dontwanttodothis

If someone with Facebook gets a sec, could you eyeball some 2025 results and say whether it seems like the majority of 'off the waitlist' acceptances came before or after April 15th? Or question for vets here: if you're in Vegas and have to lay a bet on "pre April 15" or "post April 15" for a waitlist acceptance... what're you betting? (Say an average, solid, fully-funded program.)

In general I'm starting to think we probably underestimate the amount of people *not* on either Draft or gradcafe. (Despite them being incredibly helpful resources!) For poetry, many funded programs only have a couple of acceptances and waitlists on the spreadsheet per school; my very dumb ballpark guess is 75% of the MFA poetry pool doesn't use facebook/is unaware of it/stays mute.

Nah no way this hurt you imo, sounds like solid material for a SOP! If you didn't add any of your influences/writers you admire/traditions you're writing in or against, I'd add a bit along those lines though. (You may have already, just recommending if not.)

My pet theory is that it's more common for fiction "readers" to exist in MFA programs, as if they were lit mags. Like, some current students/adjuncts/admin give fiction subs a first pass and weed out tons of unserious apps right away, before sending whatever percentage of finalists upstream to the profs. For poetry I think it's not uncommon for the poetry faculty to read every app themselves. No idea why this is, but I've seen comments to this effect. Also, it's harder to dismiss a poetry packet as quickly as a fiction work. If a fiction writer doesn't have talent it'll be evident in a couple paragraphs, or 1-2 pages at most. (And they're only submitting one or two pieces of art.) Poetry is more fickle; you can absolutely have a bunch of clunky swings-and-misses in a row, then suddenly two perfect poems, then crap again, all wildly different within the same app, etc.

I love McGurl's work and enjoyed this essay from Bennett. However, I feel compelled to say you might be surprised if you ever visited Iowa City (lol) and talked to recent grads, profs, and students. Despite the experience of walking into Prairie Lights and looking at the tables of bestsellers in the front... the millennial/zillennial/zoomer set of the last 10-15 years seem intensely aware of the school's history, and the larger historicization of the workshop model and of academic creative writing in the States. In fact, in my experience a healthy % of students admitted into the 'major' MFA programs nowadays tend to write in some sort of avant-garde tradition. You'll find their names with equal measure in rags like Protean, The Baffler, n+1, Jacket2, Fence, and endless smaller leftist zines etc. etc. as you would the traditional outlets. Further, and not to necessarily 'defend' Iowa, but you can find plenty of famous grads who wrote/write against its prevailing aesthetic. Here's a small and random grab-bag of great writers across the decades: alice notley, joshua clover, james tate, cathy park hong, john edgar wideman, michael lally, joyelle mcsweeney...