“Show, Don’t Tell” and Cold War Politics
Show, don’t tell. This is a good rule as demonstrated by its inclusion in the forthcoming (we hope) Rules for Revising Poetry and How to Break Them by KB Ballentine, Finn Bille and John C. Mannone. This rule is also what the esteemed former president of Chattanooga Writers Guild, Ray Zimmerman, has repeatedly called “so much pabulum,” meaning, we assume, a stupid rule.
So when I found this very rule used as an example of how “Cold War politics helped to create the aesthetic standards that continue to rule over writing workshops today,” I paid attention. This startling assertion was made by Timothy Aubrey in the New York Times Book Review of November 29, 2015. Here, he reviews Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War by Eric Bennett.
Per Aubrey, Bennett documents that anti-communist foundations funded creative writing programs, the Iowa Workshop being his prime example. These foundations encouraged workshop leaders to teach aspiring authors “certain rules of propriety” that would create literature containing “sensations, not doctrines; expressions, not philosophies.”
Aubrey continues, “The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual.”
I was schooled in this show-don’t-tell anti-political, anti-philosophical tradition of creative writing. I was struck by the contrast with European writing in the 1990’s when I taught English at a Danish folk high school.
When I read my poems from my first book, Rites of the Earth, at the folk high school, my Danish students told me that my positive, concrete, and personal poetry was completely unlike what they were used to reading. At that time much of Danish poetry was a fine example of Bennett’s “systematic social critique.” Poetry my students were reading was full of protest and critical observations related to social and political issues. The writing of the Danish creative elite was replete with anti-American sentiment, especially during and after the Vietnam war. This both in spite of and because of Denmark’s membership in NATO and Denmark’s dependence on American military aid and assistance.
So, is our poetic aesthetic—our rules for writing and revising poetry—a product of influence and manipulation by the big political money of the 1960’s and later? Apparently, to some extent.
Aubrey concludes that “Bennett’s argument is a persuasive reminder that certain seemingly timeless criteria of good writing are actually the product of historically bound political agendas. . .”
Show, don’t tell?
— Finn Bille, January 11, 2016.