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 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.

• Yehuda Amichai, Love Poems
• John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems
• John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs: Poems
• Robert Bly, Silence In The Snowy Fields
• James Dickey, Drowning With Others
• Richard Hugo, The Lady In Kicking Horse Reservoir
• Rolf Jacobsen, The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems
• Randall Jarrell, The Lost World
• Paul Mariani, The Great Wheel
• Thomas Merton, In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems
• W.S. Merwin, The Lice
• Frank O’Hara, Meditations In An Emergency
• Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
• Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
• Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck
• Jon Silkin, New and Selected Poems
• W.D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle
• Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Thomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
• Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
• William Carlos Williams, Spring And All
• William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

That’s more than the recommended twenty works (and notice I have deliberately not added any books about poetry)–so, I will have to trim and tinker.

Any suggestions, anyone?

Narration	Lyricism
Free verse	Meter & rhyme
Meaning	“Precious Nonsense“
Stichic	Stanzaic
Plain Speech	Elevated diction

In addition, I will continue to read widely from a variety of sources. Here is what I am thinking about adding to my reading list:

On Poetry

• Fredrick Smock, Poetry And Compassion (thank you, Mr. Carter)
• Dorianne Laux and Kim Adonizzo, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
• Stephen Berg (ed.), Singular Voices: American Poetry Today

Poetry

• Umberto Saba, Songbook: Selected Poems from the Canzoniere of Umberto Saba (trans. Stephen Sartarelli)
• Marvin Bell, The Book Of The Dead Man and Mars Being Red
• Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
• Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World
• Ron Silliman (ed.), In The American Tree
• Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems
• Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
• Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996
• Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
• Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems: 1978-1994
• David St. John, Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems
• Tony Curtis (ed.), The Art of Seamus Heaney
• Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition

Ideas For Poetry Book Structure

• Issa, The Year Of My Life (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa)
• Basho, Back Roads To Far Towns (trans. Kamaike Susumu and Cid Corman)
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies
• Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)

This is only a cursory sketch for now. Any suggestions?

Dear MFA Students and Alumni,

I just discovered last night that the latest Atlantic Monthly magazine has listed Pacific University as one of the top five low-residency MFA programs in the nation! Jeannine Hall Gailey casually told me this in an email (a post script, no less) and I dashed out to buy two copies of the “Special Fiction Issue 2007.” In there is an article called “Where Great Writers Are Made” and there, in the last sidebar, is our program. We are included with the most venerable low-residency programs in the nation: Antioch, Bennington, Vermont and Warren Wilson.

Building a program is never easy. But it has truly been a group effort and the faculty and students are the ones who have helped make it happen. You are a talented, hardworking and passionate community and I hope you take as much pride and joy in this news as I do.

All best,

Shelley

Shelley Washburn, Director
MFA in Writing
Pacific University

Not bad for a program that has only graduated two full classes so far.

Obviously, I didn’t choose Pacific for its reputation, since it effectively didn’t have one when I applied. But clearly I’m not the only one who sees the means to work so closely with such great faculty as a rare opportunity and privilege. The beyond-the-call-of-duty helpfulness of the staff, beautiful residency settings and challenging-yet-manageable academic structure go further in making this a great experience so far. Hats off to all involved.

With the exception of times I have been really sick (since sleep is my immune system’s best friend), I have been getting up an hour early before work every day. I started this months before the MFA began, before I even knew I was accepted. This seemingly obvious exercise has helped me keep a steady focus on my writing independent of other circumstances. The catch, of course, is getting to bed early enough. But with the prospect of writing again in the morning, this little programmer-owl is has finally stopped stalling at beddy-by time. Well, mostly. Tonight’s an exception. Really.

The second major preparation was garnering the support of my wife. Val has seen how much writing has helped with my grief recovery (even though I often am not necessarily writing about our son). In fact, some days, the prospect of reading and writing poems is what gets me out of bed in the morning. But even more than this, we talked about the practical impact of my new schedule and what it could mean in terms of our lifestyle–all well before I started sending tuition payments.

In addition to the one hour of writing before work, I also read for an hour after work. This means stopping work at a reasonable time so I can fit the reading in and still, when necessary, make dinner. Ending work at a reasonable hour is another discipline I started months before the start of the program. Figuring out and then working toward these simple, banal practicalities–as unpoetic as they are–has gone a long way to establishing my pace. After all, twenty four months of creative writing graduate school is not a sprint–it’s a marathon.

Val and I also often head for our favorite local coffee shop on late Saturday and/or Sunday morning. She brings a book, or picks up one of the English papers they get in or chats to our friend the owner. I read books of poems and sometimes write my essays. Having this kind of a ritual, in a nice spot with an espresso con panna and my laptop bag full of books before me, makes studying in the morning on weekends feel less like work and more like, well, a weekend. Again, setting this up in terms of the practicalities, our relationship and how I can put in the time on a regular basis in a regular way has gone a long way toward making this a sustainable effort.

I’m ahead of the game, in fact–which is another tip that has really helped. Being one assignment up at any given time (and maintaining it) gives me a little peace of mind, knowing I can deal with one of life’s little curve-balls without having to play too much catch up afterward. This and other remarkable little gems of advice came from another strategy I highly recommend to new students starting an MFA (low-res or otherwise): talk to your elders.

I got in touch with one friend-of-a-friend on his last semester at Pacific, and the program coordinator put me in touch with a second exiting student at my request. My one question to them: “What do you know now at the end of the two-year program that you wish you knew at the beginning?” Then I opened the field up wide–everything from long underwear for the Oregon winter to “the question of losing one’s voice in the institution of the MFA.” They were only too happy to pour out their words of wisdom, and I was only too happy to take it all with my requisite grain of salt. Everyone’s experience is different, and I had to bear that in mind when it came to personal preferences. But getting the low-down from at least two sources had me feeling much more confident going into the residency.

I am not really sure if my circumstances are extraordinary, or if nearly everyone who commits to their art in a major way feels as I do–but I know doing this is much more than a want or whim. It’s part of me. So that, above all, has given me what I need when the alarm goes off early each morning. Once my feet hit the bedroom floor, I know I’m in for another day when writing comes first. So far, doing this degree has been one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and a little planning has gone a long way. Hopefully these tips can help other students of art–whether in a formal schooling or just looking to add a little more regularity to their practice. And, if the inspiration hits, maybe I’ll do a followup when I’m further down the road.

Related Posts:

“Should I do an MFA?”

More on Choosing to Do an MFA

Pacific University MFA Commencement Student Speech

What I Learned in the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program

Open Thanks to the Pacific University MFA Program and All Who Sail in Her

Pacific University’s MFA in Writing was named one of the top five low-residency programs in the country by Atlantic Monthly, “Special Fiction Issue 2007.”

Posts About My Faculty Advisors:

Joseph Millar, first semester
Sandra Alcosser, second semester
Marvin Bell, third and fourth semester

Posts About The Residency Periods:

The First Residency in Seaside, Oregon
The Second Residency in Forest Grove, Oregon
The Third Residency in Seaside, Oregon
The Fourth Residency in Forest Grove, Oregon
The Fifth and Final Residency in Seaside, Oregon

Related Topics:

Master of Fine Arts in Writing
Pacific University