An interview by Sarah Kanning

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Kanning, Sarah

LR: In 1991, while I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard studying First Amendment jurisprudence, in line with advocacy work I'd been doing about freedom of speech and expression and public funding for the arts, I took on a job as director of the summer Writing Workshops at Bennington. After I directed my first season of the summer program, I realized what a perfect place a college like Bennington would be for a low-residency program.

I was interested in teaching and I was also interested to see if I could start a writing program and build it from the ground up. Having been the director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), I wanted to tackle as directly as I could some of the criticisms of writing programs, the primary shibboleth being that everyone writes and no one reads, so I decided that I would found a program that was substantially, consciously committed to reading, as well as to writing. Bennington had a splendid history of writers-in-residence (Bernard Malamud, Auden, Theodore Roethke, Hortense Calisher, John Gardner, Jamaica Kincaid, Howard Nemerov, Stanley Kunitz, etc.), a long history of writers teaching literature, and Bennington's intense tutorial pedagogy and low studentteacher ratio were really in harmony with the low-residency format. That format was devised basically by the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt in the 19705, god bless her.

So I approached the president of Bennington, Elizabeth Coleman, with a proposal (one of our mortos in the Seminars is that we don't apply for jobs, we create them), and after she considered it and put it to the board of trustees they decided to bankroll the program and we were off to the races. It was fortunate then that there was a poet who was president of the Bennington trustees: John Barr, who has since gone on to be the director of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. It was a considerable financial risk for Bennington at the time, and one that paid off in many ways. As Monsieur Dylan has it, those not busy being born are busy dying.

We've also managed to make the First Amendment and its freedoms of speech and expression an ongoing touchstone of our program. Without a clean circulatory system there's no real communion between writer and reader.

SK: How have writing programs changed American letters?

LR: For writers, writing programs have changed American literature essentially by being literary centers that have decentralized things away from what used to be the literary center of New York City. Manhattan remains a publishing center, augmented by university presses and lively small, literary presses throughout the country, but the main action for literature, particularly poetry, is now decentralized and dispersed throughout the United States. And that's more or less a good thing. The person from Massachusetts does not have to run away to New York to find their Athens; they can get their asses (and the primary gesture of writing is sitting) off to Amherst or Boston. The person from Montana can go on down or on up to Missoula.