Over the past twenty years there has been a considerable rise in the number of Creative Writing focused Master’s programs as well as a rise in the demand for poetry, but these poetry programs lack literature classes. Sac State’s program is a Master’s in English with the Creative Writing option, in which students can study either poetry of fiction, but those students opting to follow the poetry track are not given the opportunities of fiction students: the ratio of fiction to poetry literature classes at Sac State is ten to one. Students are being cheated out of a proper education and leaving the university ignorant of a major literary genre. We need in-depth literature classes based solely on poetry.

Leading schools in Creative Writing studies such as Naropa University and NYU, offers classes such as “Midnight Angels” about the Beatnik generation of poets including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; another called “The Cantos of Ezra Pound.” Even by adding a couple poetry specific literature classes, such as a Postmodern Poetry class, a class on William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot, a class dedicated solely to Wallace Stevens, or to Sylvia Plath, would help all Creative Writing students (fiction students included, since hopefully many of them would opt to take some of these courses in order to enhance their own ethos.) Creative Writing students would undoubtedly become more integrated into the current writing scene; would learn what exigencies are calling other writers, whose voices are being heard nationally or even globally, to write and to publish; would find out what relevance there is to the ideas calling us to write; are we saying anything new?

Right now there is a very real market for poets, and it would reflect well on any university to have the poems of their students published, but in order for students to thrive, there must be a thriving program, and every poetry teacher I have ever had has made “Read, read, read!” the first lesson. As Gioia Dana sayd, poetry has gone from bohemia to academia, and since it is now a part of the university system, it should be treated as such, with rigorous classes designed not to challenge students not only to write in styles with which they are unfamiliar, but to explicate complex poems of accomplished poets. At Sac State this reading become extracurricular, but it is unfair of those people designing the classes for this program to assume that poets can (and will have time) to self-educate while they take courses in Methods and Materials Research, Critical Theory, workshops, and other literature (although not poetry.) There is little to no time left.

There are currently twenty graduate literature classes offered at Sac State in fiction, and two in poetry, including a Whitman and Dickinson classand a Yeats, Kavanagh, and Heaney (Modern Irish Poets) class. This leaves at least two semesters in a graduate English Program where poetry students will be without a literature class in our genre. We surely benefit from taking the classes in fiction, but as a student whose purpose in the Master’s program here is to study poetry while I simultaneously polish my own craft under the instruction of Dr. McKinney and with the help of my peers in workshops, I would love the opportunity to engage in in-depth classroom readings of accomplished poets of different genres and time periods.

At Binghamton University, also a state school and a place significantly smaller than Sacramento, where I completed my undergraduate studies in the same field, there was a thriving writing community. A member of my poetry workshop here at Sac State mentioned that of course there would be — “It’s cold there! Everyone’s depressed and writing poetry!” Whether or not that is the case, students seemed more excited about poetry there. It is the university’s duty to help foster that excitement in course offerings. As Dr. Mc Kinney says, creative Writing cannot do it all — literature is its counterpart.

At a state school, the prospect of incorporating more poetry-based literature classes may not seem feasible due to budget constraints, but it seems to me that if a school designed a certain program, hired capable teachers to furnish it and expected that students would both apply and complete it, going on to inhabit various occupations in the field, that that school would want its students to boast of their experience and the knowledge they gained as a result of attending. The lack of poetry specific literature classes at Sac State is a faculty bias forced upon the university’s Creative Writing students, and we are being cheated.