From Bad to Verse
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Hoover has run Columbia’s poetry program single-handedly forever, though he’s never had the title of director. He’s developed the courses, assigned the classes, overseen the Columbia Poetry Review, and curated a reading series. When he and his wife, poet Maxine Chernoff, moved to San Francisco a decade ago it didn’t cause a blip on the screen. He just worked out an arrangement that has him teaching a double load every fall and in California the rest of the year.
Hoover says resentment is fueling all this–coupled with Columbia’s unusual structure of tenure without rank, which makes for strong department chairs (who retain their positions for years on end) and faculty members, tenured and untenured, scrabbling for position. Hoover himself led a long struggle to free poetry and other English courses from the control of legendary story-workshop creator John Schultz. Unlike most colleges, Columbia, which was conceived as a trade school for the arts, offers no English major. But in the mid-80s an independent English department was established apart from Schultz’s fiction writing program. That left Hoover’s poetry fiefdom, which now has its own undergraduate major and master’s degree, as part of the English department, which still does not. As Hoover sees it, other English department faculty and administrators resent poetry’s prominence and seek to control it, while younger poetry faculty want their share of the power. Last May he took a leave of absence (during which he’s been teaching at San Francisco State University) and sent an e-mail to the Columbia English faculty explaining that he’d been demoted just as the MFA program was getting under way. He says no one in the department spoke up on his behalf: “All my old friends disappeared. Everyone’s scared.” A story in this week’s Columbia Chronicle, the student paper, considers the impact of his absence on the school’s first class of graduate poetry students, a few of whom say they enrolled in the program because he’d be part of it and have been disappointed to find newer faculty not as receptive to “experimental” work. Hoover claims there have been repercussions for students who support him, including an attempt to convert the Columbia Poetry Review to a faculty-edited publication; some students are complaining about questionable grading. Hoover’s extended his leave of absence until the fall of 2005. He says he’ll make a final decision about coming back that year. “It’s inconceivable for me to return there in a demoted position,” he says. “I’m too proud.”
