Culture is the key to a great program

I flipped open my copy of Poets & Writers this month to discover that Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program has ranked fourth among the top low-residency MFA programs in the U.S., edging up one place from last year. Congratulations to the faculty, students, and staff who made this possible. What is remarkable is that the Pacific program has only been around for a handful of years, as compared to the three programs ranked above it (Bennington since ’94, Warren Wilson since ’76, Vermont College since ’81) and the one program it surpassed in these particular rankings this year (Antioch, started in ’97).

My theory about the secret to this program’s twenty-first-century upstart success is, once again: faculty, faculty, faculty.

What happens when you assemble talent such as the Emeritus Flannery O’Conner Professor of Letters from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the director of the Ph.D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, and the founder and poetry program director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at SDSU (just to name a few) is that the program obviously benefits directly from the contribution of such outstanding writers and teachers. But more than this, having not only such a talented but well-connected core faculty naturally and automatically attracts other first-rate writing teachers into the program.

By rapidly attracting great faculty, the program made a name for itself with its debut in the Atlantic Monthly rankings as one of the top five low-residency programs. This led to an explosion in the quality and quantity of new student applicants, acquisition of more first-rate faculty, and overall program growth. The greatest challenge that comes with such rapid growth is maintaining the outstanding culture that precipitated the program’s early success. Culture is critical because maintaining a diverse, congenial environment where faculty can do what they do best with a minimum of politics and pretension creates an ecosystem wherein writing students are bound to thrive.

As in business, culture trickles down from the top. Kudos, three years on from the program’s Atlantic Monthly debut, to Dean Hayes, Program Director Shelley Washburn, and the core faculty–for sustaining a positive culture in the Pacific University MFA program, continuing its reputation as a great place to teach and therefore, by extension, a great program overall.

I also took this occasion to debut my new limited-edition broadside of the poem “Recipe for the Broken.” The poem was first published in “Walt’s Corner” of The Long Islander, the newspaper founded by Walt Whitman in 1838. Fittingly, the column is now curated by George Wallace. The poem and background image are printed on sturdy 8.5″ x 11″ paper as part of The Broadsider Volume 2, Series 12 (Poor Souls Press 2010), conceived and created by Paul Fericano. A limited quantity of hand-numbered and signed prints are now available for sale on this website.

The piece begins:

The circumstances that brought me back to poetry, and subsequently to an MFA degree, were not common. In fact, the doctors told me what my wife and I experienced was a one-in-one-thousand occurrence. After the death of our infant son, poetry became the only language that made sense to me.

Read the full article at “The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog … Period.”

While my first two pieces, on how to learn from rejection and how to be a poet every day, will remain archived on the site, my latest response to a member question, originally slated for mid-May, will now no longer show up on the site. So, in honor of the first day of the last month of this remarkable community’s existence, in honor of the first day of National Poetry Month, and in honor of Read Write Poem member Julie’s question, I am publishing my final column in this series here, on my own website.

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At work, when I interview candidates for an open position, I always ask what it was like at their previous job. I am amazed at how many interviewees animatedly complain. It is a warning sign to me that, if I hire them, they will likely soon be doing the same about my company. And so, though it seems Socratic, I am compelled to respond, whenever fellow writers ask me if they ought to do an MFA, with more questions, such as: How is it going in your current writing workshops? What is the conversation like between you and your trusted peers, when they give you feedback? Who are your current mentors (including those you learn from solely through their published work)? What are you working on improving about your writing life? Whom do you emulate? What do you absolutely know you still need to learn?

Learning to write well is, to me, a lifelong process of self-education. Just as I consider myself responsible for looking after my health, and enlist medical professionals to that end, likewise I am the one in charge of educating myself as a writer. My attitude, therefore, played a critical part in making my MFA two of the most rich and fulfilling years of my writerly life so far.

That said, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” tells the story of a man who, thorough his attitude, found existential meaning in the midst of his imprisonment in a Russian GULAG camp. And so, having said my piece about attitude, let me turn my attention to the substance of the MFA program I attended. After all, nobody wants to pay tens of thousands of dollars to participate in an experience that feels like a Soviet labor camp.

To hear some speak of the MFA system, it can sound like The Gulag Archipelago, which is probably what prompted RWP member Julie to ask:

I’m curious about how writing can be “improved” or even just taught by teachers.  I’ve always felt that poetry arises out of deeply felt experiences that can’t be articulated in any other way but in the shorthand of poems, and yet your writing (at least what I’ve read so far) indicates that an MFA isn’t the kiss of death for originality and that certain “life” that much of current poetry seems to lack.

I must admit that I feel under-qualified to speak to the current state of poetry, or the current state of the MFA system at large. My scientific sample size is limited to one: just me, attending a single low-residency MFA through Pacific University, Oregon, for two years time. I can tell you what I got out of it. Doing so, in my experience, is a bit like sounding a tuning fork. Some will read this and resonate automatically, based on how they are put together. Others might ask “Did you hear something?” and then move on.

Doing an MFA is not for everybody. There are plenty of great writers without them, plenty of mediocre writers with them–and vice-versa. The best answer I can give is to share my experience. Then, if something goes “ding,” you might want to take a next step toward looking in to this type of education.

One of my faculty advisors, Marvin Bell, said something I found remarkable. He said, “Genius in the arts consists in getting in touch with your own wiring.” At first, this would seem consistent with the idea that good writing can’t be taught. This is especially true if you consider teaching in the narrow and traditional sense of imparting information, and quizzing it back. However, my experience in the MFA had more to do with the part of education that shares a common root with the word “educe”–that is, I felt my true writerly self coaxed out from within.

And so, while good writing may not be “teachable” in a traditional sense, a better question might be: is there value to mentorship in the arts? Reading the exchange from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” strikes me as a natural precursor to the faculty advisor exchanges in a low-residency MFA. Let me be clear: MFAs are expensive, and MFAs take time; Peer advice is free, and workshop groups are cheap. What made my MFA worth every penny of tuition, and every second of the two intense years of study, was this timeless process of mentorship and exchange. Pick your mentors well.

I studied with remarkable poets who have dedicated their lives to poetry. Just being around them was a privilege. But more than this, I experienced the traits of an artist awaken in me, through conversation and contact. Plus, their writing advice was invaluable. Though I may have found my own “wiring” eventually, through the support and encouragement of my advisors, I feel that my MFA gave me a jump start on the discovery process–easily compressing ten years of self-educating study (or more!) into two rich and immersive MFA years.

Regarding the “kiss of death for originality” sometimes linked to MFA programs, I see self-direction as the most significant mitigating factor against this syndrome. With regard to mentorship, the difference between the teacher-as-sender/student-as-receiver model of teaching, and the rich and engaging dialog I experienced in my two years, is the difference between potentially getting in touch with someone else’s wiring, and getting in touch with your own.

In workshops, the danger of sucking the life out of a poem is heightened, since groups tend toward consensus, and consensus favors mediocrity. Still, for the self-educating poet, taking temperature readings from a variety of bright, engaged readers, and conversing with them about their reading experience, can be an invaluable precursor to the more terse and ruthless process of sending poems out to a publisher. It is an imperfect science, fraught with false reads and biases. Then again, the literary marketplace is as well. The self-educating poet carries a salt shaker wherever she goes.

Finally, while my low-residency MFA was certainly not a GULAG camp, the results were a bit like going through boot camp. Two years of getting up early before work to write, reading after work, and spending time in the evenings and on weekends revising work and sending out poems helped me to groove new and lasting habits. I could set up the same accountability for free with trusted peers–and since graduation, I have. But the energy required to sustain my focus in the MFA program specifically helped me achieve an escape velocity–leaving behind preciousness and hesitation, propelling me into a new realm of discipline and confidence.

Your mileage may vary. For me, this particular MFA, at this critical juncture in my life, was transformational. I wrote blog entries on my website throughout my time in the program. If you would like to read more about my experience, including a transcript of the introduction to my graduate reading and student speech at commencement, please see the “MFA” category on my site.

“How open to suggestion / they have always been, carrying nothing // with them of the past, content to leave almost / everything behind…”

-Christopher Buckley, “New Clouds”

I received a complimentary copy of the premiere issue of Cloudbank today. The journal is co-edited by Peter Sears, core faculty in the Pacific Unviersity MFA program, and the index reads like a roll-call of some of that program’s most talented writers: Arthur Ginsberg helps us see behind sight, Ron Bloodworth takes us into meditative country, Marianne Klekacz makes a Christmas-morning discovery of flight, Jennifer Whetham extols the sensuous mushroom, Beth Russell defends the curious appetites of the female praying mantis, and Abby Murray brings a glimmer of hard-earned compassion to a dog-eat-dog world. More than this, new poems by Christopher Buckley, Carolyn Miller, Margaret McGovern, and a host of other wonderful poets–some from the Pacific Northwest, others not–round out this impressive debut. A publication of Cloudbank Books in Corvalis, Oregon, Cloudbank the journal is accepting submissions for its second issue, including offering a $200 prize for one outstanding poem. Details for submitting poems, and ordering a copy of their excellent first issue, are available on the Cloudbank website.

Associate Provost Wilkes, Dean Hayes, Vice President Akers, Ms. Washburn, faculty, staff, graduates, alumni, family, and friends–good afternoon. Today we celebrate our completion of the requirements for Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree, and a milestone for each of us in our ongoing education as writers. This also marks the fifth year of this MFA program’s existence. And if any program has earned the right to act its age, this one has. If memory serves me, this involves spontaneous tantrums followed by graham cracker cookies and a nap. At least, that’s what I liked best about being five. It was also the age when I dictated my first poem to my kind and patient mother. It ran seven pages. And, although I have learned a lot since then, today I would like to be brief in simply reminding us all of some truths about this program, and about writing, we all already know–but might want to hear repeated.

The behaviorist B.F. Skinner was fond of the saying that, “education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” And so, in some sense, the real test of our education begins now, as we start to forget. Fortunately, through the unique grace of this program, we have been educated in the truest sense of that word, which shares a common root with the word “educe”–that is, we have had our writerly selves evoked from within. And so, more than any specific, received element of craft–immensely helpful though they all have been–we have learned, most importantly, to live in the world more like writers. This doesn’t mean we all moved in to our basements and stopped showering. Those would only be the outward signs of a being a writer.

Ours has been, if anything, an inner transformation–toward a greater awareness of what Paul Eluard meant when he said, “there is another world, and it is in this one,” and, hopefully, an experiential understanding of what our own Marvin Bell points out when he reminds us that, “in art, you’re free.” This experiential understanding of what it means to live through the eyes and ears of a writer can not be inculcated through lectures, workshops, or assignments alone. There is something about good writing one simply has to catch. And the privilege of spending time with mentors who are talented but unpretentious, wise with a sense of humor, and generous almost to a fault–is a rare and wonderful gift.

Teaching writing seems to involve a curious sort of dance, and the faculty here are all fleet of foot–instead of rattling off answers, they have stood next to us, in their humility, and marveled at the beauty of the questions. Instead of pounding us into conformity with their own style, they have opened doors into rooms full of gifted writers, each with something in common, something to teach us, and made introductions. Instead of telling us what to write, they pedal fast downhill, no hands, and shout, “catch me if you can.” And through this, the faculty have changed–not only our writing, but our writing lives–for the better.

Truly, I can not thank the faculty and staff enough for creating and sustaining this remarkable culture of generosity. In my two years, I watched faculty and students mix easily, talk honestly, and work hard not to take themselves too seriously. And so we have learned, by example, that brilliance doesn’t require pretension, that sincerely need not lack toughness, that there is no more wonderful pursuit than Czezlaw Milosz’s definition of poetry, and which I think applies to all forms of writing–”the passionate pursuit of the real.”

Stepping into this lineage does not begin or end with a ceremony. It happens every time we sit down to write. We have practiced the fine art of introducing the seat of our pants to the seat of the chair for two years now, forging habits, redefining comfort zones, wearing in new neural pathways like breaking in a stiff pair of boots. And because we have laid claim to the lineage through practical experience, it can not taken away from us by any external force. What challenges our awareness, and understanding, and commitment to explore what William Stafford called “the whole unexplored realm of human vision,” is not war, tyranny, imprisonment, floods, or any other natural or man-made difficulty–because writers have continued to write through every one of these circumstances–but forces instead far more insidious–like complacency, laziness, and pride. Our own honorary prose faculty member Anton Chekhov once quipped that, “any idiot can face a crisis–it’s day-to-day living that wears you out.” And it is true, because, in our day-to-day lives, we are not always so free.

And yet we have, each of us, in unique ways, committed to writing against the odds. It has been humbling to study alongside the single mother who would steal away a precious few minutes to write late at night, in the bath, when her kid was in bed–straining from exhaustion to keep the notebook out of the water. It has been remarkable to watch fellow students face down dark corners of their past with tenacity, honesty, dignity, and grace. We are teachers, and parents, and grandparents; computer programmers, and journalists, and students fresh out of college pulling espresso drinks for tips. We are just like anyone and everyone else. Except that we have committed, over the last two years, to develop and sustain a practice of writing–writing when tired, cranky, uninspired, and even when we just don’t feel like it–and, by persistently tapping away at the blocks, we eventually crack open rich inner worlds, by abandoning ourselves on the page time and time again, we eventually discover a little more about who we are.

It takes courage to come here, courage to stay here after that first workshop where you realize, in fact, just how far you have to go. And perhaps the greatest test begins now, as we step out into a world that needs great writing more than ever, and yet has been somehow dissuaded of that fact. Writing well is an act of defiance, not only against the conventional wisdom that favors a tangible product over a life-enriching process or experience, but defiance of the sound-byte, get-it-now consumer culture, and mind-numbing political-speak. Good writing defies neat categorization, defies polarization of “right” and “wrong,” and challenges us to understand our lives, ourselves, and our language–a medium we take for granted by its constant use–in new and unexpected ways.

I have been away from the program for several months now, having completed the course requirements in January. One week after my final residency, at my company’s all-staff retreat, the chairman announced that the global financial crisis had finally caught up with us, and that the company was in financial trouble. One month later, I was summoned to the board of directors’ meeting. I got up early that morning, just as I had for for over two years, and wrote a poem. In that meeting, the chairman announced that, in order for the company to survive, it would have to lay off forty percent of staff, including colleagues I had hired, and trained, and nurtured as a team. Breaking the news to them was one of the hardest things I have done. I kept the poem in my pocket that day, a token of defiance against the tidy conclusions I was tempted to make–about them, or me, or my superiors–and about the financial institutions that precipitated the storm that had now become ours to weather.

The truth is that none of us have been promised a simple life–security, and certainty, and plenty of uninterrupted time to write–and an MFA degree provides little, if any, added assurance about what lies ahead. Instead, we might do better to wake up each morning deeply impressed with the reality that there is truly no telling what today will bring. That might encourage us to close down the email, and sign out of Facebook, and write something–anything, for better or worse–right there, right away. What is that timeless adage? I believe it was Socrates who said, “Life is short, eat dessert first.” Instead we might print our own bumper stickers–”Life is uncertain. Write something.”

For two years, we have practiced the art of focus in a world of increasing distraction. It is not enough to say “keep writing” just once. Therefore let us go on from here as a community, and a family–to swap work, trade books, and above all encourage one another–a sacred, forgotten art revived here with a passion–encourage one another to keep writing, no matter what. It does not suffice to just say it once. And so, to get us started, I will say it three times, like Dorothy calling for her home out of the strange Technicolor world into which she was whisked by a tornado–let this be our mantra, our incantation, and every time we meet, let us say to one another: “Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.”

Congratulations, and thank you.

The practice of capturing inspiration in the moment is nothing new to artists and writers. After the Ojai Poetry Fest Fundraiser, I had a stimulating conversation with a fellow writer who also happens to be a journalist. As our chat got interesting, he whipped out a pad and paper, seemingly on reflex, and began to take notes. He was “off duty” in the sense that he wasn’t taking notes for a news story–but it got me thinking that if one is, indeed, a student of life, there is no “off duty.” And a good student takes good notes about subjects that fascinate. The difference GTD makes, of course, is that it presents a systematic approach for what to do with those notes–including tracking any resulting commitments to oneself or others, and executing appropriate action and regular review in order to make one’s dreams more than just a scribble on a notepad.

So, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you, David, for bringing this methodology into my life, helping me to bring appropriate focus and attention to the many different worlds I inhabit. The gift of being more present in my life is truly precious.

I came to my first residency, here in Seaside, Oregon, one year after the death of our infant son. That event brought me back to poetry by momentarily stripping away all other ambitions. Poetry alone got me out of bed some mornings, and helped me chart the difficult inner landscape of grief, often in the bleary pre-dawn hours before work. I sought out mentors to assist me in improving my poems, and, on the sage advice of my friend and mentor Joseph Millar, I enrolled in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Pacific University.

Getting to that first residency was hard: it was the first time my wife and I had been apart since the birth and death of our son, my first time in the Northwest, and my first real writing conference. I knew no one other than Joe. But from my arrival by bus in the freezing dark, throughout the past two years, at every turn and in even the most minute details of my experience–I received confirmation, time and again, that I was in the right place.

After two years, it seems to me that poetry is not, in fact, a skill one learns or teaches–like driving or typing–but actually a virus one catches from sustained and intimate contact with the infected. Having been cooped up with so many brilliant invalids–both faculty and students, poets and prose writers–over the last two years, I can definitely say I came down with something. More than anything, I learned how to give over to this healing sickness–by learning to let my poems have their own say.

In a letter to his brothers, John Keats wrote:

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Above all, it is this ability Keats describes as “negative capability” that I cultivated, with great help, during my study here.

I cultivated this ability on two fronts: in the context of an individual poem, following the “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” more closely and more confidently, striking out boldly from line to line, assured that either my subconscious would catch me–or else the resulting fall and splatter would be spectacular. I also cultivated negative capability in the larger context of my writing as a whole, resisting “irritable reaching after fact & reason” and instead writing, and writing, and writing some more as an exercise in creative freedom, receptivity, and knowing myself.

For me, one of the great, unexpected aides in cultivating negative capability was poetic form. Whether the simple challenge to maintain stanzaic integrity, or the complex machinations of a sestina or villanelle, self-imposed limitations actually seemed to elicit greater wildness and surprise–to let my poems have more of their own say through me, instead of the other way around. It seems as though form distracts a certain logical part of my mind long enough to let the other, more creative parts come into play. And yet, when I came in to this program, I was unsure about the place of formal elements in contemporary writing in general, and my own writing in particular.

You see, I came in to this program as my own little house divided: between undergraduate studies filled with formal poems and critical theory, and a writing life fascinated by the wildness and apparently simplicity of most free-verse contemporary poems. In my third semester, the essay semester, I returned to an old favorite poet, Seamus Heaney, for help in understanding how to synthesize wildness and precision, scholarship and artistry, innovation and tradition–and in doing so, discovered a relationship between form and freedom. Studying Heaney’s poems and essays helped me understand how wild imagination and well-tuned music can fuse to create what he called “total adequacy,” that is, “a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

The title poem of my thesis, “The Silence Teacher“–which you will hear in a moment–is one example of how form and Negative Capability eventually came together, and taught me a lot in the process about how to let a poem have its own say. Based on the experience of visiting one of my wife’s oldest friends in England after the death of our son, early drafts were loaded, not only with personal feeling, but a disjointed amalgam of experiences and thoughts. We visited John Keats’ house in Hampstead during that trip, and I read poems by Robert Hass on rainy days. In this literarily-intoxicated state, the seemingly lighthearted story of the woman’s deaf daughter mistakenly calling her mother a “silence teacher” struck me as profound.

“Silence” became a lens through which I could view the present-tense experience of grieving amidst polite conversation, as well as the actual moment of loss, which remains present with me to this day. But, as much as this lens of silence provided its own kind of clarity and adequacy inside of me, coordinating and communicating these elements such that they might have a similar impact on a reader led me through draft after draft, and form after form.

Sandra Alcosser sent me countless examples of fine lyric poems, placing me in the middle of the choir to help me discover my own voice. Re-reading Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” as well as David St. John‘s “To Pasolini,” gave me a renewed understanding of the possibilities of the terza rima form. What I discovered in this process is the extent to which musicality and form heightened, elevated, and actually advanced my presentation of events and ideas: the better the music, the more these disjointed events seemed to come together and make “sense”–that is, to convey “a ring of truth.” The more this happened, the more I was encouraged to refine the imagery and word choice. Extensive feedback from my advisors and workshop groups helped validate these revisions, but it was the poem itself that ultimately spurred me on–teaching me, in its own way, how to clarify the narrative facts, remain wild and encompassing in my imagination of the experience, and, above all–stay true to the music.

Grief itself eventually became its own kind of reason, leading to its own conclusions. And so, particularly in my second year, the challenge became to remain open to a wider range of human experience. During one lecture, Marvin Bell admonished that we should write, instead of so many elegies to the dead, more love poems to the living. I took this advice to heart, and, with Marvin’s encouragement, began leaping off whatever ledge I encountered next–writing poems about love, several about our cat, and even one inspired by a sign on public bus.

In this way, I began to discover myself a writer in the way William Stafford understood, when he said, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” And so, my creative process became largely a matter of starting–up early before work, up late when I should have been in bed, or on the weekends in our local coffee shop. I became–not a grief poet, or a lighthearted poet, a formal poet, or a free-verse poet–but a receptive poet, and a determined sitter before the laptop screen.

Assembling two years of work into a creative manuscript was equally a process of alchemy, gut, and nerve. In the end, I produced a collection of poems on a wide range of topics, grief being one of them. Yet, like Antonio Machado’s thorn in the heart, grief informed my writing process, no matter the subject, and, above all, kept reminding me, poignantly, of that heart.

More challenging for me than picking out poems, grouping them, or assembling them in a sequence was the weighty sense of finality that came with that little black buckram-bound book we call the thesis. For a moment, it symbolized “the end.” And then, once again, as an act of sheer defiance, I fired up the word processor, opened my running document full of rough drafts, false starts, cheesy ideas, and occasional gems, and just wrote something. Probably something bad–or worse, “just alright.” But in that moment, poetry was, once again, revitalized in my life.

More important, then, than the product of my two years here at Pacific–this thesis–has been the process of developing a practice of writing which includes actively cultivating “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”–both within the poems, and within the larger process of writing–finding along the way that each poem had something to teach me, and something to say.

This has been the greatest gift of this program, discovering what Stafford discovered about the adventure of writing, when he said:

For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

For this remarkable and transformative gift, I extend my deep gratitude to the faculty, staff, and students of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program. You were right, Joe. This is something truly special.

As of Saturday, I am a graduate of the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program. Throughout that final residency, and especially at the banquet on Saturday, I lost count of how many times I was asked, “What are you going to do now?”

Some asked with such expectancy, I almost wondered if they thought I had been granted magic powers. I wanted to tell them about bounding over skyscrapers and shooting lasers from my eyes. But the real answer is far more simple: I am going to keep reading, writing, and conversing with other writers and thinkers about art.

Poetry has become a survival skill for me. And so, although I now find myself in the post-MFA, pre-first-book limbo, I will continue to keep reading and writing, with patience and determination, as though my well-being depended on it. Because, quite frankly, I have discovered a simple equation: the more I admit poetry into my life, the better my life becomes. So, perhaps I should answer instead that I plan to keep improving my life, one line at a time.

It is funny only because it is true that having this particular combination of letters after one’s name is not an automatic pass into the love, understanding, and recognition we all crave. Being raised by public school teachers taught me that our society undervalues education in a way that can be seen as either comic or tragic–depending on how tired you feel at the end of the day–and that teaching is an act worth pouring your whole self into anyway. It is the same with art.

After the graduate readings at this residency, a new student remarked that they were struck by the profound sense of gratitude present in the hearts of each of us outgoing students. This program is suffused with a spirit of generosity. Faculty and students mix easily, talk honestly, and work hard not to take themselves too seriously. A visiting professor put it succinctly: “usually people are either really good or really nice–but here they are both.”

If the faculty were priests, and this were a church, we might predict that they will reap rewards for their generosity in heaven. But they are not priests, and this is not a church, and instead of taking confession or quoting answers from religious texts, they have instead stood by us, in their humility, and marveled at the beauty of the questions. It is a privilege just to be here, partaking of something that transcends commerce, and politics, and marketing-speak: the deep words. The ones that matter.

And the rewards these artists and teachers reap in this life, for having faced down the human condition in their own projects, and hung in there with us students through our likely all-too-familiar neuroses, insecurities, doubts, and hopes as we face down our own projects–is the knowledge, all too rarely expressed, that they have changed–not only our writing, but our writing lives–for the better.

If there were a better phrase in English to expres profound gratitude and respect, I would want to use it. But all I can think to say is “thank you”–to the faculty in all genres, to Dean Hayes for believing in this program, and to Shelley, and Tenley, and Colleen, and, formerly, Amber, and all the interns, past and present, who slog heroically behind the scenes to sustain this place where brilliance doesn’t require pretension, where sincerely never lacks toughness–where people set out, with their raincoats and tackle, in search of the deep words. It has been a privilege to travel with you in this vessel for a little while.

This is a remarkable, confident, mature collection by a poet I am grateful to have met through the blogosphere. These are poems about cancer, divorce, and the possible violence–both physical and emotional–that linger beneath the surface of ordinary life. But there is also a striking metaphysical dimension, from the opening conversation with God to the angelic figures of great poets, birds, dead saints, and fire. Unpretentious and elegiac, these poems progress like the epigraph to “Elegy for Light and Balance,” notes on Winslow Homer from “a catalog” which point out, “Homer depended on narrative structures that would, just as they begun to suggest a normal unfolding, deflect the viewer from obvious and easy interpretations.” This is a tremendous collection, delivered, in my case, in a moment of delightful synchronicity.