15 year itch | notes on the mfa
It occurred to me that it's been 15 years since I finished my MFA. (Also 30 years since I graduated high school but that seems even more impossible.) I had to recheck the math, since it hardly seemed that long of a stretch. Once again, I blink and entire decades pass. 2007 was a weird year, both academically, where I found myself getting over a terrible bout with mono in my early 30's and an early Chaucer class, that I am pretty much sure I slept through 40 percent of and am amazed I passed. It was a crazy time personally, trying to navigate the most fucked-up of all my past romances and the hardest to untangle. I finished my thesis manuscript (girl show) albeit reluctantly and stubbornly. It actually would get picked up by the press that published my first book, but would wind up back in my lap after they shuttered a couple years later. I made changes I hated to appease my thesis advisor, printed it out on fancy rag paper, and handed it over, mostly just to get the whole thing over, which after 4 years of part time study while working full-time was kind of slowly killing me.
My first book had come out the previous fall, when I was both at my sickest and my most romantically fraught. I only remember it in bits-bright yellow fall trees, a downtown fire that closed down our campus, headaches and lingering lunch dates. I was already in my 30's. I was older than almost everyone in my program. I had long before determined workshops were only useful when everyone actually shared some idea on what made a poem good, which was an impossibility. In many ways, I found the program to be a nice incendiary, spurring me to projects I might not have done otherwise (my archer avenue poems, for example, or actually finally finishing my Cornell poems for an ekphastic class.) The lit and craft classes were interesting, the workshops mostly tedious.
We all know the horror stories of the MFAers who walk out of graduation and never write another thing. I worried over this, in that stretch right after I finished the program, when things felt too close, too tight, and I wrote very little. I would talk to other writers and get insanely anxious when they asked me about new projects, the dreadful "what are you writing now?" I did lots of other things--like move the press operation into the Fine Arts--start the web shop, sell vintage and paper goods, and soap--and all the while, tried to distract myself from the non-writing self that only churned out a poem every couple months, nary anything I really liked. I tend to be a prolific writer, before grad school, during grad school, and even now, but between 2007 and 2011 I probably wrote about 20 poems total. A couple things happened in 2011 that set me writing again, one being the process of writing the James Franco pieces that barely felt like poems at all. The other was girl show finding a home at Black Lawrence. By the end of the year, it seemed possible that I might actually want to write more than I was. The next spring I finished what would become beautiful, sinister that had been languishing for a couple years. I also wrote what is one of my all-time favorite series, shipwrecks of lake michigan. The poems were back and I've been pretty steadily writing since--an output that has filled 9 other book mss. in a decade. It's hard to believe sometimes that I have that many poems in me, let alone that I managed to get them successfully on the page and out into the world.
Sometimes, when eyeing my student loan balance I have been chiseling away at in small ridiculous bits, I wonder if the degree was worth it. If either grad degree was worth it. I do feel some of the lesson content I've been writing is served well by my MA degree, but the yeilds of my MFA are a little more slippery. I absolutely believe I could have written and published (and was doing so) without the degree. Would I be writing the same poems? In the same style? Would I be as good? Maybe not..but then again, so many poets I know do just fine without advanced degrees. I also know many really lackluster poets with a train of them. Many say the time to work uhindered by other things is priceless, though doing it while also working full time cut into that experience and made it more unweildy and harrowing. On the other hand, I got a discount for working on campus, so maybe it was a trade. The 29 year old me who enrolled wasn't sure what I was looking for.skills? legitimacy? knowledge? She could scarce have told you any more than I can now. I got better by writing more, reading more, of course, and for that, maybe I owe those few years of study and attention I may have not gotten otherwise.
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