'I think they should be discouraged'

 

Here is that fine poet Elizabeth Bishop, in a Paris Review interview in 1978: 'When I went to Vassar I took sixteenth-century, seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literature, and then a course in the novel. The kind of courses where you have to do a lot of reading. I don't think I believe in writing courses at all. There weren't any when I was there. ...The word "creative" drives me crazy. I don't like to regard it as therapy. I was in the hospital several years ago and somebody gave me Kenneth Koch's book Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?* And It's true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged. From everything I've read and heard, the number of students in English departments taking literature courses has been falling off enormously. But at the same time the number of people who want to get in the writing classes seems to get bigger and bigger.' I'm sure the situation she describes in the universities is the same, only more so, today. The overvaluing of 'creativity' and the undervaluing of reading, specifically as an essential bedrock for any attempt at creative writing, has had dire effects both on writing (especially poetry) and on education. While I wouldn't quite go along with actively discouraging children from writing (though there are plenty of adults who should be firmly discouraged), I certainly think teaching them to read books and learn from their reading should take precedence over any encouragement of creative writing. The playwright Tennessee Williams also took a dim view of creative writing classes, and had kept and reread Bishop's interview. In an interview with James Grissom in 1982, Williams gave his formula for learning to be a writer:

'Read. Read a lot. Go home. Be quiet. Write. Write some more. It will soon be discovered if you are a writer. Classes are not for discovery; they are for stipends.' * In which Koch seeks to show how great poetry can be taught in such a way as to help children write poetry of their own. Koch also co-edited a beautiful illustrated anthology of 'poems for young people', Talking to the Sun. The illustrations are all of paintings and other treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the choice of poems is wide and wonderful.