Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

The Tyranny of Praise

27 This paper was delivered at the 1997 AWP convention in Washington, D.C. The meeting was held in a hotel near my favorite museum in the city, the National Museum of American Art, where once-popular art is housed away from the museums on the Mall. I฀was฀standing฀in฀line waiting to use an outdoor ATM built into the wall of the Schine, the student activity center at Syracuse University, where I used to teach. Waiting behind me was a colleague, a poet, from the creative writing program, and I turned to talk with him. It was spring, a truly lovely and rare couple of minutes in the yearlong perpetual gloom that the lake effect generates. So there I was. And there was sunlight, a bit of warmth, maybe even some birds chirping. And I turn to remark upon this fact to my colleague standing behind me in line when I catch sight for the first time of a new installation of outdoor art covering the lawn of a building two hundred yards away. Now, I had read about this work, a group of twenty or so sculptures , fiberglass or resin, I think, sculptures of women, larger than life-size, naked, arranged in a kind of Stonehenge circle, frozen in various contorted gestures of grief and mourning. They were modeled on the mothers of Syracuse University students killed in the bombing of Pam Am flight 103, which had crashed five years before. The sculptor, a mother herself, whose son had died The฀Tyranny฀of฀Praise 28฀ The฀Tyranny฀of฀Praise on the flight, asked the others to recreate the moment they had understood their child had died, that first sharp intake of breath. And I caught my breath seeing the grouping for the first time, even though I had read about the work, looking over the shoulder of my colleague to the greening lawn and the figures shimmering and quaking on the hillside in the rare sunlight among the living people walking there. And my colleague seeing me so struck turned, following my gaze to gaze at the collection of sculpture and then said something quite amazing. “You know,” he said, “it’s moving but it is not great art.” Now it may be the case that the sculpture may not be great art. It probably is the case. I don’t really know and don’t really care one way or the other. What struck me that moment and what has stayed with me since that moment was the need my colleague expressed , the need to make such a judgment. Or, put another way, what struck me is that judgment would be the initial response, that he would be driven to begin the culling, begin constructing the scaffolding of hierarchy, that he would find it necessary to establish his position as being in the position to make such a definitive determination. Let’s muse for a second on how writers find themselves in the role of judge, arbiter of taste, gatekeeper of the good. I entered my first teaching job at Iowa State University the object of a terminal-degree war where enlightened colleagues (in my view) in the English Department were arguing for my inclusion though I held only the lowly MA. I began teaching quite conscious of my status as not quite professorial to some while at the same time aware that I owed what status I did have to my PhDed betters, some of whom were willing to share at least some crumbs of the table. Better be on my best behavior. Since no one I worked with saw me as a professor in the usual sense, I had to be more professor than professors. Not a new story. Walker Percy in Love in the Ruins has a religious black character say to an ambivalent white one: “You know what really bothers you is that we out-jesused you.” One way to read James Joyce is as an Irish revenge on the language of the The฀Tyranny฀of฀Praise฀ 29 oppressor. He out-Englished the English. So I was primed to outprofess the professor. And look! That anxiety is replicated in the organization that gathers us here. The AWP, since I have been in it, has been driven to shape up the writer as some sort of professional professional, insisting on the trappings of accreditation and rank, etc. And, by the...