A broad church: secret knowledge and self-mastery at the Poetry Field School

On July 28, 2024, I headed to the 7th Ave Garden, an outdoor space in Los Angeles run by the artist David Horvitz. The occasion was a reading hosted by Elaine Kahn; the lineup included Rashed Aqrabawi and Tamara Nassar, two Palestinian poets who had been students in Kahn’s online academy, Poetry Field School. I was eager to meet Nassar, whose luminous poem “Lovers’ Quarrel” had just been published in Granta, and equally intrigued by Aqrabawi, who had only weeks earlier won BOMB’s 2024 Poetry Contest. In the twilight of Horvitz’s garden, the poets read to a rapt audience. Their work was different—Nassar’s angular but warm, Aqrabawi’s rangy, sexy, and lyrical—and yet one could sense a certain formal throughline. These were poems that had been polished like precious stones, whittled into a precision so exhilarating it almost seemed dangerous.

That quality of tension and containment is what Kahn, an established poet and the author of multiple books, is known for. “I have to confess,” Aqrabawi told me, “when I enrolled in Poetry Field School, I expected Elaine to be as cruel as her poems.” Spartan and unforgiving, Kahn’s work simmers with an ominous sensuality. “A thousand different holes/in me,” she writes in “Linen,” from her 2020 collection Romance or The End, “And I have spat myself in each.” But beneath Kahn’s froideur is an ethical commitment to telling it like it is. “Writing a poem,” Aqrabawi explained, is “a cruel act” with “a terrible kindness” at its core. Kahn’s pedagogy embodies this ethos, which has proven extraordinarily effective. Since its inception, Poetry Field School has punched far above its weight, assembling a robust roster of students who are publishing widely, winning prizes, and generally making their presence felt in the literary landscape.  

Poetry Field School, or PFS, was founded in 2016, shortly after Kahn moved to Los Angeles. A graduate of the California College of the Arts who earned her MFA from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Kahn had previously lived in Berkeley, where she’d led a poetry class at a local bookstore and enjoyed the experience. Although she spent a few years teaching at St. Mary’s College, Pomona, and University of California Los Angeles, nothing seemed to capture the immediacy and egalitarian spirit of teaching in that bookshop. So Kahn began hosting workshops out of her apartment. Demand grew quickly, and soon Kahn had more students than she could accommodate in person. When she added more classes online, things took off fast. About five hundred people a year now enroll in PFS, around 60 percent of them returning students.

There is a long tradition of practicing poets offering community-based classes. Bernadette Mayer and Ted Berrigan famously hosted workshops at the Poetry Project in New York City during the 1970s, as did Robert Gluck and Gloria Anzaldúa at the Small Press Traffic bookstore in San Francisco. But PFS is at once more formal and less centralized, with a faculty of its own and course offerings that rival those at any MFA program. In addition to the three or so poetry workshops offered each term—some taught by Kahn, others by poets including Sholto Buck and Manal Kara—PFS also hosts classes in nonfiction prose led by the writer and editor Rob Goyanes and a fiction workshop with Chloe Watlington, cofounder of Commune magazine and former managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The “field” in Poetry Field School is twofold. A few years ago, during an appearance on the podcast Apology, hosted by former longtime editor-in-chief of Vice magazine Jesse Pearson, Kahn explained that a field school specializes in “practical training on subjects previously learned theoretically”—which is to say, in the kind of “hands-on direct learning” that anthropologists or medics, for example, get when they are in the field 1. But the school’s name has another meaning as well. “In poetry,” Kahn tells Pearson, “we call the page ‘the field.’” She cites the poet Charles Olson, whose manifesto “Projective Verse,” first published in the magazine Poetry New York in 1950, extols “composition by field”: a method of writing that does away with the fixed structures of “inherited line, stanza, over-all form” in order to move freely across the page, in a kinesis of language 2.

The basic structure of PFS is simple. Each class meets once a week for two and a half hours over six-week period. Fees are sliding-scale, ranging from $375 to $575 per term, with Black and Indigenous writers offered a discount of $100. Funding is also available through the Leijia Hanrahan Scholarship for Communist Women Smokers. Named in honor of a PFS alum who died in 2022, the scholarship provides students with the opportunity to attend six months of courses free of cost. Students must apply to PFS the same way they might to a creative writing class in a university English department. They submit manuscripts, which Kahn and her fellow teachers read carefully before deciding which applicants to admit and how to distribute the students among classes. The faculty looks for people who Kahn says are “comfortable with the direct-critique mode” that is the school’s hallmark: peer-to-peer evaluation and commentary that mimics the structure of an MFA workshop, minus the emphasis on professionalization.

The creative writing workshop is an American invention, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was its laboratory. Iowa was founded in 1936 by Wilbur Schramm, who was also its first director. An English professor and writer of short stories, Schramm would go on to head degree programs in journalism and communications, treating creative writing as straightforwardly as any other subject, with clear procedures and methods of evaluation. As Rebecca Roach points out in her 2025 book Programming Literature, the rise of the workshop was “part of a larger reorganization of the writing ecosystem” during the interwar period, an ecosystem that included “the less glamorous but equally institutionalized and rapidly expanding field of technical writing.”3 A poetry-writing class would now be as systematic as a class in advertising or science journalism. It would keep to a consistent format, follow clear rules, and achieve reliable results from its students.

For those unfamiliar with the workshop method, its approach is as follows: During each class, students read and discuss each other’s writing under the guidance of an instructor. Often the writing is shared in advance, so that members of the group can prepare comments on their peers’ work. During discussion, the writer remains silent, without the ability to explain or defend what she has put on the page or to respond to feedback. Embarrassment is a potential effect of this method, but its real goal is estrangement: by being forced to stand at arm’s length from her own writing, the author can, ideally, begin to evaluate it objectively, as though it belonged to someone else.

Almost without exception, American MFA programs still revolve around workshops. But if the method remains dependable, the delivery system has faltered. In the last decade, MFA programs have come under scrutiny for the ways in which they perpetuate social inequity. In 2017, an article published on the website Literary Hub noted that 75% of students enrolled in creative-writing programs in the United States identify as white.4 Meanwhile, the cost of most programs is so prohibitive that, even with scholarships, they remain out of reach to lower-income applicants: first- and second-year students in Columbia University’s MFA program can expect to pay $86,369 a year in direct costs, and that’s not counting the price of housing in New York City. To quote the poet Juliana Spahr, “if one believes it is a meaningful cultural practice to both read and write literature, and to gather around a table and discuss each other’s attempts,” how can such a practice be made ethical within the constraints of a “pay-to-play system”?5

For Watlington, who teaches a Generative Fiction Workshop, PFS exemplifies the possibilities of a scrappier, de-institutionalized program. Citing Sophie Rachmuhl’s A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, Los Angeles, 1950–1990, she submits that whenever a grassroots writers’ project secures government or nonprofit funding or otherwise attracts attention, it quickly loses its originality and verve.6 “Economic instability turns artists into gimmicks,” Watlington told me on the phone last month. There are poets everywhere, “but all they talk about is each other.” As for their work, much of it might be described as “pop poetry,” trendy and topical but ultimately shallow. But PFS, she insists, “chases no trends.” Instead, it maintains the classic workshop ethos of serious, sustained, and collective work, but without the baggage—not to mention the costs—of working within a university system.

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Flyer for the Poetry Project’s schedule of workshops and readings at St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York, 1967. Courtesy of Larry Fagin and the Poetry Project.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I logged into Zoom to visit a poetry class led by Kahn. She had sent me the poems that would be workshopped along with her guidelines for students in advance. “If your piece is being workshopped,” reads one, “remain silent.” Another reminds participants that their peers are not overly invested in whether or not their feedback is incorporated into a finished poem. “Therefore,” Kahn writes, “it is unnecessary to defend against any suggested modifications.” There is no calling into class from the car or at work. “We love Elaine for her severity,” wrote PFS student John Ling via email. But once class began I was surprised to find that Kahn’s presence was steady and relaxed, more watchful than strict, with a quiet air of big-sisterly benevolence.

In Kahn’s workshops, each student writes and circulates a poem before every meeting; a prompt is offered, but responding to it is optional. When your poem is up, it is read by another student, who is also responsible for kicking off discussion, which lasts about fifteen minutes. In the workshop I attended, the conversation was friendly, but the comments themselves could be refreshingly brutal—perhaps because the poems themselves were so good. (PFS students are fond of quoting what they take to be Kahn’s mantra: “criticism is a form of respect.”)

Having sat through a few poetry-writing workshops in my day, and having read a great deal of student poetry, I have to admit I was taken aback by the high quality of the work. Although Kahn’s students all had very different styles and preoccupations, their poems had in common a quality I can only describe as a sort of glorious musculature: they were, in other words, toned, not wobbly or enervated. They were also unsentimental, with none of the therapeutic cant that characterizes so much of contemporary poetics.

Writers were encouraged to excise whole stanzas, toss out last lines, restructure their poems entirely. One student says she made a list of lines to omit “in order to accelerate” someone’s poem. I noticed that Kahn’s students approached each poem as an artifact, not an overflow of consciousness or a repository of feeling. They advised their peers to cut and condense, to move things around or bring things together. In some ways, the class felt more like an art-school crit than a creative writing workshop. The mood was collegial, even comradely, but no one talked about their emotions or their life stories. The focus was squarely on the page. Near the end of the class, Kahn told the group that “language is material that you can pull on and push on, and work, and wrinkle.” It’s an idea that has clearly made its way into her students’ sensibilities.

Something else I noticed: I couldn’t tell, from reading their poems and listening to their conversation, which of the students had previous experience as writers, or if any of them might write for a living. PFS, as Kahn explains, is a broad church. “We have students with multiple books, who have won awards, who edit poetry journals,” she told me in an email, “and we have people who have never been in a workshop before, [and] who are brand new to writing.” PFS often attracts musicians and visual artists who want to try their hand at a new medium, as well as people with day jobs who, as Watlington says, “respond to prompts after work, or click into email jobs they hate.” In keeping with its name, PFS is a utilitarian space where students learn by doing; it is not a high-pressure hothouse where they are wondering who in their cohort will be the first to land a book contract.

In an email, workshop leader Manal Kara, who has also been a PFS student, said that this “egalitarian” atmosphere is “a testament to how [Kahn] has designed the format of the class.” It was certainly clear, from my conversations with Kahn and with PFS alumni, that the school’s method entails taking its writers seriously and treating them with respect. They are students, but they are also artists with their own points of view. During the meeting I visited, Kahn told a student who was experimenting with an unusual layout, “I know you have your own vocabulary, and I don’t want to interfere with that too much,” before gently suggesting some ways in which she thought that poem might be more effective.

When I ask Kahn how she learned to be such a supportive mentor, she recalls her experience living with musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore—of the legendary experimental rock band Sonic Youth—in their Western Massachusetts home during her twenties. Kahn met Moore at a gig she was playing with her band between her first and second years at Iowa; he mentioned that he and Gordon often invited artists to stay on the third floor of their home. When Kahn graduated, she took them up on their offer. Those years in Massachusetts effectively comprised what Kahn calls “an artists’ residency,” during which, she says, she learned firsthand what it means to be a working artist, as well as how to build a likeminded cohort and support the people in it. (Moore also had “an enormous poetry library,” which Kahn was free to rifle through.) It’s important to Kahn that many PFS students have become good friends. “Even if the workshops are fairly down to business,” she texted me on April 22, “there’s a real community that has sprung up around the school.” 

As it approaches its ten-year anniversary, PFS shows no sign of winding down, and its students continue to thrive. When I was brought on board as a poetry editor for The Key, a new magazine helmed by former Los Angeles Times journalist Sara Yasin which is focused on writing from and about Palestine, I immediately thought of Nassar. Two of her poems appeared in The Key’s debut issue. “I owe to Elaine Kahn the possibility of having been read,” Nassar said in an email, praising Kahn’s “exacting mercy” and tact. Like many PFS alums, Nassar didn’t begin as a poet; she was and remains a reporter for Electronic Intifada. What she learned at the school, she says, was not just to find “the secret of the poem,” but how to keep that secret—“deciding which mouth to open first, and when, and how to close it.” If PFS is a field school, a place where theory meets practice, it is also, you might say, a mystery school, dedicated to the teaching of secret knowledge and self-mastery. Rather than hoarding its wisdom, PFS makes it available to anyone—or, at least, to anyone brave enough to face themselves on the page.