Years ago I was ostracised from the group. Is it finally time to reach out?
Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.
Dear Hera,
I am a poet who went to a relatively well-known MFA and had relatively well-known poet friends. That friend group imploded for various titillating yet incriminating reasons, including drugs, mutual masturbation and crushes that should have been perceived as silly but were instead pursued. Mostly, the problems were started by other people, though I can admit to being an asshole. And, engaging in the mutual masturbation :-(
Ultimately, I was kicked out of my apartment and either totally thrown from friendships or at least significantly distanced, both physically and phone-ically. I can say with clear eyes and a full heart that I never backstabbed any of these poets. But several of them believe I did, and may even consider this article a twist of the knife.
While I would like to repair these original MFA relationships, I have moved on and created a relatively well-known community in my town through reading series and small chapbooks. I guess I have two questions: 1) Do you think that I should try to reconnect with my MFA cohort? And 2) If not, how can I bring attention to the community I’ve built outside of my MFA when I basically lost all of my academic and publishing ties?
Maybe these are vain questions. If they are, please tell me so. I love the people I’ve met through my town and do not want to underrepresent their talent and poeticism, despite many of them not having attended this ridiculous MFA program.
Best,
Workshopaholic
Dear Workshopaholic,
You ask if these are vain questions, but all personal problems are kind of vain. Nobody ever writes in asking how to solve world hunger and thank god for that.
I’m fascinated by the redacted drama in your letter. What on earth did you do to get thrown out of your apartment??? Write the world’s meanest sonnet? I would love to know the gory details, but I suppose, like everyone else, I will have to wait for the no-holds-barred memoir that will raze the neighbourhood to the ground.
As far as I can tell, poets come in two basic varieties. The sincere recluses, whose abundant feelings about herons require some kind of natural outlet, but who are otherwise wellsprings of peace in a wasteland of chaos. And the emotional catastrophists and institutional show-offs, whose general inability to communicate with others has warped them and become a foundational part of their personality, like The Riddler leaving cyphers at crime scenes for Batman.
During my MA, I was lucky to be stuck with a group of heron-loving individuals. There were zero scandals, but the morning teas were superb. There were times, however, when I thought wistfully of the other cohorts, who had all the incestuous, second-rate drama of a Game of Thrones spinoff. Beheadings, adultery, ancient prophecies. Good raw literary material.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about your experience. These elite writing programs thrive off emotional intensity and folkloric betrayals. Especially if everyone in the course uprooted their entire lives to attend. The bonds you form are intense and overwhelming. A little bit of drama is normal, especially when you spend each week reconstituting your feelings as metaphor and then surrendering them for excoriating roundtable critiques. Add financial incentives like scholarships and prizes into the mix, various romantic and sexual indiscretions and substance abuse, and you know you’re in for a wild ride. It’s inevitable that some feelings are going to get hurt.
Which raises the question: why do you want to get involved in all that mess again?
Reading your letter, it’s hard to get a sense of your motives. Do you miss these friendships and desperately want to reconcile? Do you feel haunted by the way things ended and want a chance to clear your good-ish name? Is it because some of these people have outsized influence in the writing world, and having them as enemies is awkward and limiting in such a gossipy community?
If it’s anything but missing your friends, I say forget it. Sometimes, the best thing you can do after an experience like this is wash your hands of the situation and try to move on with your life.
I’m sure, as a poet, you’re dying to explain yourself. But people don’t care about “who started it” or “the facts” as much as you think, and likely have no appetite to revisit all that drama. If the situation got so bad you had to move out of your apartment, relitigating the past might only reopen old wounds.
If there are one or two people from the group you specifically miss and want to reach out to, you could give it a try. But even if it wasn’t all your fault, it sounds like some feelings were badly hurt. Remember that a sincere apology often goes down much better than a well-presented and factually accurate defence. People are reluctant to rake over past wounds, and even if you feel your reputation was unfairly maligned, you’re going to have to humble yourself a little if you want anyone to listen. But even if you perform the most exquisite, metrically perfect apology in effortless iambic pentameter, there’s still a good chance you might not get the reaction you were hoping for. If you want to reach out, keep your expectations low, and try not to be upset if your former friends aren’t ready to reciprocate.
If your main goal is to repair your professional connections, I wouldn’t bother. It’s not that community doesn’t matter. Even poets need colleagues, and I’m sure having a few successful enemies makes it harder to book readings and get published in journals. But it sounds like you’ve built something great within your local community. Having a prestigious peer group can only get you so far. The only truly important thing is the work.
If you have any heartfelt apologies you need to make, make them. But it’s also fine to write your MFA experience off as an anthropologically fascinating and narratively rich personal disaster, and try to move on. Never get too invested in “the scene”, whatever the scene currently happens to be, and redirect that energy to your writing. Sometimes it’s better to keep your personal life and your artistic life as separate as possible. Treasure your normal friends who don’t know their Rilke from their Rimbaud. Keep gassing your small town poets up. And funnel all those extraneous feelings straight back onto the page.
From a piece by one of my favourite poets, Joe Dunthorne, in the NY Books this week:
“One of the few things New York School poets agree on is that the New York School never really existed. ‘You can join the New York School for $5 if you want,’ was how Ted Berrigan often put it. Part of the lasting appeal of this loose group of poets is their disinterest in assessing their own legacy. Frank O’Hara wrote that he preferred the movies, and Eileen Myles quotes Joe Brainard on his deathbed: ‘Well, one good thing about dying, you don’t have to go to any more poetry readings’.”
Amen to that.
