On the Reform of Creative Writing

Abstract

Creative Writing was no sooner established than reformers set out to change it. First came those who wanted to do away with it altogether. In a famous broadside published in Poetry magazine in 1986, Greg Kuzma called it a catastrophe, demanding its abolition.¹ But Kuzma was trying to take away the bone after the dog had already buried it. By 1980 the number of writing programs in the US had climbed to over a hundred, and by the end of the decade more than a thousand degrees in Creative Writing were being awarded annually. Creative Writing was not about to disappear. Next came those who granted its existence, but not without an improvement in its habits. ‘The question today’, concluded the poet Christopher Beach ten years after Kuzma wrote, ‘is not whether such programs should exist, but how and where they can and should exist within the academic structure of the English department and the university as a whole.’2 By the mid-nineties, in short, the question was bureaucratic.