The Quiet Cold War of the Workshop

By: Rishi Janakiraman

There’s a style of poem that lives rent-free in almost every writing workshop in America, and also lives rent-free in the heads of all its detractors. People say you know it when you see it: first-person but a little coy about being first-person, free verse, maybe one and a half pages long, full of images so crisp they feel like they came out of a high-end camera ad, and ending with a final line that feels like it clicks shut, the “fitting surprise.” It’s the kind of poem that makes your fellow poets nod thoughtfully, that you can imagine in The New Yorker with a tasteful serif font above it. But this style’s got a history, and that history’s not just that “insular MFA-educated poets liked it.” There’s a long discourse about the “MFA style” and its ties to Cold War politics, U.S. cultural propaganda, and yes, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—a program that, thanks to Paul Engle’s aggressive fundraising and the CIA’s taste in art, ended up exporting a very particular idea of “good literature” around the world. 

The short version is that in the 50s and 60s, Iowa was effectively a cultural embassy for creative writing. Paul Engle, who ran the place for decades, took money from the Farfield Foundation, which has been traced directly (Table 3) to the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF’s job was to prove that America had the best culture, i.e., art that was high-quality, sophisticated, but not marching in ideological lockstep. Eric Bennett, in his essay “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” argues that this meant a deliberate lilt in aesthetic priorities: “With CIA help,” he writes, Iowa was "enlisted to battle Communism and eggheaded abstraction.” Bennett’s point is sharper than it sounds. He’s saying the entire funding structure rewarded a style that could be taken abroad as evidence of “freedom,” as literature where the politics were invisible, where the self was the main stage, and where even the most personal confession was scrubbed of anything that might sound like a manifesto. 

This is perhaps the primordial soup for the “MFA style” that everyone seems to be pointing at right now. In poetry, it’s often taken to mean the short lyric, stripped of obvious ideology, built around sharp imagery and formal control. Think about a confessional poem like Robert Lowell’s in Life Studies—full of private grief, family history, mental illness, eschewing any sense of modernist impersonality. M.L. Rosenthal coined the term “confessional” for Lowell’s work, and Iowa absorbed (and neutered) that style as a craft ideal: the poem that spills its guts, but in a way that leaves you admiring the vessel. 

Take Sharon Olds—a writer who came out of the academic poetry world (Stanford PhD, longtime teacher at NYU’s MFA program). Her work certainly “spills its guts,” referencing sex, trauma, and divorce, but retains meticulous craft:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head

This excerpt is from her poem “I Go Back to May 1937” where the speaker recalls her parents standing at the gates of their colleges, unaware of the emotional devastation their marriage will cause. The poem contains its grief within carefully measured free verse, using visual detail and tight enjambment to control tone and pacing. The result is a poem that embodies the Cold War ideal of freedom—art that appears subversive in content (divorce, abuse, rage) but remains formally disciplined, non-political in subject, and centered on the self, effectively containing its emotional volatility within the safe, liberal-humanist aesthetic promoted by American cultural institutions of the period.

You can see the same Cold War–MFA synthesis in fiction, where the “personal without politics” ethos becomes narrative gospel. Consider Raymond Carver, who, while never a formal Iowa graduate, was deeply embedded in the MFA orbit through his years teaching and being edited by Iowa-connected Gordon Lish. Carver’s stories are taught in workshops as paragons of “show, don’t tell,” but what they’re also showing is how the Cold War preference for interior drama over exterior critique plays out in prose. In “Cathedral,” for instance, the political economy of Reagan’s America is nowhere to be found; instead, we get a working-class narrator’s spiritual awakening while drawing a cathedral with a blind man. It’s not that Carver ignores class—his characters are broke, often unemployed, trapped in dead-end jobs—but the stories never rise to name the structures behind that stagnation. That absence is precisely the point: the craft ideal here is one where human suffering is localized, personalized, and ultimately subservient to an aesthetic purpose.

The argument here is not that these writers were propagandists, but that the workshop rules they helped cement—show, don’t tell; keep ideology subtle; end on an image—aligned perfectly with what the CIA’s cultural arms wanted to sell. And once you standardize that into craft dogma, you don’t need the CIA anymore. Workshops everywhere began producing iterations of the Iowa ideal: “tight” stories, “polished” poems, no “soapboxing.” Students learn that a poem that openly names capitalism or racism or imperialism is “too much” and “lacks subtlety,” while a poem that relegates any of those issues to memory or metaphor is “beautiful.”

I think that even while workshops have diversified, the contained style didn’t fundamentally change, other than that POC writers today face a double bind where their experiences must pass a higher threshold of subtlety to constitute “good writing.” For a white, middle-class writer in 1960, writing about a parent’s death or a romantic implosion in that mode could be read as universal; for a Black, queer, immigrant, or otherwise marginalized writer in 2025, the same first-person lyric might be read as “identity writing” or “political,” even if it obeys all the same craft commandments. Junot Díaz, in his widely circulated “MFA vs. POC” essay, described exactly this: programs that claimed to teach "universal" craft but whose universals were coded white and middle-class, and which resisted direct engagement with race or systemic injustice, often urging writers to “show, not tell” in ways that conveniently kept structural critique out of the text. The result is that writers from marginalized communities are often steered towards personalizing their politics—turning racism into a memory, homophobia into a metaphor—in ways that keep the larger system out of view. Which is to say, the old Cold War preference for private over public is still doing its quiet work, now dressed up as workshop neutrality. 

The question for anyone writing now, especially anyone entering this system from the outside, is whether to inhabit that style or to resist it. Resistance doesn’t have to mean abandoning the short lyric or the understated story; it can mean breaking the expectation of the “fitting surprise,” leaving the poem unresolved, pulling ideology into the frame. It can mean writing a “confessional” poem that refuses the self-containment of the new confessional, and instead bears more similitude with Plath’s or Sexton’s. It can mean, in fiction, letting the narrator editorialize, letting the argument take center stage. If the Cold War MFA style was designed to make politics invisible, maybe the new counter-style is about making the invisible visible again, as an honest acknowledgement that our craft is not, and never was, separable from the politics of its making.