Read submissions for long enough and a shape starts to repeat. A poem opens on a precise, slightly unexpected image — a bird, a kitchen object, a fragment of weather. It moves through two or three stanzas of careful, competent observation. Somewhere near the two-thirds mark it turns, usually toward memory or mortality, and it ends on a quiet, understated line that gestures at meaning without quite stating it. None of this is bad, exactly. Every individual move is one a good teacher would tell you to make. The problem is that thousands of poets learned the same moves from the same rooms, and the result is a kind of poem that is very hard to get wrong and almost as hard to remember.
What the Workshop Poem Sounds Like
I don't think there's anything wrong with the workshop as an institution, and I don't think MFA programs are the villain some essays make them out to be — most of what gets taught in a good workshop is genuinely useful, and most of the poets I most admire went through one. The trouble isn't the teaching. It's what a workshop is structurally suited to reward. A workshop critiques poems one at a time, in a room, under time pressure, among people who need to say something useful in five minutes. That format rewards clarity, competence, and the kind of move that reads well cold, out loud, to strangers. It does not reward strangeness that takes a while to earn its keep, or a poem that only makes sense in the context of forty other poems around it. Twelve years of that pressure, applied across an entire generation of poets, produces a house style, even when no one intended one.
Where the Sameness Comes From
Workshops also, understandably, teach revision toward the room's taste rather than toward the poem's own logic. A line that confuses three of your twelve classmates gets cut, even if that confusion was doing real work. An ending that resolves cleanly gets praised, even when the poem's subject didn't actually resolve. Over enough drafts and enough rooms, poems get sanded down toward whatever reads most legibly to a group of strangers in fifty minutes — which is a specific and fairly narrow kind of poem, not the only kind worth writing. None of the individual notes are wrong. The aggregate effect, repeated across a whole publishing ecosystem, is a genre that increasingly critiques itself for sounding the same, while still teaching the exact process that produces the sameness.
A poem that confuses three people in a workshop might be doing exactly the thing a workshop can't reward.
The Question We Ask Instead
When we're reading for the press, the question we actually ask isn't “is this a competent poem” — most submissions clear that bar easily. It's closer to: could this book be shuffled? If you could rearrange the poems in a manuscript without doing real damage to it, we're probably looking at a very good workshop portfolio rather than a book. The manuscripts we've taken on — and this is true across every one of them — have an internal architecture that a single, excellent poem cannot have on its own: a structural logic, recurring obsessions that develop rather than repeat, a shape that only exists at the scale of the whole thing. That's a different craft from the one a workshop is built to teach, and it's very hard to develop it inside a format built around one poem, one room, one hour at a time.
Writing Toward the Book, Not the Poem
None of this is an argument against getting an MFA, or against workshops as a place to learn the fundamentals — most poets, myself included, needed exactly that kind of room at some point. It's an argument for what comes after: for spending time, once you've learned to write a clean, competent single poem, unlearning the instinct to make every poem legible to a room of strangers in five minutes. The poets whose manuscripts actually hold together as books are usually the ones who eventually stopped asking whether a workshop would understand a given line, and started asking whether the book needed it. That's a harder question to answer alone. It's also, I think, the only one that actually produces a book instead of a very well-revised folder of individual poems.
