Writing Workshop

In 1969, the Senate was poised to slash funding for public television. It’s a story we see often in the arts. Arts organizations struggle to find funding and often face existential threat when their funding is cut. These organizations are at the mercy of government budgets, the whims of private donors, and the generosity of private individuals who support their mission. In response to the threats of budget cuts for public television in 1969, Senate hearings were held, and Mr. Rogers spoke before a senate subcommittee to request the full $20 million in funding for public television.

His adversary is Senator Pastore, the archetype of a politician: skeptical, impatient, and angry. What Mr. Rogers does next is remarkable.

As Mr. Rogers explains what the program is about, he tells Mr. Pastore that Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood tries to help children cope with “the inner drama of childhood” which include themes like sibling rivalry and anger. Mr. Pastore is curious. He interrupts Mr. Rogers to ask him how long the program lasts, and says he wants to watch it.

Mr. Rogers uses his poetic and rhetorical gifts to show Mr. Pastore exactly what his show is about, and by extension, to show Mr. Pastore the real work being done on public television.

Art has the power to heal and the power to help improve our mental health. Mr. Rogers explains that his television show strives to “make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable.” Mr. Rogers continues to explain that by doing this work “we will have done a great service for mental health.”

Mr. Pastore is a man who is not in touch with his inner child, and it’s thrilling to watch Mr. Rogers tap into the child hidden within even the most curmudgeon of curmudgeons.

Mr. Rogers describes his puppet work. He describes commercial television’s propensity to glorify violence, and his desire to create a safe space where children can address their anger and frustrations in healthier ways.

Mr. Pastore says he has goosebumps, but this isn’t what gets Mr. Rogers the money.

Mr. Rogers gets the money by reciting a poem for Mr. Pastore. Sure, he calls it a song. But Rogers doesn’t sing. He recites.

The power of poetry, especially poetry spoken out loud, is its ability to tackle some of the most difficult subjects of human life from an indirect angle. Why say something indirect when you could say it directly? Emily Dickinson herself wrote, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Success in Circuit lies.” But why?

Some things are so unspeakable or difficult that they cannot be said outright. Some types of criticism cannot be uttered without distancing the speaker from the audience. Some types of anger expressed can damage relationships rather than heal them. Anger, so often expressed, especially in political settings, can be counterproductive in producing desired change.

And Mr. Rogers is angry. He’s angry that the government will take away money from public television, threating his show and the only space children have where they don’t have to watch cartoon characters hitting each other with sticks. Mr. Rogers is angry, angry at a society that values violence over mental health, violence over kindness and compassion. He’s angry at a culture that pours money into the inane and superficial, while leaving the depth of emotion unspoken and undervalued.

His anger is an anger anyone who has worked in the arts feels regularly. It’s the anger of knowing the importance and the value of what you’re doing, and also knowing that it’s not valued by society. Poetry has value. I know this because when I was a little girl, I found poetry and it saved me. And not in a stupid way.

It gave me a place to put my anger, grief, sadness, and desperation. I truly believe I’d be dead or in need of deep support without it. I know that poetry saves the government money if only in saved mental health support I’d otherwise need, and the increased productivity I bring as a taxpaying and functioning citizen.

So yes. When I see poetry underfunded, or the arts underfunded in general, I get angry. I see deep foolishness in a government willing to spend billions on medical services, Medicaid, and prisons, but not willing to invest in preventative care through the arts. Because poetry and art is preventative care. It is.

But Mr. Rogers is a true poet (and wiser than me), understanding that he’ll need to address his own anger indirectly, and address Mr. Pastore’s callousness indirectly as well. Rogers has the wisdom to know that poetry offers the kindest vehicle for correction—for both himself and Mr. Pastore.

And so, Mr. Rogers speaks directly to the skeptical Senator’s inner child, and the moments that follow are truly some of the most moving moments in contemporary and modern poetic recitation.

The poem goes like this:

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite,

When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong

And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do?

Do you punch a bag,

do you pound some clay or some dough

do you round up friends for a game of tag

or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop

when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong

and be able to do something else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to

can stop when I wish

can stop, stop, stop anytime

and what a good thing to feel like this

and know that the feeling is really mine

know that there’s something deep inside

that helps us become what we can

for a girl can be someday a lady

and a boy can be someday a man.

And Mr. Pastore, doesn’t say much. He’s clearly moved. He smiles, for once. “Looks like you’ve just earned yourself the $20 million dollars.”

This is the real power of poetry. If only we had more Mr. Rogers and more people like Mr. Pastore, willing to be moved.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and his most recent book, Think Again, offers insights not only in how we can rethink our relationship to uncertainty and unknowing, but also how larger organizations like universities, high schools, and even elementary educators can rethink their approach to how students learn. I hold an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University (with an undergraduate degree from the University of Florida), and after reading Adam Grant’s book, I am more convinced than ever that the type of learning employed in creative writing courses at the undergraduate and graduate level is the type of learning model that should be employed in all types of education.

Adam Grant’s newest book Think Again argues that when we humbly admit that there is much we do not know and train ourselves to avoid overconfidence cycles, we become better at whatever we are trying to do, whether our project is to lead an organization or to paint butterflies. He suggests that we could all produce better work if we thought more about our work and ourselves as works in progress. In a particularly fascinating section of the book, Adam Grant writes about teachers who show their students how to question established knowledge. He shows how this learning process makes the students better learners and better critical thinkers, more willing to take risks and make mistakes. I have always suspected that the way the creative writing workshop is taught at the university level produced not only better writers, but students who were more willing to question themselves and their abilities. Adam Grant’s book explains why this is so.

For those who do not know, the creative writing workshop is typically taught like this: every week students bring a draft of a story or poem they are working on, and every week, the poem or story is read, and then critiqued by both the teacher and the students. The teacher leads the critique, thus modeling constructive criticism to the students. As the process unfolds, the students learn to see areas in their writing where they could improve, and the students also learn how to become better critics, not only of their own work, but of the work of others.

After all every one of us has written something we once thought was a perfect masterpiece. The creative writing workshop gives writers a safe space to question that assumption.

I was a creative writing student both in undergraduate and graduate school and it is undeniable that the process made me a better writer. I learned grammar. I learned about gaps in my reading and knowledge. Having been subjected to the “surgery,” the sometimes painful, but always enlightening process of having not only an esteemed poet, but also 12 of my peers critique and question my work, I found myself asking similar critical questions as I wrote and as I learned to edit my own work. As I wrote, I had a chorus of perspectives to consider, which helped me expand as a writer, and understand my own limitations. I also learned when it was important to stick to my impulse and ignore my teacher or peers, and I learned when to listen to my peers, which often involved a complete or partial re-write of my work.

Sitting through a creative writing workshop always involved more mental effort than sitting through my other English lectures. In my creative writing workshops, I had to be prepared, because I would be expected to participate. I also had to be ready to defend my critique and position. It made me an active learner of writing rather than a passive learner. So many students have to wait to get feedback on their papers at the end of the semester. I got feedback on my writing, week after week.

In my English classes, I earned straight As, and praise. In my creative writing workshops, I was reminded that I needed to work on my under-use of commas (now I overuse them, dammit), and was reminded that I could write some convoluted and confusing sentences. I learned that you want more dessert, not deserts on your plate, and was taught that the Pantheon is in Rome, not Greece. In a creative writing workshop, the final result matters, but the process of writing matters more.

Adam Grant writes: “Exclusively praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies, incentivizing people to keep doing things the way they’ve always done them.” In my English classes I just kept writing papers the way I’d always written them, while in my creative writing workshops, I evolved as a writer because I could experiment and fail. In my creative writing workshops I could take risks because the poems I submitted never contributed to the final grade (only the final version of the poems contributed to the final grade). In my English classes, I kept doing what worked because I only had one shot to get it right.

I have always wondered whether such a model could work beyond the creative writing workshop; whether it could work in the English department, where students’ critical papers would be subjected to a similar process, or in the philosophy department, where a student’s argument would be subject not only to the scrutiny of the teacher, but to a group of one’s peers. It could work in science, when students were designing experiments, thus helping young scientists catch key errors or bias in their experimental designs early.

I imagine this model would provide students with a better education overall, but it is unlikely to be adopted any time soon. It requires a smaller class size, for one. And it requires a teacher able and willing to model constructive criticism. By the time a creative writing professor becomes a professor, they have often sat through hundreds of workshops where they have been exposed to constructive criticism from several professors and often hundreds of peers. Were the education system to adopt a similar model today, teachers would need training. I fear that the education system will be slow to change.

Adam Grant writes: “With so much emphasis placed on imparting knowledge and building confidence, many teachers don’t do enough to encourage students to question themselves and one another.” Our current education system often produces people overconfident in their abilities, blind to their blind spots, or it produces students who have memorized facts that will often be lost with time and without practice.

The creative writing workshop manages to do just what Adam Grant thinks education should accomplish. It instills students with “intellectual humility,” a healthy sense of “doubt,” and helps students cultivate “curiosity.” The creative writing workshop interrupts overconfidence cycles in their tracks.   

Grant writes about the remarkable Erin McCarthy, a teacher who gives her eighth graders history texts from the 1940s to show her students that history is a constantly-evolving narrative and also to give her students an opportunity to question sources and authority. Many students are not taught to critically question sources or even to question those in authority. How many of us were taught to question our teachers growing up? And yet, this may be one of the more fundamental lessons our teachers can teach us.

Grant writes about a six-year-old who took feedback from his peers on a butterfly he was trying to draw. I’d recommend reading Adam Grant’s book just to be able to see the kid’s improvement for yourself. The butterfly, after five drafts, is truly breathtaking.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

If you are looking to traditionally publish your poetry book, you’ll likely find yourself spending a great deal of money. Most small presses that publish poetry books charge reading fees for submission. These small presses often host “first book contests,” “second book contests,” or “open reading periods,” where writers submit their manuscripts. Many of the major first book and second book contests receive hundreds of manuscripts (800 to 1,000 manuscripts being submitted to a contest is not unheard of). Other small presses offer poets the opportunity to submit their work during open reading periods for a fee, where the press often won’t commit to publish a single manuscript from the pool of submissions. The cost to submit to these poetry book contests and open reading periods ranges from $25 to $30 per submission.

Shortly after I graduated from my M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, I found myself in the position of desperately needing to publish my poetry book (if you want to teach creative writing at the university level, you’ll need to have published at least one poetry book from a respectable small or medium-sized press). I also found myself in massive student loan debt and struggling to find work due to the 2008 financial crisis. Despite these challenges, I spent the first two years after graduate school submitting my work to many small presses publishing poetry books. If you understand the nature of publishing, you understand that in order to have a fair chance of publishing a poetry book (or publishing anything for that matter), you’ll have to submit your work to many places. When it comes to poetry, this means submitting your manuscript to dozens of small presses. I estimate I spent several thousands of dollars submitting my manuscript to first book contests. (Do the math: about 50 submissions at $25 to $30 each, plus the cost of mailing and printing…it was that late aughts, after all). After two years of doing this, I saw some minor success. My poetry manuscript was selected as a finalist for a couple of contests and I’d been nominated for a few small awards. But I still had no published poetry book, which meant that I couldn’t apply for university teaching jobs, making my expensive M.F.A. pretty much useless as far as pursuing my planned career path to be a tenured-track creative writing professor (now, the thought of me being a tenure-track creative writing professor sounds about as absurd as saying I want to be a professional surfer; I have to admit I sometimes think I  probably would have had a better chance of being a professional surfer than poetry teacher if I’d started surfing as young as I’d started writing poetry—but I digress.)

The problem with publishing poetry books is this: the average poetry book doesn’t sell well. Small presses often have to rely on poetry reading fees just to survive. After all, if you aren’t selling 800 to 1,000 copies of every book of poetry you publish (and most small presses don’t), you’ll need to find a way to get income. $25 to $30 reliably coming from people who may not buy your poetry books, but who are willing to pay for you to read theirs is a pretty solid, but questionable, business model.

According to an article written by Rachel Mennies for The Millions, the average poet who has published one successful poetry book spent around $3,000 in contest submission fees before seeing success. In most cases, royalties and prize money wasn’t enough to recoup these costs. This is not surprising, given that most first book contests for poetry offer prizes under $5,000. And given the dismal state of poetry sales, especially in “academic” poetry, most writers cannot hope to make a living off of royalties. Most writers make a living as teachers, but again, having a published book is important to landing those jobs.

Poets don’t like to talk about money. No one goes into poetry for the money. I didn’t go into poetry to become rich as a poet. But the fact that submitting work costs money makes poetry only accessible to the wealthy or at least to those with some kind of disposable income.

This creates a system where poets who publish their work often can afford to do so. Mennies noted: “If a sizable majority of poets must spend money to secure publication for their books (and, ever increasingly, to submit to journals), and it’s uncertain whether or not those costs will be recouped upon publication, is the submission-fee model equitable for poets? By equitable, I mean accessible across, here, class: can a poorer or working-class poet submit her manuscript as often as a wealthy or institutionally supported poet? The data is unequivocal: no.” Because so many of the opportunities available to poets are contingent upon a first book, poorer poets are locked out of accessing institutional support (through tenure track jobs and residencies that rely on having a published book). They are locked out of job opportunities that rely on having that first book. And they often leave the field altogether.

I had to eventually stop submitting my work to poetry small presses. There came a point after the financial crisis where I had trouble affording groceries. I certainly didn’t have the discretionary income available to send out $25 poetry manuscripts to first book contests. Then I got divorced, had to leave Canada where I’d been living at the time, and found myself living out of a tent and a van. The thought of publishing a poetry book was the last thing on my mind, especially given the costs of submitting my work. It’s not that I stopped writing. It’s just that I stopped submitting.

I’ve recovered a great deal since then, but when I found myself recently with some discretionary income (not having to pay hundreds of dollars to my student loans every month thanks to the student loan deferrals due to COVID-19 gave me a little freedom to use my money creatively; an argument for student loan forgiveness; yes, even for Ivy League graduates, like me; though I’d be happy to see student loan forgiveness for state school attendees only, or forgiveness equivalent to the cost of attending state school; any relief is better than no relief), I decided not to submit my poetry manuscript to poetry contests. I decided to use it to start my own small press (Sphinx Moth Press) and publish my book (Relationship: A Poetry Book) in the process.

Poetry small presses struggle because they don’t often have government support, donor support, or enough people buying poetry books. I don’t think this model is inevitable. I believe that there are people who read poetry out there (look at how many people buy Rupi Kaur’s books!); I believe a small press willing to diversify its titles can sustain itself without the need for submissions fees.

Sphinx Moth Press won’t rely on a submission fee system. I want to make poetry publication a possibility for all poets. Sphinx Moth Press will ask that those poets who can afford to submit their work to paying contests support the press by becoming patrons of the press or support the press by buying our books.

Sphinx Moth Press isn’t the only U.S.-based press that has an open reading period where writers can submit their work without paying a fee. Author’s Publish includes a list of presses (U.S., Canadian, Australian, and U.K.-based) that have open reading periods. When looking at this list, writers should also visit the submissions pages of the individual presses to learn more because many presses have restrictions about who can submit (cultural or regional), or to check to see whether these submissions policies may have been affected by COVID-19. They should also take the time to understand how the press promotes new authors and the work they publish. Many presses on the list are strong venues that offer real opportunities to new writers.

In the coming months, I’ll offer more updates. But for now, support poetry. Support independent artists and writers. We need it now more than ever.

(UPDATE 02/23/21: Author’s Publish has two pages which list presses that are open to free submissions. The most recent one is “90 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees.” Older ones include: “78 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees.” Authors should refer to the “90 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees,” as it appears to be the most up-to-date list on the website.)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Is it possible to write about the meaning of life and happiness in less than ten pages? Anton Chekhov, in his humble story, “Gooseberries” manages to do just that. George Saunders, who teaches short story writing at Syracuse University, like most short story writers, is interested in happiness, the meaning of life, and in how Chekhov pulls it off. In Saunders’s delightful new book of essays, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” Saunders tries to articulate just how Chekhov makes the mysterious, luminous, numinous, and magical happen.

 “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” is drawn from the lectures Saunders delivers year after year to his graduate writing students at Syracuse University in his Russian Literature in Translation class. His writing students, he explains, “arrive already wonderful.” Saunders’s goal is to help them “become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”

Saunders argues that the short story is not a minor art form. It is a form uniquely situated to help us answer the big questions of life: “How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?” The short story exists in the perfect balance between the novel and the poem. Like poetry, every word, every narrative movement, every sentence counts. But like a novel, it also has some space to breathe, to digress, even if only for a brief moment, to let us mull in the mud of the mundane, in the numbers of the tax man, in the slow time it takes to cut an apple into slices.

Saunders’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” offers a close reading of some of the best short stories ever written. Saunders’s book is a study on how to read, and also a study on how to read life. It gives readers a glimpse into a writer’s thought process. The title essay, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is a study of Anton Chekhov’s transcendent story, “Gooseberries.” Saunders puts it quite simply that the story changed his life. And yet, he notes, “On its surface, it’s not a story you’d expect to change anybody’s life. Nothing much happens in it…”

I’ll say right here that I don’t always agree with Saunders’s reading of the story. In short form, “Gooseberries” is about two men who, while walking through wide open country (in which windmills can be seen in the distance), get caught in the rain and visit a third friend for shelter. Ivan, the protagonist, says he needs to tell his friend a story before the rainstorm hits. When the two men take shelter with their friend, while eating a delicious meal cooked and served by a beautiful woman, Ivan, the protagonist, tells a story whose moral seems to be this: happiness exists in the world only because poor people are forced to bear the burden of the happy. Even those who are happy are not immune to unhappiness because unhappiness and death visits us all in the end. Ultimately, people shouldn’t bother trying to be happy, but should instead work to do good. All this is well and good, but as Saunders astutely points out in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” Ivan is an unreliable narrator. Even as implores his friends to be good, he indulges in a transcendent swim in a pond, admires the beautiful servant girl (Saunders rightfully notes that every mention of her involves some reference to her beauty with words like “beautiful,” “soft,” “delicate,” and “pretty”), enjoys the delicious food, and delights in the warm shelter his friend provides.

Saunders argues that the protagonist is neither against happiness nor for happiness. He argues that his speech on happiness “seems kind of…grumpy…seems not just anti-happiness but sort of anti-everything.”

I’m not so sure. Ivan isn’t really talking about happiness at all. Happiness occurs in life almost by accident, like a swim in a pond, like a friend who happens to provide you shelter for the night during a rainstorm when you’re on a long journey, like a beautiful man making you a nice meal. (Saunders himself notes later in his reading the accidental nature of happiness: “Happiness is a gift, a conditional gift.”)

Yet, I don’t think this is a story about happiness. Chekhov’s commentary on happiness is an accident, like happiness and pleasure’s accidental nature. What the protagonist is really talking about is the fact that what brings true meaning to life is not happiness, but the good we do to others—and also the bad we leave behind. The meaning of life comes through the marks we leave on the world.

Ivan, the protagonist, is a maker of marks, (and by extension, so are we all maker of marks; this is why the humble farmer friend in Chekhov’s story looks also like an artist and a professor). Even though Ivan’s tale within a tale is told orally, he leaves a mark on his friends. And this is not the only mark he leaves. The story ends with Ivan leaving a stinky pipe on the table that keeps his friend awake. We cannot avoid leaving marks, both good and bad. Ivan’s point is just that—we must strive to do as much good as we can, because we will inevitable unintentionally do bad, and happiness and pleasure is so brief in the end. Happiness is not a mark as permanent as sadness and sorrow. When we act, we need to take this into account.

Chekhov somehow draws all of humanity into the drawing room where Ivan tells his story. There’s the host who looks a little like an artist and a little like a professor, and whose dirt rolls off him in the pond the color of paint and ink. There are the rich ancestors leaning down to listen from their paintings on the wall. There is the beautiful servant girl, the working men—all of humanity.

Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” is also a story about beauty, about the importance of beauty in life, and its nature. The servant girl is, in Saunders’s view, “a reminder that beauty is an unavoidable, essential part of life; it keeps showing up and we keep responding to it, our theoretical positions notwithstanding, and if we ever stop responding to it, we have become more corpse than person.” And the way that Chekhov announces the servant girl’s beauty, without having to describe her at all, is both a comment of Chekhov’s genius and Saunders’s brilliant powers of observation. The men admire her beauty even as she does all the work to make them comfortable, highlighting Ivan’s hypocrisy. If he really believed in upending the system, why not stand up and help the poor girl?

“Gooseberries” is brilliant because it offers us so many potential versions of a good life, in so short a space. Can one live a good life by retreating from the world, living in a country house, eating gooseberries? Can one live a good life by trying to be good, to do good, like the servant girl, who clearly makes those around her happy? Can one live a good life by merely philosophizing on the nature of the good and beautiful? Can one live a good life by doing hard and good work like a farmer or landowner? Each of these possibilities are there.

I love that Saunders describes the rain as a kind of character in the story, a character who makes the protagonists unhappy (when they are caught in the rain), and a character who is locked out of the story at its end. If rain is a force of unhappiness, the men and women at the end of the story are sheltered from the rain. What does it mean in a story about the meaning of life that the characters are (more or less) happy in the end? What does it mean that the shelter itself doesn’t guarantee happiness? Ivan’s friend is disturbed and unable to sleep because of the smell of Ivan’s pipe.

Happiness will never be enough. What will be enough? As Saunders’s notes, the story “keeps qualifying itself until it qualifies itself right out of the business of judgement.”

What I loved most about “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” was that I felt like I was again inside the classroom. It’s been years since I earned my MFA in poetry at Columbia University, and more years than that since I studied literature at the University of Florida. Saunders’s book is a gift. It reminded me again of why I loved being in those rooms. It reminded me of what it felt to discuss a good story with someone for whom it mattered. My desire to argue with Saunders’s readings is a sign of his strengths as a teacher. A good writer and teacher creates a frame others might be able to fill in with the substance of life, art, and good thinking. A good writer and teacher puts forth premises vast enough to inhabit. A good teacher reminds us that “it is hard to be alive.” A good short story, like life, does not lend itself to one reading. “Every human position had a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error.”  

There will never be a point where we can just relax and not think. And Saunders finds comfort in finding in Chekhov a writer with whom we can find “someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).”

I have sometimes wished to be like those who could live their lives by a creed; those who decided to give their lives to a single religious precept and live every day under that credo; those who marry one person and live together for the rest of their lives. I am not such a person. “Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.” My life has been a constant negotiation and renegotiation of the truth—the truth about myself and the truth the world presents. In other words, I have chosen to stay open. I have left marks both good and bad on the world as a result, and I must live with them.

I loved being able to get back into the classroom, and in the process find a new teacher. What a gift Saunders gives in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain!”

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

When I applied to get an M.F.A. in poetry, in the ancient times, before the financial crisis of 2008, if you had an M.F.A. from a reasonably good school with a poetry book under your belt, you could expect a tenure-track job offer. By the time I graduated in 2009, with the financial crisis in full swing, my job prospects and life plan had been basically decimated, the social contract I had entered into when I matriculated all but burned, its ashes fed to the gaping maw of the gig economy to follow. There were maybe a grand total of 8 poetry tenure track jobs in the nation, if that. I managed to get a few adjunct jobs, where I was paid a handsome sum of several thousand dollars to teach a writing class, without benefits. I did the math, and after accounting for gas, coffee, printing fees, and medical fees to deal with all the anxiety, I basically paid the school to let me teach. I had tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and an advanced degree in poetry where even the best poets could hope to earn a high four-figures a year in poetry book sales.

I found other ways to make money: as a college admissions tutor, as a blog writer for law firms, as a travel writer for travel companies. I’ve managed to find a niche for myself in capitalism’s sea of troubles. The plight of the worker in capitalism is the plight of living in a constant state of precarity. Now, I read in the New York Times that another force aims to take my job—an A.I. Last week the New York Times made the announcement: “Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).” The tech universe is reasonably worried. If you google A.I. that can code, you’ll find a smattering of articles written by coders and their sympathizers musing on a future where their jobs will go the way of those who worked Henry Ford’s assembly line. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, workers have had to constantly face, encounter, and survive revolutions that threatened their obsolescence. I’m not surprised that coding is facing a similar revolution, though I imagine it will be quite some time before GPT-3 is able to fire all the brains behind Google, Facebook, and the other nameless tech companies that keep Silicon Valley buzzing and Elon Musk sending rockets into space. And yet, the fact that this A.I. is partially funded by those same Silicon Valley giants should leave lower-level developers and coders on high alert. An A.I. that could repair or produce basic code could possibly supplant entry-level and lower-level jobs. GPT-3 seems able to create simple applications reasonably well. It could even create its own version of Instagram.

But GPT-3 can also write. As a writer, should I be scared? Should bloggers and the small army of content creators out there think about going back to school for new skills?

It depends.

GPT-3 seems to have learned “natural language” by basically reading the entirety of the Internet and as many digital books as possible (I assume all the digital books available in the public domain). The New York Times notes that “GPT-3 is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network.” Unlike the network of neurons of your brain, GPT-3 creates networks of meaning out of the vast array of information and text available on the Internet. It finds connections between things and exploits them, much like the brain, but GPT-3’s connections are digital. And yet, a system whose power is based on the Internet will also suffer the same limitations of the Internet. Biological systems are fed information from the real world. GPT-3 forms its meaning from the vast oceans of text and images available on the web.

And this is why I’m perhaps not too worried about GPT-3 taking my writing job anytime soon. GPT-3 is a universal language model, and its limitations are also the limitations of the Internet, where the quality of writing and the quality of research often leaves much to be desired. GPT-3 can’t distinguish between Shakespeare and shitty sponsored content from Bud Light.

GPT-3 can imitate natural language and even certain simple stylistics, but it cannot reason and it cannot perform in-depth research. It cannot perform the deep-level analytics required to make great art or great writing.

GPT-3 seems to have learned how to write from Wikipedia and internet blogs. When it comes to writing clickbait, the New York Times suggests that GPT-3 may have the skills to supplant this type of writer. Several blog posts “generated by GPT-3… were read by 26,000 people, and considered good enough to get 60 people to subscribe to GPT-3’s blog.” The blog was about how one could increase one’s productivity. GPT-3 may be excellent at spewing out platitudes, but this may be as far as it will go.

GPT-3’s greatest flaw may be the Internet’s greatest flaw. Because the program has “learned” to write from the Internet, when the A.I. writes its posts, its pieces are unsurprisingly often biased and racist. And that’s the problem. When left to its own devices, GPT-3 is much like a toddler, making manifest the soul of the Internet.

Leaders who study the use of artificial intelligence in business note that any company that chose to use GPT-3 to run its blog would face “reputational” and “legal” risks. 

When a writer writes, she uses conscious memory, but also her unconscious learning. This play between the conscious and unconscious is also difficult to emulate. Could we ever create an A.I. with an unconscious? I don’t know. More disturbing is this question: What would that unconscious look like?

GPT-3’s great skill, if we want to use the word “skill” when referring to an A.I., is its ability to identify patterns in given text and imagery. If great writing and great art were merely the identification of patterns, I’d be scared for my writing career. But I think that there’s more to it than this. GPT-3 may be able to imitate a style or writer, much in the way a beginning writer can imitate a style, but great writers do more than just imitate.

But what is it, exactly, that great writers do? And what is it, exactly, that GPT-3 cannot do?

I venture to guess that storytelling plays a major role in what separates humans from silicone. Oliver Sacks, in his beautiful essay, “The Creative Self” writes about the difference between mere imitation and creativity: “Voracious assimilation, imitating various models, while not creative in itself, is often the harbinger of future creativity.” GPT-3 may perhaps be on the verge of true creativity, but it certainly isn’t there yet, and it isn’t clear whether it ever will be.

For me, GPT-3’s ultimate “Turing Test” of creativity will be its ability to create a meaningful narrative, to tell a structured story, without prompting or help. (Turing was a philosopher who speculated that we would call a computer “intelligent” only if the computer could imitate a human, or even be mistaken for a human; many systems have passed the Turing test since Turing came up with this formulation, but we still, as a whole, don’t consider computers intelligent or as having properties that truly can be called “thinking,” though many eager A.I. developers are quick to describe the “emergent” qualities of their systems).

There is something more to creativity than merely making connections, or making random connections. There is more to it than even “guided” connections. Sacks writes about “the energy, the ravenous passion, the enthusiasm, the love with which the young mind turns to whatever will nourish it…” This is where a computer fails. GPT-3 can make connections and can be fed the entirety of the Internet, but this “feed” is encyclopedic and complete. What makes the human mind fascinating is its incompleteness, the fact that in its incompleteness and finitude, it must make a decision about how to allocate resources, and this decision-making is the seat of desire, is the source of desire, and yes, I’ll argue, the seat of love. GPT-3 will never be temporally limited. Its abundance makes it poor.

GPT-3 may be thorough, but it is not obsessive. It can never be. That is its ultimate limitation.

Sacks distinguishes between technical mastery and true creativity and innovation. He distinguishes between craftsmanship and art. GPT-3 may be a craftsman, but it is no artist, it is no writer.

In fact, Sacks makes a point to differentiate mimicry from creativity. Mimicry is an act performed by humans, but also by animals. Mimesis is something else. It requires the assimilation of meaning, something which A.I. cannot do. We have yet to create an A.I. that truly understands what it is reading, that can feel what it has read, that can emotively create from its experience. When we can create an A.I. that can do this, I will have officially lost my job.

Still, I have to admit that GPT-3 is fairly good. When the system was asked to create a poem about Elon Musk in the style of Dr. Seuss, it did surprisingly well. You can read the poem here: https://arr.am/2020/07/14/elon-musk-by-dr-seuss-gpt-3/. That said, Arram Sabeti admits that the system doesn’t rhyme well and that he had to “delete and retry lines.” “The whole process took several hours of trial and error,” Sabeti notes. It appears that the poem that was produced was less the work of an A.I., but rather the work of Sabeti with A.I. assistance. I don’t know how much of the poem was GPT-3’s skill or Sabeti’s cleverness.

GPT-3 is haunting, in the way a young artist, still stuck in the throes of imitation is haunting. Sacks writes: “All young artists seek models in their apprentice years, models whose style, technical mastery, and innovations can teach them.” If Sacks is correct that “imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity,” perhaps some writers should be afraid, very afraid; and perhaps I should be, too.

Even if GPT-3 could ever be a great writer, great writers have nothing to fear. Greatness is by its very definition unique. GPT-3’s greatness will be unique to it, leaving enough room for the future Virginia Woolfs and Shakespeares.

If any writer should be scared today, it is the writer that deals in platitudes. GPT-3 may soon be able to help marketers write promotional e-mails and tweets. But the system still appears to need a lot of babysitting and will likely need it for some time.

Will GPT-3 ever take away my job? I doubt it. Even though the system has been used to create blogs, I doubt the system will ever be able to replicate critical thinking, which is something our culture has in very short supply. And while the system has been used to create a tutoring application called LearnFromAnyone, where the system imitates famous people, answering user’s questions, I don’t see a future in which tutors are replaced. Students often don’t know which questions they need to ask. The system seems best at answering questions when the “learner” already had a great deal of knowledge about the subject and the person teaching. The magic of a good teacher is that he or she can adapt to a student’s gaps and fill them. A.I. can’t do that.

How ironic that a system with so little gaps, still would find difficulty finding our own.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Craig Foster’s stunning documentary, My Octopus Teacher, which is streaming on Netflix, tells the story of how Foster came to make friends with an octopus. I live in Hawai’i. I enjoy diving. As the first few minutes of the film unfolded, I couldn’t help but think about how wonderful it would be if I could make friends with an octopus of my own.

But after watching My Octopus Teacher, only one thing is clear: I will never make friends with an octopus. I don’t have the emotional fortitude to make friends with an octopus. These fragile, yet stunningly intelligent creatures only live about two years, and live those two years in a hostile and dangerous ocean, where at any moment they could become dinner.

While watching My Octopus Teacher I found myself at various points, sobbing and at other points, curled up into a fetal ball watching an octopus barely survive danger after danger. If I ever made friends with an octopus, there’s a good chance I’d drown myself, either trying to save it, or due to freaking out and hyperventilating underwater (if its safety were ever put in danger while I was around).  

Foster had set himself the challenge to dive every day for a year, in the underwater kelp forests near Cape Town, where he grew up. These are dangerous oceans. In an interview Foster told NPR that he’s been sucked into sea caves. Foster dives without oxygen or a wetsuit in cold water. There’s a purity and a danger and a challenge to his initial conception of the film: namely, to go into the cold and stormy water every day and document what happens.

Foster’s genius is that he doesn’t let that ambitious premise get in the way of his storytelling. In the midst of our striving, what we discover is often the true end, and sometimes ambition takes us to places we never expected we’d go. That Foster dove everyday doesn’t matter. That he dove every day and in the process, befriended an octopus is everything.

This is a master class in art creation. Set out to do something ambitious by all means, but when the time comes to make something of that ambition, you must lead with the story, or the ambition is nothing at all. And Foster’s story is remarkable. He gains the octopus’s trust. He watches as the octopus is violently attacked by sharks, and there’s nothing he can do. He questions whether he should intervene with nature. He watches the octopus heal. He watches her cleverness, her joy, her ecstasy. He watches her lay her eggs and die.

Werner Herzog once wrote an essay called “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” where he notes that the sublime lies in the place where the human overcomes nature. But My Octopus Teacher takes this ecstatic truth one step further. Not only do we observe the human overcoming nature, but we observe an alien familiar—the octopus—do the same. The film reminds us that the sublime doesn’t involve the subjugation of nature, but residence within it, survival within its power. This requires respect for its power, which Foster shows throughout. This isn’t some testosterone-hyped film about diving into deep and rough waters without a wetsuit. This is a film about what it means to be a mortal creature in residence in the natural world. This is about fragility.

My Octopus Teacher has been critiqued for the same reason Werner Herzog’s films have been critiqued. This isn’t educational documentary about the lives of the octopus. Foster isn’t here to teach us about the octopus’s suckers, nor is he performing scientific work. This isn’t documentary or an accounting of the facts. This documentary is about disclosure, about revelation. The education we are receiving is less physical and more metaphysical.

Foster leans into his friendship with the octopus even though he knows she will soon die. He is willing to embrace the pain in order to experience the joy of knowing her. And isn’t this life itself? Isn’t that love? Don’t we all have to face headlong the fragility of it all, the reality that someday everyone we love will die, the fact that everything we treasure isn’t permanent?

Maybe I’ll never make an octopus friend, or dive every day. But I do surf almost every day, and there are sea turtles who visit me often. They come up for air during big swells in Hawaii, letting me know that the bigger sets are coming through. If I watch them closely, they tell me where I need to be in the water to be safe. No, I won’t make an octopus friend (I don’t have the heart for it), but maybe I’ll take a moment to sit in gratitude for the friends I have—the long-living survivors—the sea turtles.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I have to admit that I missed Rupi Kaur. By this, I mean that I had so fully committed to retreating from the New York poetry scene and from the poetry and literary scene in general that I didn’t even notice it when a book of poetry made the New York Times bestseller’s list. I was busy working as a legal content writer, climbing cliffs in Yosemite, and rebuilding my life after divorce.

If you, like me, have been hiding under a rock, Rupi Kaur first made her name on Instagram, where she gained a following of loyal fans (she currently has 3.9 million Instagram followers). She’s grouped within a movement in poetry known as the “Instapoets.” On Instagram, where the currency is “followers” and “likes,” Rupi Kaur leads a pack of other popular poets that include Cleo Wade (over half a million followers), Atticus (1.4 million followers), and R.H. Sin (1.8 million followers). The pendulum of commercial success always brings its share of backlash on the backswing. And Kaur has seen the run of it.

Priya Khaira-Hanks, writing for the Guardian notes that “Kaur treads a fine line between accessibility and over-simplicity and often stumbles into the latter.”

I can’t blame the critics. It is easy to dismiss Kaur’s poetry books as doggerel. And I agree that her simplicity can often be banal. She most often markets in generalities, revels in cliche, works in shock value, peddles in platitudes, and her use of the epigrammatic form does for poetry what stock photos have done for photography. Critics have noted the over-simplicity of her style, with some even questioning whether her work should be called poetry at all.

The word poetry is derived from the Greek word, for “making.” In this context, the conscientious making of language is poetry. We can debate whether Kaur’s work is good poetry, but we cannot dispute that she is working within the poetic form. Kaur, like many other Instagram poets, is a maker.

Kaur’s ability to harness the medium of Instagram has created a genre of poetry of its own. To ignore a writer who has done this would be a mistake. Her language is concentrated and it evokes an emotional response in its audience—as her millions of followers will attest. Work by women is often devalued or seen as frivolous and these views are never stronger than when a woman is writing about feminism, her vagina, or women’s issues.

Kaur cannot be ignored if we are going to have a real discussion about what modern poetry is, and what it can be. Kaur’s biggest problem is that she lacks a good editor.

My Rupi Kaur Poetry Edits

In my work as a legal content writer, I am often called upon to edit law firms’ landing pages, blogs, and articles. Part of the process of receiving an MFA in poetry involves editing the work of other poets and writers for homework and in class. I couldn’t help but find myself editing Kaur’s work as I read.

Kaur’s Milk and Honey is a poetry book at its best when the writer is the most specific and the most vulnerable. There are moments when the arrangement of words juxtaposed to her doodles achieves something close to artistry.

Take for example, this piece:

Despite her brevity, Kaur still lacks full control of her poetic powers. The entire second half of this poem is redundant. A pit stop is an apt enough metaphor to describe a place “empty enough/ for guests but no one/ever comes and is/willing to/stay.” The reader, even an Instagram audience, possibly drunk at 2 a.m. can be trusted to get the point.

And yet, for its flaws, the drawing, along with the placement of the words, succeeds. It is important to note that Kaur received wide media attention when Instagram removed pictures of her in bed menstruating. The vagina is either vilified or sexualized; I have not often seen it textualized. Kaur’s replacement of the vagina with words is brilliant. After all, words are the potent vacancy of sound not yet sounded—spaces of meaning into which the patriarchy has ascribed so much meaning. The undepicted vagina becomes a generative space. The vagina has a voice. The decision to not depict the vagina is an act of resistance against objectification, and it is also a move that controls the meaning of that which is not depicted.

A major aspect of Kaur’s project is the act of reclaiming body as her own. She writes, “the next time he/ points out the/ hair on your legs is/ growing back remind/ that boy your body/is not his home.” And the poem would have done well enough to end there…but it doesn’t. Kaur’s inability to self-edit results in other regrettable pieces as well.

Kaur writes, “the art of being empty/ is simple.” This gorgeous couplet, given Kaur’s use of brevity and white space would be enough. Instead, Kaur goes on, with unfortunate results. Here’s my suggestion:

Kaur addresses topics of love, sex, female representation, relationships, and also darker topics, like parental abuse and rape. Kaur is at her best when she is most specific. In this way, she is the true heir of the confessional poets, following the footsteps of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, except more simply and with less artifice. I can most accept Kaur if I take her for what she is. We have young adult books for young adults and now we have a young adult poetry whose primary platform is Instagram. This is beautiful.

Her poetry book is weakest when her tendency to overgeneralize, combined with her brevity, results in throwaway poems that would have been best left out of the book. The work is hardly poetry at all in some places, reading more like an adolescent journal opened for the world to see. It’s a fine line between writing poetry for adolescents and writing juvenilia yourself. Again, this is where an apt editor might have been able to help Kaur. Her book could have been half as long and much better.

And I feel this way about many of the poems. Take for instance this one:

I rather love the boldness here, but it is blunted by the exposition. Invert the stanzas and cut out the exposition and you have something closer to poetry.

When Kaur boldly depicts female sexuality, it easy to remember that the poetic cannon offers so few instances of female sexuality so openly represented. There are times where Kaur’s condensed poetry reminds me a little of Sappho.

Still, I do not want to place Kaur in the cannon. Kaur in a minor poet with a large following. Here, I find it important to note that John Greenleaf Whittier was a quite popular poet in the 1850s, but the poet we remember today is the “no-name” Emily Dickinson of the same era. I cannot guess what posterity will make of Rupi Kaur, but I can tell you what I make of her now. She has captured the imaginations of an audience of young women, and she has done so deftly. She serves as a gateway for her readers to find other poets and to tap into their own poetic potential.

And that’s the thing about Kaur. She has potential. She has an audience. In the September 2006 issue of Poetry Magazine, John Barr wrote: “Poetry in this country is ready for something new.” Why has establishment poetry fallen on hard times? Why are Instagram poets flourishing?

Establishment poets attend MFAs (like I did). Establishment poets write their first poetry book manuscripts with the intention to submit these manuscripts to first poetry book contests where the manuscripts are read by judges. Those who submit to the contests often tend to only submit work they think might be selected by the judge (I know I didn’t submit to contests where I feared the judge didn’t share my aesthetic). When crafting a poetry book manuscript, these academic poets might only include poems that have been published in literary journals, or may only include poems that could potentially appear in literary journals; work that appeals to a common denominator. The poetry world is not a place for risk-taking any more. And that’s why I admire Kaur—her audacity to post her poetry, her words, on Instagram—a medium meant for art and photography; a social medium (of all places); her boldness in writing honestly about her life; her bravery in self-publishing her own work. And maybe Kaur’s most important comment on modern poetry today is this: poetry, in order to succeed and reach people must be social.

Kaur takes her poems outside academia and into the conversations her audience is having. Her audience cares about sex, breakups, relationships, and taking ownership of their own bodies. They care about female experience told unfiltered. Her audience cares about seeing a woman write about real life in a meaningful way. For centuries poets have been walking the fine tightrope between the vulgar and the rarified view. Shakespeare did it. Dante did it too. Too often contemporary academic poetry is so rarified as to slip off the face of the earth. Contemporary poets would be wise to put a little dirt in their shoes.

Barr wrote in 2006 that he didn’t know what the next thing in poetry will be. Now we know what it is. Instagram poetry. Twitter poetry. Establishment poets can deny its ascendency all they want and criticize it away, but it won’t make it go away, and it won’t make sales go down.

Kaur is writing for an audience of young women who are heartbroken, lonely, and who are learning how to navigate the vicissitudes of love and self-determination in a world for which there are few artistic precedents. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry for its edginess, for its willingness to depict sexuality and for its contempt for modern life without filter. The voice I found in Rimbaud was from another era, but was still one with whom I could relate.

I love that Kaur is writing in the face of the establishment. This is why she is successful. Despite my reservations about her as a poet, I am interested in where she will take her work next.

I only wonder what poetry and art she would produce if she holed herself away for a few years, read more poetry, and worked with a capable editor on a new poetry book (and I’m not talking about The Sun and Her Flowers). With her reach, wit, and ability, she perhaps really could change the poetry world—and maybe not just in sales and followers. I’m actually looking forward to Home Body, a book she appears to have written while in quarantine. UPDATE: I’ve reviewed it here.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.