Category Archives: MFA

The Beginning of the End (of the Beginning)

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Best Western, Seaside, Oregon. So it begins: the final residency of two life-changing years in this MFA program. Our journey progressed like a staged rocket in reverse–instead of jettisoning components as we went, we gathered fellow students into our merry band all along our trajectory. Three of us left Ojai and met two more at LAX. Then we were thirteen on the bus from PDX to Seaside (which made our superstitious driver nervous). Finally, there are scores of us swarming throughout not one but two adjacent hotels.

Though the halls are quiet–partly due to the chilly open balconies–faculty and students are no doubt buzzing like bees in their cells. I suspect this because the WiFi signal is sapped on my floor, probably due to overuse. So, I’ll either be posting this when the mass-scale email-checking blitz subsides, or use the old standby–the chilly first-floor laundry room, unsuitable to sustain human life, but great for WiFi.

Val and I were tired from our journey, which began at 7AM, so we ordered up room service–fish & chips & hot cocoa–and flicked on the ceramic-log fire. It is great to finally be here. But lingering at the back of my mind with each new friendly face I meet is the knowledge that I will have no good excuse to return to this place when our ten eleven days together have run their course. We may leave zingers on one another’s Facebook status updates, swap the occasional poem or congratulatory note on a publication or award–but the two intense years of stretching together into the writers we always hoped (and still hope) we could someday become–is coming to a close. But not before eight nine days packed full of inspiration, revelation, camaraderie, and, almost certainly: rain, rain, rain.

The Final Residency

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On Thursday, I will leave for the fifth and final residency of the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. A new twist this time: my lovely wife will be joining me. On balance, with the omission of workshops and the addition of a graduate reading and thesis review committee session, it looks like this special final residency schedule will be slightly less intense than the previous four. So, I asked Val to come along to watch the graduate readings, hang out with the amazing writers I have befriended in the last two years at mealtimes, and soak up the outstanding faculty readings each evening. I look forward to introducing her to the Pacific Northwest, and the remarkable faculty, staff, and students in this community. We’re mulling over the packing list now. This is going to be fun!

Poetry Versus Prose: a Visual Experiment

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Thanks to Jason for turning me on to Wordle. It’s a simple program designed to take in text, and spit out attractive word clouds.

My MFA Thesis consists of three parts: a book-length collection of poems, an essay on Seamus Heaney, and a bibliography. According to the Wordle website, “If you do not save your Wordle to the gallery, no information leaves your workstation at any time.” So, I felt comfortable pasting the culmination of two years of hard work in to the site.

First, the essay:

Then, the poems:

As you can see, even though I generated them with different coloring, the word clouds still have a unique impact based on the words alone. Whereas the essay is dominated by a few words, my poems are swarming with numerous smaller words (i.e. less frequently repeated)–and, of course, “like” reigns supreme over my similes.

Just walking my eyes over the clusters of different-sized words is itself a somewhat poetic experience, akin to the hybrid art of visual poetry. So, there you have it–all the words of my creative thesis (minus the bibliography), de-duped and laid out for your delectation. Hmm… “delectation”… now there’s a word I should use more often!

Poetry as Defiance

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“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.”

-William Stafford

An ouroboros, symbol of cyclical processesI have been preparing for my final MFA residency–the last requirement before I graduate. In preparing an introduction for my graduate reading, I began reflecting on the newfound significance of the writing process in my life. More than any specific product, like the black buckram-bound book containing my creative thesis, it is the process I have nurtured over the past two years that I will carry forward into the next phase of my life.

In fact, momentarily, holding the bound thesis in my hand seemed to symbolize “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.

Poetry is an act of defiance, not only against the conventional wisdom that favors a tangible product over a life-enriching process, but defiance of the sound-byte, get-it-now consumer culture, and mind-numbing political-speak. It defies neat categorization, defies polarization of “right” and “wrong,” and challenges us to understand language–a medium we take for granted by its constant use–in unexpected ways.

I am writing this now to encourage myself to remember, once the cover sheets have been signed, and the toasts have been made, to rebel a little each and every day against a world that wants to tell you, “stop, enough, you’re done.”

Thesis Approved

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I got final approval on my MFA thesis from my faculty advisor this morning. In celebration, here is one of my favorite clips on the perils of being a closet academic. (Note: this video contains strong language and adult themes–that is, if you can understand what is being said!)

Modern Poets: Selected Annotations

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This semester, like last semester, I am writing brief annotations on the books I read. As I mentioned earlier, I am focusing on late modernist poets. Here are a few notes on some iconic books that have had a great impact on my relationship to poetry:

Jarrell, Randall. The Lost World: New Poems. New York: Collier Books, 1966.

This collection of poems is strikingly different from Jarrell’s body of work about wartime aviation. These are mostly dream-like meditations on childhood, told from the perspective of a child, and sometimes as persona poems in the voice of a woman. They employ deliberately prosaic language and a stocky, often single-stanza form.

Merwin, W.S. The Lice. New York: Antheneum, 1967.

A forceful, strong-voiced body of poems. Possibly a predecessor of Glück’s ventriloquistic style? Also somehow reminiscent of Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. Haunting, powerful, and impossible to summarize.

Merwin, W.S. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

The soldered-together sentence fragments, lack of punctuation, and disruptive repetition of certain phrases in this collection of poems is highly reminiscent of Paul Celan. This collection seems clearly more influenced by French than The Lice, which, by compare, moved into a more distinctly American voice, while retaining the high-voltage associations and also adding metaphoric elements reminiscent of Pablo Neruda. Merwin was striking out in new directions in The Moving Target, no doubt heavily influenced by his translation work.

Moore, Marianne. Selections from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.

Poems of observation, many of which follow a pattern of syllabic counts from stanza to stanza. Many of these poems employ a wit akin to that of the Algonquin Round Table (Dorothy Parker et al.), and certainly possess a kind of period charm. But beyond this, the work is interesting for its celeritous musicality, and in particular the ways that Moore works with enjambment and slant internal rhymes to create pleasurable disorientation.

Silkin, Jon. Poems New And Selected. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1966

These are compelling meditations on life and death, at once seemingly plainspoken and yet intellectually intricate and refined. His poems about the death of his son, as well as similarly resonant poems about the death of animals, betray a deep sensitivity and a beautiful use of forms that invent themselves as they go along.

Snodgrass, W[illiam] D[eWitt]. Heart’s Needle. New York: Knopf, 1959.

This is a collection of meditations upon failure, written in a variety of somewhat formal structures. The title sequence focuses on failures in parenthood. This collection does not strike me as “confessional” in the sense we have adopted since the 1980s of direct revelation and admission of shortcomings, as much as it attempts to find language suitable to relate a sense of futility in the speaker’s voice, and the speaker’s relationship to the world.

Stevens, Wallace. “Ideas of Order.” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. 117-188.

A collection of musically-driven poems, which seem to find their way by musicality into strange ideas and sensibilities. “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an ars poetica composed in couplets, simultaneously explaining and demonstrating Stevens’ poetics through the metaphor of the blue guitar.

Williams, William Carlos. “Spring And All” Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. 88-151.

An experimental work interspersing poems with fragmentary prose commentary on the importance of imagination in art and life. An incredible sense of freedom is achieved by the deliberate meanderings, starts, stops, and intentionally mis-headed sections. The poems, set apart from the surrounding experimental-style commentary, demonstrate Williams’ characteristic style.

Community Publishing

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Chris Tonelli gave an excellent talk on limited-run small press publication. Rather than attempting to expiate small presses in light of an overwhelmed marketplace for poetry, Chris instead focused on the community-building aspects of small press and book-arts projects. For example, his So And So Reading Series in Boston works in collaboration with Rope-a-Dope Collaborative to produce letterpress broadsides of featured poets’ poems, which they sell on the night of their reading.

Drawing on Lewis Hyde’s idea that art exists in both a gift economy and market economy, he pointed out how limited-run collaborative publications foster community by delivering a select number of high-quality works to artist, collectors, and aficionados who truly appreciate the work. This has been my own experience firsthand in rather serendipitously entering in to my first book arts collaboration–that the collaboration itself was a gift between artists that then extended out to appreciative communities. Thanks to Chris for flying out to the Pacific University campus to deliver his unique perspective on community publishing.

Duhamel on Humor in Poetry

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“The more sacred the slain cow, the tastier the feast.”

-Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel gave a laugh-out-loud funny talk on an oft-undervalued aspect of poetry: humor. She showed how classic stand-up tricks, like following the main punch-line with “tags,” mangled cliches and malapropisms, and, above all, a tone in satire that admits complicity–a kind of poking fun at the speaking self alongside all humanity–can serve to open up a funny poem to more than just laughs. How fitting that she deliver this talk on the heels of the news of George Carlin’s death, in the ha-ha-ouch age of Stephen Colbert. She spoke to the subversive nature of humor as a means to talk back to power through the side of one’s mouth, to work on levels too fast and facile to register in the minds of self-righteous oppressors–a kind of political Capoeira, an expansive, complicated, lethal dance with the truth.

What Yoda Means to Me

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After hearing Marvin Bell read last night, I realize my assertion that he could levitate a space ship with his mind was somewhat understated. In fact, some might be downright confused by me comparing him to Yoda: is he green? does he have pointy ears? Not to my knowledge. He does invert syntax to bring pressure and rhythm to language–but, unlike Yoda, in doing so, Marvin remains grammatically correct.

There really are two aspects of Yoda that remind me of Bell. First, Yoda is a master teacher of an unteachable magic called the force. Second, and most importantly, in Episode II (the fifth film ever made) George Lucas gave every Star Wars junkie what they had long craved: the opportunity to see Yoda wield a light saber himself. With blinding alacrity and consummate skill, Yoda shows himself not only as a master teacher, but master practitioner. After Marvin’s poetry reading last night, a fellow student leaned over to me in the darkened theater and whispered, “he’s a genius.” Having spent last semester studying with him, I wanted to whisper back, “well, duh.”

Conversing with Greatness

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The poetry craft talks so far have been broad and encompassing in their scope, and, true-to-form, Sandra Alcosser’s talk this afternoon was no exception. She spoke of the 4,000-year-old wisdom tradition that is literature, as the room filled up with the white Northern light of a solstice afternoon. She cited Shakespeare’s education in reading, translating, and memorizing the rhymed iambics of Ovid, and Whitman’s conversion from disdain of “un-American” opera to his assertion later that he could not have written Leaves Of Grass without having heard Bellini’s “Norma.”

In contrast to all the academic banter (especially among Americans) about eschewing received forms, Alcosser cited example after example of how genius in art consists not only, as Bell stated earlier, in getting in touch with one’s own “wiring”–but also in synthesizing tradition with newness. In fitting parallel with the theme of the talk, the question-and-answer session afterward opened out into a dialog among journeyman and accomplished writers alike about the remarkable and necessary tradition of literature, and the courage it takes to enter such a conversation with greatness.

Process

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“Genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with your own wiring.”

-Marvin Bell

Joseph Millar and Marvin Bell, both former faculty advisors during my study at Pacific, conducted a roundtable discussion around the theme of what writing poetry teaches one about poetry itself. At the forefront of their message was: write! As in, do it.

They focused on the necessity of the process to their lives (not the product)–the quality of humility necessary when coaxing out new work (Millar), and the freedom necessary to write long enough, and bad enough, to get better (Bell).

In this sense, Marvin’s admonition that poetry is a way of life, not a career, and Joe’s analogy that keeping on writing limbers one’s muscles to be flexible and receptive to the dance, renders complimentary angles to a simple but profound message: writing is about writing. Talk is talk. Publication is nice; a fleeting pleasure. Writing.

Hearing about the importance of process, and the transitory pleasure of product, reminded me once again of this great little animation of a recording by Alan Watts.