible what he called the “creative way of life,” which he distinguished from the active and contemplative ways of life defined by Thomas Aquinas, and to assert that people who pursue the creative way of life require a different kind of education. He left it for others to answer the curricular and employment-related questions raised by this assertion.
If the active way of life, Hope argued, is characterized by the urge to possess what a person desires, and the contemplative way of life by the impulse to know and understand the things of the world as deeply as possible, then the creative way of life is defined by the drive “to bring new objects of desire” into existence, the salient point being that the creator of such an object not only does not know, but in fact cannot know the final form that object will take or the meanings it will contain and generate. That inherent uncertainty, Hope concludes, is why an education that is “largely dominated by practical ends” and “the adjustment of educational needs” to meet those ends is by definition not the kind of education an artist needs.
MFA programs can be understood as a response to the call-to-action implicit in Hope’s framing. They provide poets with an education in their craft, and the professional degree the programs confer represents at least the potential for those poets who earn one to earn a living. The MFA’s existence, though, is also an implicit assertion that the academy is not simply where poets ought to go to get an education, but also that it is where poets belong. The findings reported by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman in their article “Literature’s Vexed Democratization” would seem to substantiate this assertion. Not only, these authors found, are writers with an MFA much more likely to win career-making literary prizes—careers that are, more often than not, located in academia—but fully half of MFA-holding winners graduated from one of four schools: Columbia University, New York University, University of California in Irvine, and the University of Iowa.
Iowa’s program happens to be fully funded, but Columbia’s, for example, is not. Students who want to obtain their MFA from Columbia, along with the career boost it might provide, need to cobble together just over $115,000 per year for two years to cover tuition, room, and board. Search the web for advice on whether an MFA is actually worth that, or any, price—especially since most students will have to take out loans in order to afford it—and pretty much the only answer you’ll find is some version of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. The problem with focusing like that on individual responsibility, though, is not only that it conveniently elides any question one might raise about structural issues like adjunctification; it also avoids entirely the question of how it shapes our understanding of the poet’s place in society that the weight and authority of the MFA can bring to institutional heel not only a young poet who is just getting started, but also someone like the multiple-award winning poet I told you about earlier.
4.
Before my year at Syracuse, I took part in only one other poetry workshop, which was led by June Jordan when I was a senior at Stony Brook University. Towards the end of that semester, Professor Jordan and I were standing together at an awards ceremony I remember nothing else about. During a pause in our conversation, she put her hand on my arm. “People get jealous,” she said, “so I didn’t want to say this in front of the class, but the poem you shared with us the other day is important. I’m glad you published it. You need to keep writing.”
Jordan was referring to a poem of mine that had been published in a journal called Poem. I’d written the piece because I was disturbed by the way the Jewish exceptionalism that had saturated a Holocaust memorial I attended seemed to deny or trivialize the experiences of other marginalized and oppressed communities. I’d brought the poem to class earlier in the week because I wanted to celebrate its publication. Professor Jordan asked me to read the poem aloud and she and my classmates offered congratulations, but we did not discuss the poem at all. I was surprised, therefore, when she told me she thought it was an important piece of writing.
I didn’t begin fully to understand what she meant by that, though, until a few years later, when I read her essay called “Thinking About My Poetry,” which she’d written in response to the near silence that greeted the publication of her selected poems, Things That I Do In the Dark. “I decided to pretend,” she wrote in the brief preface to the version of the essay published in her book Civil Wars, “that somebody wanted to know how I came to be a poet, and what I had in mind, poem by poem.” I first encountered “Thinking About My Poetry” after I left Syracuse, and it became a touchstone for me. I found in it both a framework for thinking about my own identity as a poet and a model of poetic practice to which I could aspire. “I have moved,” Jordan wrote
from an infantile reception of the universe, as given, into a progressively political self-assertion that is now reaching beyond the limitations of a victim mentality. I choose to exist unafraid of my enemies; instead, I choose to become an enemy to my enemies.
Those words gave voice to a commitment I had not yet fully articulated within myself: to oppose, always, anyone who supported the values embodied by what the men who violated me did to me. Jordan’s words also gave me permission to think about my own poetry in the same way she thought about hers, as a vehicle for and a testament to that opposition. It was, however, the argument she made for an explicit connection between the integrity of her poetics and the discipline with which she pursued poetry as a craft that made the deepest impression on me. “I invented,” she wrote, in describing what her early life as a poet was like,
[regular exercises] for myself so that I should feel competent…to write in the manner of Herrick, Shelley, Eliot, or whoever, and whenever…I guess my theory was that if apprenticeship was essential to painting then apprenticeship was essential to being a poet [and so] I did not regard these studies as optional.
This idea, that craft is political, not in the sense of it being inherently either progressive or conservative, but in its role as a foundational element of artistic integrity, was a revelation to me. It cast in a new light the very first exercise Professor Jordan gave us in that Stony Brook workshop: to reproduce in a poem of our own the precise scansion and rhyme scheme of a nursery rhyme of our choosing. We were, she explained, to allow ourselves neither a single extra syllable nor any deviation from the rhymes, meaning that if the nursery rhyme we chose used only full rhymes, all our rhymes had to be full as well; and if there were partial rhymes of any sort, we needed to reproduce those too, and in precisely the same lines.
More than any exercise I’ve been given since, this one taught me to think of poems as made things: as objects built from syllables and of syllables as building blocks that need to be as carefully chosen as the notes with which a composer creates both the horizontal elements of rhythm and melody and the vertical elements of harmony and dissonance. What reading and rereading “Thinking About My Poetry” added to this lesson was an understanding that the ”music” of a poem was as integral to the politics of its being in the world as the meanings of the words out of which the poem was made. The music, in other words, the product of the poet’s craft, was part and parcel of the truth the poem was written to convey. This is how Jordan put it in her introduction to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People:
You cannot write lies and write good poetry…[Good poetry] is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social interaction.
After I received Philip Booth’s response to the poem I sent him, I understood that the poems I needed to write were those that told the truth about myself as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. I wanted those poems to emerge, though, from the kind of “progressively political self-assertion” that June Jordan talked about. I wanted them to be “good poems” in the sense that she meant the term, to confront not just what the men who violated me did to me, but also how that experience had shaped who I was in the world as a friend, as a lover, as a man, as white, as Jewish—because having once experienced what it was like to be on the receiving end of someone else’s arbitrary and capricious and hateful and violent exercise of the power they had over me, I knew I could not ignore the other axes along which that kind of power expressed itself.
One of the reasons I think I was not able to publish The Silence Of Men until I was forty-four years old, two decades plus one year after I left Syracuse, is that I needed the time to hone my craft to the point where it could hold those truths. I don’t know if Booth had any of this in mind when he reminded me that I didn’t need a degree to be a poet, but looking back on it now, it’s tempting to think that he did. I am struck, for example, by the realization that he could have ended that conversation very differently, by encouraging me to take whatever time I needed away from Syracuse and then to return when I was ready to finish my degree. I don’t know why he didn’t do that, but the fact that he didn’t has everything to do with the trajectory my writing life has followed.
Given the same circumstances, I like to think I would make the same choice today as I did back then, to leave the creative writing program in which I was enrolled and not look back, but so much else has changed in the literary world that I can’t say for sure what I would do. I think about the student poets who take the creative writing classes I teach these days, some of them majors, a few of them already able to see far enough ahead to the MFA they are sure they want to pursue. Part of me wants to warn them against that choice for all the structural and socioeconomic reasons I have enumerated here, but I also know that if their ambition is to publish, if they want to give themselves the best chance of gaining any sort of recognition at all, then being part of the MFA ecosystem is essentially a prerequisite.
Good poems, in June Jordan’s sense of the term, will always be written, and those poems and the people who need them will continue to find each other, just as they have always done; but if the possibility that one does not need a degree to be a poet does not feel to an aspiring poet today like the viable choice I understood it to be forty years ago, then I wonder what it is that we think being a poet really means.
5.
The young man at an uptown Manhattan poetry reading who told me he was buying a copy of my second book, Words For What Those Men Have Done, because he wanted his father, a survivor of childhood sexual violence, to read it.
The man around my age who followed me after a reading into the bathroom of a Lower East Side venue to thank me for the poems I’d read from The Silence Of Men because he was too ashamed to say anything where people might hear that he too was a survivor.
The man who, after I’d read from both my books at a small New York City arts festival, spoke to me for nearly an hour about how his now ex-girlfriend had not believed him when he told her his uncle raped him when he was a boy.
I did not choose to be a poet for moments like these—I was more concerned with coming to terms with myself—but I think about them whenever I receive a royalty statement from CavanKerry Press, which has kept The Silence of Men in print since its publication nearly twenty years ago. In 2023, that check totaled $6.96 from the sale of seven copies.
I’d be lying, of course, if I said I wouldn’t like to make more money than that from my poetry, or that I wouldn’t enjoy being better known as a poet than I am. It’s possible that having an MFA would have helped me achieve both those things; but it’s equally possible that an MFA degree would have made no difference at all in my status as a contemporary American poet. What is certain is that having an MFA is irrelevant to what that royalty check ultimately represents, seven new readers of poems I wrote more than two decades ago. Who knows what impact those poems will have? But that’s how poetry always does its slow work in the world: one book, one poem, and one reader at a time.
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