A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  A pivotal incident occurred when Cisneros and Harjo resolved to confront their instructor for neglecting to include them in the weekly reading rotation. As the only students whose work did not appear, they grew increasingly uncomfortable with the galling exclusion. Hesitating outside the door of Donald Justice’s office, they swallowed hard and exchanged a glance of mutual fear. Their gentle knock elicited a weary reply telling them to enter. “When he saw us,” according to Harjo, “he started backing up, like we were going to pull out a switchblade or maybe scalp somebody.” Few words were exchanged, but the solidarity of their protest made its presence felt. “We just looked at each other and walked away,” Harjo recalled. “The next week our poems were on the Worksheet.”56

  Both met crushing silence when their work was circulated, as was the case when either of them made a comment. “When you said something in class,” Cisneros attested, “there was this absolute silence in the room. ‘Did I say something wrong?’ ” she wondered.57 Something deeper than playground bullying was taking place. The resistance to diverse mythological impulses came in the form of “only those classical expressions pertinent to the dominant culture” qualifying for “recognition and kinship in the writing workshop,” according to Harjo. She shared Cisneros’s sense that “the workshops at Iowa were particularly brutal. Competition was rife and set us against each other.” Harjo envisioned the alternative to the contentious workshop environment as an intimate and informal “kitchen-table community,” united by trust in a shared bond of mutual support for maintaining high creative standards.58

  Cisneros would adopt this inclusive encouraging model in her own teaching. Scholars of creative writing pedagogy have observed the ineffectiveness of its opposite in the “Bobby Knight school,” named for the sadistic college basketball coach notorious for berating his players for their slightest misstep. As in the Workshop, “students learn to write in an economy of scarcity, where the only guidance centers on what not to do.” This approach, Stephanie Vanderslice notes, “ultimately fails” writers in their early stages of development.59 Cisneros’s alternative method, applied with her underprivileged Chicago high school students in 1979, was ideally suited to her inclusive narrative voice. In The House on Mango Street, she intended to make the narrative “approachable for all people, whether they were educated or not, and whether they were children or adults. My ideal was to write in a way that would not make anyone feel intimidated, but welcome.” Her populist vision of herself as a writer emerged when she was in fifth grade, when she imagined her name on an index card in the public library’s card catalogue. “That card,” according to her ideal, “would be wrinkled and dirty because so many people wanted to read her books.”60 To “say yes to everything” was a construct inspired in direct opposition to “the worst mistake a writer can make”—mistrusting one’s instincts out of fear of a rigid audience waiting to pounce on flaws. Tolerance in this sense is more than aesthetic; it inheres as a politics of gender and shared power to “be open, be gentle, like a mother.” In an environment without these vital elements, “which is what happened to me at Iowa, how can you grow?” she asks.61

  While Harjo entered the Workshop in poetry and remained a poet throughout her career, Cisneros crossed over into prose, but without ever leaving verse behind entirely. Her sense of abandonment came when her adviser Don Justice told her in no uncertain terms that her poetry was third rate. Tracy Kidder, an Iowa MFA from 1974, told me he could explain Justice’s decision, if not excuse it: “Justice was a neo-classicist” and simply “did not tolerate the sort of experimentation” Cisneros had done.62 She poured herself into the hybridized poetic prose of the first three stories of Mango Street in one weekend at Iowa.63 Glancing at drafts, Justice winced and pushed them aside. He first struggled to justify his distaste for them, then finally shook his head and concluded, “Well, you know, these really aren’t poems.” As prose, Justice refused to count them toward the MFA thesis because she was a poetry student not formally enrolled in the fiction Workshop. His authoritarian bearing reminded her “too much of my father.”64 She immediately sought the aid of Harjo, sharing the sketches with her confidante, “who was also having a hard time in the poetry workshop.”65 In retrospect, Cisneros wished she “had been a little older at Iowa,” so she might have had the courage to assert herself as both a fiction writer and a poet, “trying to fuse the two” forms.

  No one at the Workshop had ever completed a thesis in both areas, or received approval of it from a combination of poetry and fiction faculty. Marvin Bell, who took over the role of Cisneros’s thesis adviser from Justice, had the most fluid and accommodating sense of poetry, allowing for, and even encouraging, a narrative emphasis. Bell’s earthy eclecticism functioned as a viable solution for Cisneros, who otherwise had nowhere else to turn for aesthetic guidance among the poetry faculty to suit her desire for experimentation. She had been reading the “Latin American boom” writers and Nicanor Parra, whose “anti-poems, anti-upper class, anti-ivory tower, anti-pretty poems” captured her imagination. She thought, “this is what I am,” in bold defiance of the poets she had been clustered with at the Workshop. Besides Harjo and Dennis Mathis from blue-collar Peoria, Workshop poets to her “seemed very pretentious and very upper class,” quite the opposite of her community-centered orientation toward the craft. “Maybe Iowa was a family for some,” she attested, “but it wasn’t my family. I felt homeless.”66 Mango Street’s dedication, “To the Women,” speaks to Cisneros’s attempt to reclaim authorship for community and progressive gender politics. At the Workshop during the late 1970s, few showed concern over an author’s contribution to society, or obligations to community. “And we never mentioned class,” she recalled of a curriculum missing a sense of political efficacy. “I wish there had been some political direction,” she lamented.67

  That missing political component at the Workshop threatened to extinguish Cisneros and Harjo’s ambition to develop a literary aesthetic responsive to issues of social class and economic inequality. The program also did not provide the career guidance they needed. During her literary career, Cisneros has struggled to reap the financial rewards of powerhouse presses, mainly because she lacked the necessary advising when she entered the profession. Mathis had lent his editorial skill, Harjo was instrumental in encouraging her to write, and Bell had been a loyal source of support on the poetry faculty. Sorely missing, however, was a figure to help her navigate the literary marketplace. Both Cisneros and Harjo had been excluded from the inner circle of students chosen for grooming and promotion in the publishing industry. It was not until 2004 that Cisneros landed her work with Vintage, a powerful publisher worthy of her caliber of work. This is mainly because “when I got out of Iowa, I learned the business side the wrong way, by signing on the dotted line.” Only when she conscripted the aid of Susan Bergholz, who would become the most effective literary agent of her career, did she negotiate back the rights to all her major works she had signed away as a desperate young writer aching to launch her career.68

  Harjo experienced similar trouble when small presses like Thunder’s Mouth Press, despite publishing her signature volume She Had Some Horses through three editions beginning in 1984, initially failed to win her the wide audience she deserved. It was not until 2000 that a major house, in her case W. W. Norton, signed her to several new editions of her poetry. Like Cisneros, Harjo has won the attention of literary critics and enjoys a wide readership. The House on Mango Street has sold more than two million copies since its first publication. Its twenty-fifth anniversary edition sparked international media coverage and a massive book signing tour. Cisneros used the occasion to reaffirm her spite for the Iowa program; thirty years of experience as a professional author and activist only reinforced her sense of its flaws.

  In a 2009 radio interview on the public broadcasting affiliate WNYC in New York, Cisneros asserted that the Workshop “wasn’t so prestigious to me, it was rather horrible. I like to tell people that I am a writer d
espite the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” In measured tones just above a whisper, Cisneros delivered her verdict on the Workshop. Since her graduation in 1978, she has neither recanted nor qualified her position. If any change is evident over the three decades of her commentary on the Workshop, it has become more resolute and firm over time. By 2009, she was a seasoned professional reflecting on the celebratory occasion of the release of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street with dark yet candid testimony. She explained, the program “taught me what I didn’t want to be as a writer and how I didn’t want to teach.”69 A personal vendetta or bruised ego did not motivate her to challenge the widespread view of the Workshop as a prestigious and noble institution. Instead, larger political concerns for the silenced voices of minority and women writers have been behind her campaign, distinguishing her as the most acclaimed graduate of the program to blast it so consistently in public media for such a protracted span of time—now nearing four decades—all at the peril of her own reputation and career. Despite her awareness that “no one ever wants to hear from the malcontents,” and despite the risk of alienating the powerful stakeholders at the Workshop who might hold influence over her status in literary circles, she has maintained her staunch opposition on virtually every media occasion when the topic of Iowa arises.70 These include myriad live events, in print, television, and the public radio interview, which has drawn nearly 31,000 original visitors as a video on YouTube. “We don’t often hear from the dissonant voices of the people who are enrolled there, especially ethnic women and working class people.” In response to the prompt from her interviewer, “It sounds like you absolutely hated it,” she nodded vigorously, more than thirty years after graduating: “That’s putting it mildly, yes.”71

  Featured on Garrison Keillor’s Literary Friendships series for American Public Media, Cisneros and Harjo spoke of their struggle at the Workshop, a topic that surfaced within the first five minutes of the show. The two became instant friends in the fall of 1976 because they “felt odd” surrounded by “tall serious white men,” according to Keillor. Never one to pass on exposing the humor in the hypocrisy of self-congratulatory mythmaking, Keillor quipped, “We tall serious white males feel responsible for the wonderful careers that they’ve had, for having given them the shock, the sense of resentment that may have triggered their creative careers.”72

  The Workshop, for all its sins, paradoxically inspired Cisneros’s Mango Street, if only as a counterpoint written with a survivor’s grit in opposition to the forces that threatened to destroy her creative spirit during peer critiques. She began Mango Street in Iowa “precisely because Iowa forced me,” she explained, “to look inside myself as to what made me different from all those other classmates.” With the outward support of Harjo, Cisneros made this intense inward turn. “Instead of quitting, which I felt like doing,” she boldly defied those poised to tell her she was wrong. Harjo has repeatedly denied this motivation was also hers. Instead what drove her creativity was the prospect of “speaking the mysterious, the beautiful and unspoken” in such a way that a poem would become like a dwelling where “a spirit would want to live.” Harjo acknowledged that the “care and attention” with which Cisneros “read and responded to her poems” prevented her from leaving the program. For Cisneros, Harjo represented a mature figure with the strength and survival to raise Rainy Dawn and Phil on her own in a place like Iowa. Together they emerged from this watershed moment in their careers with a renewed sense of vigor and faith in the aesthetic and cultural values that had sustained them through the program. Both committed themselves to what Harjo called “the real revolution—when we can see each other as human beings.”73

  10 • The Crossover: Rita Dove

  Rita Dove stood transfixed by the volume of poetry in her hands, the cover of which read Residue of Song, by Marvin Bell. The twenty-one-year-old future United States poet laureate, who would become the first African-American woman to bear that title, looked up suddenly at the stranger breaking her concentration. “That book—I don’t like it so much,” the man curtly declared, furrowing his brow. The 1973 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference played host to many outspoken colorful characters, and this was one of them, Dove realized. After listening with a bemused look while she vigorously defended the book in her hand, the man inquired about the location of the conference bookstore. While leading him there, she continued to praise what she insisted was a powerful and searching work by an underappreciated poet. Several days later at the conference, she crossed paths with the opinionated stranger again. “She didn’t know it was me,” Bell later explained. Dove was “a bit baffled” by his ruse, realizing he had baited her into defending—with great enthusiasm—his own work.1

  Four years later, in 1977, during her second year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dove appeared in Bell’s poetry class. Seated in the back row were two morose first-year students, Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, who marveled at Dove’s poise. When she was not holding forth with supreme confidence, Dove coolly “painted her fingernails in a rainbow of colors in class,” to the consternation of her instructor and the silent approval of her classmate Jorie Graham. This display of unapologetic individualism presented a new challenge to the status quo of the Workshop. Decades later, when Dove was named poet laureate, Graham only half-jokingly invoked her in-class nail painting ritual as a force of institutional change: “I hope she does it in the poet laureate’s office. It would be good for the office.”2

  Years after graduating, Cisneros told Dove she admired her for consistently contributing to discussion despite an environment Cisneros found so intimidating that she “gave up and didn’t say anything.” Although she knew her comments were likely to draw condescending stares and snide remarks, “she forced herself to say something in every class,” which “took all her courage.”3 Dove’s confidence derived from a sophisticated European frame of reference, gleaned from a Fulbright fellowship she held at the University of Tübingen the year before arriving at the Workshop in 1975. While there, she became fluent in German and spoke it confidently in mostly white intellectual social circles. Studying abroad in the picturesque college town offered her “a different perspective on Iowa. Had I not gone to Tübingen I might have been intimidated by Iowa,” but the experience of going “to Europe first, where no one knew me, and where I had to get along in a different language,” fortified her with “much more self-confidence than I had before.”4 Tübingen imbued her with cosmopolitanism beyond her years. She was all of twenty-two when she moved into her self-described “dive” apartment across the Iowa River from the Workshop.5 Her Fulbright also encouraged new connections with foreign scholars at Iowa, including Fred Viebahn, who would play an instrumental role in her personal and aesthetic development. The social and cultural diversity missing from the regular Workshop she found not only in the intellectual and creative companionship of Viebahn—which turned romantic—but in an unlikely institutional nexus that was the invention of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh in the late 1960s: the International Writing Program.

  The “Workshop Poem”

  Dove began her pivotal first year by devouring the works of the authors cited during workshop sessions. “I’d hear names” and take her cue, thinking, “I’ve never heard of these poets before, better read them.” Even when “someone would not like a certain poet,” Dove made a point of reading their work too. Despite her remarkable proficiency in German language and literature, she became acutely aware of “how naive” she was and how little she had read compared with her classmates.6 Afternoon Workshop classes typically adjourned up the hill to the Airliner bar on Clinton Street where “the talk was poetry” in an atmosphere that seemed to intensify competitive jockeying for position initiated in class. “It was serious stuff” consisting of allusions to classical literature and mythology, with students rattling off lengthy passages from memory. This was a group in which most “people knew poems by heart.”7 Her “short-cut reading list” became a lifebuo
y.8

  As her exposure to literature expanded, Dove diligently strived to perfect her workshop assignments. But in the process, her writing fell into a trap, and she soon realized “what everybody says is true” about “an Iowa Writers’ Workshop poem” being a stock literary product created with factory-like efficiency. To her horror, she discovered herself writing verse “that sounds like it came from Iowa,” unconsciously “slipping into that [habit] easily.” The high-stakes workshop sessions had bent her craft through “positive reinforcement,” she explained. “If people in the workshop like your poem you try to do something like that the next time,” until it becomes an unconscious reflex engrained in the creative process. She soon found herself “starting to write these kinds of safe poems that don’t take risks, and as a consequence, after Iowa, for over a year I really didn’t write any poems.”9 Dove’s dedication to achieving the program’s standard for success had inadvertently homogenized her craft and dampened her creative spark. The effects of poetry workshops are visible in her self-conscious use of “the strict forms of the sonnet and villanelle [that] are integral” to her earlier work, as critic Renee Shea points out. It was not until years after the Workshop that she expanded into “improvisation and individual expression” through the rhythms and sounds associated with music and dance.10

  The transition was not without its challenges. Her diligent work ethic—writing daily from midnight to dawn until she drifted off, arising again before noon to resume her creative thrust—drove her repeatedly to attempt to resuscitate her poetry. But outside the context of writing for workshop, the flaw in her otherwise technically sound and fastidiously safe verse was that it lacked a voice with resonance. False starts abounded. She “didn’t finish any poems” in the year following graduation because “whenever I tried to write one, it didn’t sound like me.” To her revulsion, “it sounded like a poem from some composite person,” one unmistakably identifiable in the group identity of her poetry workshop classes.11 That collective force was one to be reckoned with, as it actively discouraged experimentation while encouraging conformity through a Skinnerian system of punishment and reward. She “felt pretty paralyzed after the Workshop,” sensing at every turn “the Workshop looking over my shoulder.” By deliberately crossing over into fiction, she undid her Workshop training to regain her poetic voice. Although she vowed to keep that prose fiction in a drawer, to “let it rest in peace,” she later published it as her first short story collection, Fifth Sunday, in 1990, and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate, two years later.12