No longer motivated to hone specific regional styles and voices, MFA programs have fast devolved into an entrenched and homogenized business collective who feel it their obligation to churn out the same brand of frenetically paranoid, overly cautious, and substantively meek linguistic aesthetic to which thousands of wide-eyed literary dreamers are expected to conform. Gone are the days of morphine addicted dandies roughing it across Europe in shoddy horse-drawn buggies in search of the sublime, or booze swilling individualists leaving behind thick trails of exhaust as they drive from city to city hungering to fathom the neglected decay of old America - of boxcars, rail, and blood - or even the dwindling vestige of the American writer, fat, full of anguish, and homeless, hopping from bar to whore, desperate to preserve a shred of dignity within the ever encroaching push of globalization.
No, none of the above, but the blathering drones of the MFA canon. Enter, Ellen Bass.
Ellen Bass's credentials seem impressive, boasting several print and web publications, literary accolades, and a teaching position at Pacific University. In fact, she is considered by many (read hoodwinked understudies and their immediate families) as a darling of contemporary poetic achievement.
Now, take a moment to watch Ellen Bass read four selected poems from her Chap Book "Mules of Love & The Human Line."
During an interview, Charles Bukowski once described the process of writing poetry that relies on outlandish metaphors and ornate imagery as taking a "good hot beer shit." Referring, of course, to the pungent fumes of pretentious hyperbole to which many artists succumb. And it is this that largely characterizes the work of Ellen Bass, who, after being introduced by the pandering warble of Co-host Larry Colker, proceeds to shamelessly intone her poetry before an anesthetized, Redondo Beach café audience.
Her first poem, "Everything on the Menu" immediately commits one of the first cardinal errors in literary production, telling instead of showing. This is a favorite tactic among MFA poets, the use of direct address ("In a poet...") followed by an absurd use of figurative language:
Sand spilled from a boy's sneaker,
the faceted grains scattered on the emerald rug
like the stars and planets of a tiny
solar system.
What meaning is Bass attempting to convey, other than a moment to dazzle her audience with her smoldering brilliance? And are we to accept that "in a poem, joy and sorrow are mates" who "lie down together" with their "nipples chafed to flame?" Ouch.
Bass's second poem exhibits yet another common MFA tactic, cobbling together various images that have almost nothing to do with each other, but from which the audience is supposed to gather great spiritual import. Here, Bass combines deer imagery, full of dubious warm furs and ankle-wet eroticism, with Elizabethan collars and, of course, an obligatory line of male bashing, "...did the man know what to do...?"
Yes, and with all due respect, I know exactly what to do, run for the hills.
