7 Innovative Collections From Poets Without MFAs

This list won’t be a screed against the MFA. Other than this one sentence, I won’t write “MFA industrial complex.” Almost a century old, a master’s degree in creative writing now seems inescapable—to be a writer, you need one. While I don’t find that logic persuasive, most modern writers emerge from or eventually become entangled with the fine arts degree. But what happens when writers create without these institutional pressures? 

In the world of prose, I think of Fran Ross’s Oreo, so original, hilarious, and ecstatic—a formally ingenious book. And what about Annie Dillard’s wild inventions in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm? She ended up with a university teaching post, but I can’t imagine either of these works emerging as a master’s thesis. Outside the United States, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine ...