Yesterday, when I defended my MFA degree, I wore a present from my sister (nearly three years gone). It was a salamander, a beauty of an Art Nouveau piece with diamonds and green garnets. Here's a picture:
One of the reasons I decided to attend an MFA program was that I promised my sister I'd study poetry. She knew that I'd always regretted not going on to school for a Ph.D. or an MFA. One of the last times we talked (a week before she died of stage IV breast carcinoma) she made me promise I'd not put it off, that I'd finish by the time I was 50.
Karen, I did it. I did not come through this unscathed, as the salamander emerges from his burning log, but I did come through it. Thank you for your belief that I could work and write and be a good (albeit untidy) wife and mom. I will wear this pin in your honor on May 9 at the MFA ceremony. I promise to keep the salamander, that "fire within," that passion for poetry alive.
And a little bling amid all that black won't be bad!
10 comments:
Pamela: Thanks for your kind words about the poem.
I've missed my moment with the tulips! Damn this night schedule. I'm beginning to understand how the Dutch got obsessed, I'm looking at different varieties now, coveting them. Crazy.
Hope your defense went well. Keep us posted.
The defense went, well, swimmingly. I had the smartest, best committee members ever (Brian Barker, Nicky Beer, and Dale Ray Phillips). The questions were hard, but I really enjoyed trying to answer them thoughtfully. Here are a few, to serve as sample:
(1) "Robert Frost said, 'If there are 24 poems in a book, the book itself is the 25th poem.' Describe your book as that 25th poem."
Reaction to this one: I could not believe the members of my committee thought it was a book. Shock, then the response came pretty easily. My book's about the nature of memory, and the arrangement of memory is in body memory (love poems), bildungsroman memory (a section of mostly narrative poems in a child to young woman's voice), and the idea of art and memory (memory palace/ekphrastic poems). Oh, if this were the only question asked...I could have talked on this one all day.
(2) "Your predominant form is the stepped tercet. Discuss the tercets in your poetry, and also in the poets you have listed as influences (Mark Doty, William Carlos Williams)."
Reaction to this one: Discussed seeing the tercet stanza as a terrace, a formal arrangement, and talked about my poems with gardens.
Talked about WCW's "The Sparrow" as a major influence on my work. Talked about Doty's idea that the tercet tugs the reader down the page. Talked about Doty and "A Green Crab's Shell." Talked about odds and evens in terms of stanza structure. Talked about American haiku, and why I try to use the form of short line /long line /image to push the poem into discovery.
(3) "You say in your introduction and in your poem "Unreal Gardens" that you want your poems to inhabit the physical world and also a world of the imagination. What do you mean by that? Discuss your belief in the imagination as the animating factor."
Response: Talked about Bishop, about Boland, and about Keats.
Talked about poesis, about poetry as the made thing, about Genesis and the word speaking things into life (this is in my introduction), and also about Logos as the first name for Jesus. Had a little fun with my committee here. Told them that I was going to have to talk about Faith. You would have thought Jerry Falwell was emanating from my nostrils as ectoplasm by the look on the fiction writer's face. I did not give an altar call; just stated that I had faith in God as animator and Jesus as Word, and if we look at their premier occupations, I have faith in all artists, teachers, and poets, and hardly any faith in the words of literary critics/interpreters such as St. Paul. Got a big laugh there. Tension defuser. Especially when I said, Faith, the new f-word. They loved it. (Talked about Mark Doty's genius poem "Homo Will Not Inherit" and the flesh and the word and the kingdom. I agree with Doty's speaker on the body as beatitude, where the kingdom's found. (At least I think I talked about this. This is in my introduction, on memory and the memory palace, and Brian and I have spent a lot of time on Doty).
(5) "Discuss the traditional forms in your book."
Talked about the sonnets in each section, plus haiku, blank verse, and heroic couplets, as well as my sestina (which has a shape) and a concrete poem. This was very fun to discuss, and by far the easiest section. Talked about my love for the sonnet and the Boland/Hirsch book that has recently come out.
(6) "You have two cameos in your poem--one as an emblem, one as an ekphrastic poem. Discuss this and the influence of Boland's "Lava Cameo" on either or neither of these poems." (I reviewed this poem at length in my introduction).
Talked about the idea of giving works of art a voice (notional ekphrasis--a favorite thing for an ekphrastic poem to do). Discussed the idea of the cameo as emblem in my poems and in my understanding of poetry, because in order when things are brought into high relief, other things have to be carved away. Discussed the idea of Medusa (the speaker in the second poem) having a cameo role, as well as being carved from stone/turning men into stone, and how I thought giving anaphoristic imperatives to make the reader imagine her, to LOOK at her, empowered the image in a distinctly different way. (Told by committee member to write more poems with jewelry. Will gladly oblige this, especially if there is a research fund for the purchase of more Bakelite, cameos, and bracelets).
(7) Thrown for a loop by the fiction writer. He asked me to explain the multiple voices and
structures in some of my poems. His question was in multiple parts and as soon as I would answer, he'd chime back in.
Response: I tried my best here. I tried to say that in a world of dissonance, sometimes voices did override, and I wanted there to be three ways to read the poems. (talked about "Collapsars" by Sandra McPherson,"Three Sonnets" by James Galvin, and "Narcissus and Echo" by Fred Chappell). Talked about the idea of questioning art, and how I see the space between the viewer and the work of art as a tension zone and also a silence, and hoped that my poems were trying to do that in the way they used splits/white space. Talked about reading the poems as performance pieces, and how some of them work well off the page solo, and others require two or more readers. Talked about the three ways we consider the line (which I learned from Brian): unit of breath, unit of attention, unit of gesture/brushstroke. Talked about how I thought the most successful lines of worked as all 3. (When I teach this, I use Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," as well as WCW's "To An Old Woman." Forgot to mention this in the defense).
(7) I asked them a question about transition between two poems in the final section of the book. After Nicky's thoughtful response, I decided to leave the poems in that order.
(8) Asked what I was writing next.
Talked about cave art and the natural shaping the work of art. Talked about drowned towns and my grandmother's loss of the family farm. Was given some great suggestions for further reading by the fiction reader (Ron Rash), and the poets (Z. Herbert's essays). Cannot wait to read these.
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These are only a sample of their smart questions and my blathering responses. I am so appreciative of the care they took in reading and understanding my poems and the personal essay that served as introduction. I must have said something right, because I passed. (They told me that it would be an MFA with highest honors, if they gave such a thing, which they don't. I almost fainted. The Word is good enough for me--I don't need an honors sash). Brian (my commmittee chair) took me out to lunch. I arrived in my class with 2 minutes to spare (I am always at least 10 minutes early), and they were worried about me. "You mean you eat lunch?" (The notion of me as someone who might go to a restaurant had never crossed their brainpans).
Apologies for the length of the often inchoate rant/response above. I just wanted a record of this before I forgot it completely.
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Sorry you have missed the tulips! I am obsessed by them, too. Here's what I was hinting at about the tulips blooming completely out:
If you put tulips into a bouquet and let them bloom completely out, they'll make a constellation of stars. I have a poem about it (I will email you if you'd like to see it. It's my favorite of all my formal poems).
Also, Thanks again for the great poem on quartsiiluni. (Not sure of the spelling).
Sorry I cannot count to ten!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!
Thanks RJ, thanks Anne, thanks Your Majesty the Radish King, and thanks to AJPL, who IM'd me. I appreciate all your encouragement and good wishes.
Huge congrats! A lovely post, and thanks for adding the exam questions--so neat to read.
I was at GMU's MFA program with Brian Barker for a year--had no idea he was where you are!
Thank you, Emily!
Brian Barker is the humblest, most generous teacher, and he's a wonderful writer. Plus, he's a great boss.
Every time we have our MFA residency, all of us want to belt out "How Great Thou Art," because he is so soulful.
My other mentor, Philip Stevens, is equally wonderful and has given me so much in terms of technical understanding of poetry. He's the Master of Craft and equally generous with his knowledge and giving with his time.
Pamela: Wow. That's pretty intense. I appreciate question 2 and your answer. I've always wondered about the impulse behind those staggered stanzas--your answer makes a lot of sense to me.
I finally got around to ordering Brian's book...even though I've wanted to get it for a few years now, I always forget to order it.
I would love to see the poem--I've been tweaking and playing with some of my older formal poems--so it would be lovely to see someone else's work right now. My email: arejayg2772ATyahooDOTcom.
BTW--my bleeding hearts are coming on strong right now. Sadly blogger is acting up and I can't post a snap. Bastids.
Congratulations, Pamela! A beautiful pin and post.
What a beautiful story, congratulations!!!
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