Pursuing Poetry

Dear Readers,

I’ve told you before that I’ve been having a rough time in graduate school, right? If not, then I’m telling you now. I’m having a rough time in graduate school.

That’s part of why I want to leave Flagstaff and NAU this summer without finishing my master’s degree in General English Studies.

I’ve been very humbled lately in school. I’m not as academically talented or as well-read as a lot of my fellow grad students. Graduate school really is on a different level than undergraduate school. It’s a lot harder, which is appropriate, I suppose.

One of the experiences that have humbled me in college recently is we had to read The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, and that long poem is downright cryptic.

One thing that bugs me is that it seems like once you study English in a master’s program you have to specialize in one avenue of English. And then when you get into a PhD program, you have to specialize even more. Doctoral candidates, for example, concentrate on topics as narrow as American Literature from 1800-1850 or they focus on only on one or two authors… which sort of makes sense in some ways. It’s only when you specialize that you can contribute to all the massive amount of research out there, sort of. Specialization bugs me though, so that’s why I did the General English Studies program rather than the literature or the rhetoric or the creative writing or the English Education program.

But the General English Studies program isn’t even general enough for me. I’m interested in politics and history and religion and economics and theatre and art, and I’d like to take some courses on those subjects, but I can’t because it’s not part of the program. (Well I actually could take some of those classes, but school is expensive. I can’t afford to go to school forever just for fun.)

My point is, good graduate students tend to specialize more than I want to specialize.

Good graduate students also tend to do independent study courses. I’ve heard that taking independent study courses shows initiative. I’ve never done an independent study class before, partly because… I don’t know why. I guess I don’t have initiative. Ha ha ha. I guess I tend to go with the flow and just take the classes that the professors offer, instead of going through the trouble of creating my own class. But I see some of my fellow students really get into something, and wanting to get their PhD. Sarah, for example, strikes me as a model English graduate student. She’s involved in lots of clubs, she’s doing an independent study class, she’s presenting at an upcoming academic conference, she’s going to get her PhD, she generally seems excited about school, and she writes about it on her neat blog: http://slarue.blogspot.com/

And then there’s this other guy I know who was a reporter for a major newspaper for a while, and he’s here at NAU studying poetry, and the guy is just a smarty-pants.

But one of the worst things that happened to me in grad school was when I tried to get into a creative writing class. I knew pretty early on last semester that I wasn’t a big fan of deep literary theory, or analyzing a text in a nauseating way, and I really don’t feel very interested in academic conferences or subscribing to academic journals and stuff like that… and I didn’t want to do linguistics and I didn’t want to do boring professional writing/ document design/ proofreading stuff, so I thought that if I was going to last the full two years of the program, then I would need to get into creative writing.

So, I tried to enroll online into a poetry-writing workshop, but I couldn’t because I was not admitted into the creative writing program. Oh… it’s a long story and there’s lots of details, but suffice it to say that I met with my advisor and tried to email people and blah blah blah and it was kind of frustrating (almost like it was meant to be that I didn’t get into a creative writing course). Anyway, so I’m told to just show up to the poetry-writing workshop on the first day of class with some samples of my poetry and see if the professor lets me in. (The poetry professor was away on Sabbatical the last semester, and she’s a crazy lady that doesn’t use email or something, so she was virtually unreachable until the first day of this spring semester.)

So I show up the first day of class with ten pages of my poetry, and the professor is crazy and blah blah blah and it’s one of the weirdest experiences of my college career, and I end up not getting into the class and that’s it. Maybe I’ll write up the whole story in more detail some other time. It really is a good story.

I’m a little worried that I’ll miss the neat environment I’m in, though. I wonder if I go from living in an area rife with the arts to an area where people are boring and prone to talking about business all the time, I might not like it too much.

So, before I leave Bohemia, I would like to work on my poetry a little more with fellow students who are into poetry. I decided to give some of my poems to a good poetry student to see what he thought about them. It makes me nervous, though, to have poetry-people read my poetry. What I mean by "poetry-people" is people who are really good at reading and writing poetry. It’s one thing to write silly poems and post them on my blog, for a welcoming audience to read, but it’s another thing to give your poems to someone who really knows poetry, someone like an editor- someone who has the power to publish your work in a real poetry magazine, but who also has the power to banish your poems to the Land of Unpublished Sundries.

Anyway, I gave the excellent poetry student, who we’ll call Dave, my poems, with this letter stapled to the front: (OK, I haven’t actually given my poems or this letter to him yet, but I’ve been meaning to and I’ll do it tomorrow. Maybe. If I remember. No promises.)

Dear Dave,

Here’s some poems that I’ve written. Let me know what you think of them. Feel free to write all over them.

This is a horrible question, but… how do my poems compare with the poems you’ve workshopped in 507? Am I good enough to be a part of a graduate-level poetry writing workshop? It’s OK if I’m not, and I know I can always get better, and I know these are unfair questions, and I know that if I really wanted to get into the creative writing program at NAU, then I would need to show these to Dr. Walker or somebody else, not you. But I respect your opinion, and I’d like to know what you think of my poems.

Let me tell you a little bit about my background with poetry.

I’ve only been in one poetry-writing workshop before, and it wasn’t really even a poetry-writing workshop. It was a creative writing class at a community college that had half the semester devoted to poetry and the other half of the semester devoted to fiction. I did OK in the class. My major, English Education, only required me to take one creative writing class, and I remember always wanting to take more writing workshops, but for some reason it never worked out. Scheduling conflicts are probably to blame.

I do poetry in my free time, or whenever I’m in the mood. I’m kind of lazy about it, really.

But I love poetry. I really do. I love reading and writing poetry. I get a lot of pleasure out of writing it just for me. And maybe that’s all my poetry habit will amount to- a mere hobby, an act of self-amusement. I don’t have high aspirations for getting published or making money at it or trying to become a college professor or anything like that. I just write poetry for fun, and I’ve had a few good experiences with reading my poetry out loud to people, whether it’s been in informal settings, or at talent shows or poetry slams. (I have a background in theatre, so that helps. And my poetry tends to be on the simple-to-comprehend side; I think my poems aren’t too hard to understand the first time through, hearing them out loud.)

I was really upset about the whole Dr. Anderson thing. Really upset. I’m over it now, but, I’ve decided to quit the master’s program this summer and just start my career as a high school English (and maybe drama) teacher. I haven’t decided to quit grad school just because of the events of Monday, January 12th, 2009, but that was probably a little-bitty part of my decision-making process. I’m also quitting grad school because my wife and I are expecting a child, and because getting a high school teaching career now will be good for our finances, and I feel like it’s time to move on. I’ve been at NAU for four years now, before that I was at a community college. I went straight from undergraduate work to graduate work, and maybe it would have been better if I had taken a few years off to figure out what I would really wanted to study at the graduate level.

I’m also afraid that I’m too Mormon to be a poet. Does that sound funny to you? It sounds funny to me, but sometimes I feel like I’m too conventional or religious or straight-laced to be a poet. I get the impression, from Dr. Anderson and other places, maybe pop culture, that poets should be weird, or alcoholics, or um… I don’t know…(You’re not weird, though:) but I feel like growing up in a Mormon household and trying to be devoutly Mormon and having Mormons for my role models are factors that don’t exactly lend themselves to being a cool poet. Does that make sense? But I do hope that I can be both a normal Mormon suburban-dwelling English teacher and a good poet.

OK, thanks for being a sounding board. I wanted to talk to you or somebody like you about poetry a little bit and show somebody my poetry because I’m about to leave the NAU English department, where poets abound, to live in the suburbs of Phoenix, where, as far as I can tell, there are very few poets.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa

P.S. By the way, I remember you said you were a carpenter for a long time and you were making pretty good money doing that, but you weren’t happy. I hope you’re happier now that you are pursuing poetry. I’d like to read your poetry sometime. I like reading the poetry of people I know personally.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa