Monthly Archives: May 2008

Day 6 ALMOST feels like TGIF

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Ah, Friday of residency.  When everyone starts to get a little weak in the head :)   Or wait, is that just me?

Had to be to campus by 9 and I left way, way early but because of an accident I only arrived at class 10 minutes before it started.  I usually like to be on campus at least 30 minutes before so I can read a little or chat.  But the classes were worth it.  The first was Stage/Screen and while I didn’t really enjoy the material we read and watched before class, I found the actual in class portion great fun.

After Stage/Screen we had a wonderful Fiction course with Pinkney Benedict.  Man he is too smart for his own good and from WV. Who knew they could do produce such brains!  Lunch was a little better today because they had some wrap sandwiches.  Good thing cause they kept me full through several Graduating Student Seminars.  I attended one on Writing Across Gender and Culture, The Poetic Sequence and Revision is 20/20.  Nice done me peeps!  I hope I can live up to the great classes this year when I present mine in January. 

We only had one person to critique this afternoon and then I had my one-on-one conference with my workshop leader for this final term.  I have a HUGE but wonderful reading list and someone who really seems to understand my drive to move forward from the types of poems in my thesis versus the new type of poems I want to write.  I won’t besmirch my thesis work but it is just much different from what I want to pursue in the future.  Which worries me a bit when I think of all the revision I need to do to have the thesis/hopeful first book finished while still moving foreward but I’m hopeful.

I wimped out tonight and had a sandwich before coming home but I’m missing the faculty reading tonight.  I’m just so out of steam.  I have Dirty Jobs on in the background while I finish making sure I have all the most current drafts in my thesis document so I can reprint it.  I’m looking forward to organizing the poems next week before I start significant revision.  My plan is to tape them all up on my sliding glass doors so I an move them around and see which ones want to take up residency next to each other.

Half a day tomorrow and then I’m done. Whew.  Whoever said a Low-Res MFA is somehow easier than an in-resident MFA really must be crazy.  I swear I never did as much work before going to the residencies as I did when I was taking undergrad workshops!

Day 5 and I’m Still Alive . . . Mostly

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This morning I reached my exhaustion point for the week.  It has to happen at some point.  I guess a little of it was an overflow from last night as well as an worn out me had to rush to do laundry, pick up a few groceries and found herself succumbing to the call of two dark chocolate covered graham crackers I had bought at a new chocolate store that had opened.

So in response, I decided to try and sleep in a bit this morning.  I still arrived on campus with plenty of time but there was no working out and no reading before class like I am normally able to do. Of course, that may have been do–in part–to the fact that we had an early morning on campus today.  I had already been to the session before for students getting close to graduation but I went again to make sure I had all my dates and procedures for graduation correct.

After that session we had our final, and now I realize, my final Poetry Craft Seminar with Cathy Smith Bowers on Weaving Lyric and Narrative together in poetry. Great class.  Pitiful lunch–again–then another great round of graduating craft seminars.  I hope I can make mine even close to as well organized. 

The rest of my afternoon was small group workshop, and I didn’t realize till it was over that it was my final small group workshop in residence. Wow.  These little milestones are starting to stack up for me aren’t they?

After workshop I was able to complete part of my final residency critiques for tomorrows small group session and I just finished the 2nd part of the critique.  In between were three graduating thesis readings (I stayed for two–sorry!) and in about an hour there are more readings.  Sorry again but I hope my poet friend reads early because I’d like to go home and rest a bit since tomorrow is another early day with 2 seminars in one morning instead of the usual one.

While I’m waiting, I am trying to do some more looking through my thesis.  Right now I am trying to decide how best to work on organzing it.  I’ve heard all kinds of theories about laying the poems on the floor, of hanging them on the wall etc etc.  Not sure how I am going to work it, but right now my focus is trying to make sure I have the most current copies so I can decide what needs to be revised next.

As much fun as I am having and have had in the program, there is still a part of this that is so important to me in the sense of publication and having my work read.  I know a lot of the art is creating but once you get into revision and the final product it is something you want someone else to enjoy.  And making it good enough for them still scares me.

But, seriously, I’m still in a good mood :)

Day 4–Ah Mid Week

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Hump Day for everyone, including those of us in Queens Low-Residency MFA sessions.

Got up early again and did Wii Fit before heading over to campus.  This morning was the first of our specific Poetry Craft Seminars for the week so it was the first time all the current poetry students were togehter.  I think I counted 15.  Nice group.  The seminar today was taught by my current workshop leader, Cathy Park Hong, and focused on Poetic Constraints and Forms.  Good course.

In the afternoon I went to graduating seminars by two poets who I have been in workshops with and they both did a great job!  I swear the graduating seminars get better and better each residency.  When I am past the whole thesis process, I look forward to pulling from the suggested reading materials from those seminars.  Such a variety of topics! For today–Weaving the Blues into Poetry and Better Ways to Teach K-12 Poetry.  Great stuff.

Then my final large group session where we critiqued two very different poets.  Whoever continues to say that MFA programs all have the same poets, needed to be in this session!

After workshop I headed home to do the much needed laundry and to read one set of poets for small group critiques tomorrow.  My small group packet will be critiqued tomorrow as well.  I have a strange variety of poems in that set so I should be intersting.  There is a dinner that is done every year on Wednesday but when it is not on campus I opt out and also this time I didn’t know anyone that was actually attending.  Guess I hang with too many introverts, we attract to each other like bugs to lights.

So feeling pretty good about this week.  Still working through my thesis.  Actually had an idea for a possible title for it but it would involve a creation of an entirely new poem, which I tried to write part of while in the car.  Maybe there is hope for me yet?

 

Day 3 and it feels like it Should be Friday

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Tuesday and it really does feel like it should be Friday.  Residency is always that way, running on its own schedule. 

Right now I am trying to finish up reading the last of my “large group” poems for tomorrow for the two people we will critique before the second set of graduating student readings for the evening.  I have less than 30 minutes but only two poems to read, I think I can do it.

 I got up pretty early tomorrow considering I was up pretty late last night so I could do some Wii Fit and get a decent breakfast before the class.  Today we had a lecture on Shaping the Book: Non-fiction.  I found a lot of good information in the presentation that can be applied to my thesis work as well.  After my quick, typical residency lunch of salad and cheesecake I headed back into class for some more graduating student seminars.

The two seminars I went to today were both by poets I admire and whose presentations seemed to speak to each other as they approached different sides of how to use “truth” and autobiography in your poetry.  Very well done ladies!

My critique went pretty well today, I think.  I always choose not to read the written comments until when i am ready to revise but I took some good general notes and I think I have a few poems that I thought were dead in the water that I can possibly salvage. Yah me!

Two fiction writers and two poets read earlier. Vida you rock! And some more poets read now in–14 minutes!  I’d better save and shut down so I don’t miss out.  I am proud of myself that I am staying for more of these when my couch at home sounds very lovely about now :)

Critiques done. Ready for more tomorrow.

But I do need to come home tomorrow night and do laundry cause you don’t want me to where smelly jeans now do you?

 

2nd Day of Residency

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Today was the first full day of my final non-graduating residency in the Queens MFA program. As always, I arrived at campus earlier than I needed to but that gave me the opportunity to enjoy some beautiful weather while I chatted with other people in the program–particularly about why it is our course codes are CRW instead of ENG! (It is an applying for teaching jobs issue!)

My Seminar for today was on Shaping a Book of Poetry.  Wonderful class but it had my head going in so many directions as I was thinking about my thesis/manuscript that I was tempted to drive all the way home during lunch to get my thesis and look through it!

Our workshop discussion today was great and as always happens when AMP teaches I learn as much from critiquing other people as from when my own work will be critiqued tomorrow.

Before workshop I attended two of the graduating students seminars.  One was on avoiding the Pratfalls of Historical Fiction (or RESEARCH PEOPLE!) which was well presented and had a great resource handout and then a second seminar discussing the use of landscape/setting which was mainly on fiction but I could extrapolate to poetry, especially since a lot of my poetry has a definite landscape and/or desire for one.

There were graduate student readings tonight but I still had company here and all the readings were fiction for people I did not know so I opted out of that.  Tomorrow looks to be a long day with seminar, at least 2 graduating student seminars again, workshop and then I know several poets reading in the evening which could keep me on campus until well after 9pm.  Glad I did my critique write up in between seminar and workshop today.

I feel very relaxed this residency.  Even though I still feel I am stumbling when I try to have a conversation with professors, even when they are close in age to me I feel so Wayne’s World-I’m-not-worthy.

Now I’m itching to play with my thesis again :) How long can I restrain myself?

First Day of Residency May 2008

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I’m trying to keep up the tradition of posting on most days of my Queens MFA experience but each semester it gets harder and harder!  I’m sitting on the floor in my dining room/office at almost 11 at night trying to finish critiquing poems as well so my brain is already a little fried. 

One of my sister-in-laws has been in this weekend so we have all been doing a lot of eating, watching movies etc.  Today we did some of the same and they also went with me for a walk at South Park Mall (which I then ruined later by eating donuts while trying to keep the brain going to critique poems)  before I had to be at school for the new student orientation which I am always too early for but at least this year not as early early early as in previous years.

We had a lot of new students, mostly fiction as usual, but not a lot of questions so our equally big welcoming committee didn’t have a whole lot to do.  I did get a nice compliment from one of the members of my membership group, “You would make a good teacher–I like to listen to you talk.”  Ah, thanks!  But I did feel a bit disorganized as I almost forgot to give out the zoetrope info for our Queens MFA group.

A lovely introverted graduating person did the tour (thank goodness since I can get lost anywhere) and then we had a chance to sit around and chat informally before the social cocktail hour and manuscript exchange.  Even though I will be back in January to teach a craft seminar and give my thesis reading, I some how feel a bit disconnected already from the program.  Maybe in part because a lot of the people I spent time with have graduated already and one of them seems to have dropped out of the program but I haven’t been able to reach her?  Where are you, Leigh?

After manuscript exchange there was a faculty reading by new fiction faculty Margot Singer and the totally awesome Alan Michael Parker whose new book you totally need to not only read but you should go out and buy!

THen a trip to Dunkin Donuts where I failed at procuring my sister-in-law her favorite coffee but did get the probably unnecessary aforementioned donuts.  Then 2 packets of poems critiqued and shortly I’ll be passed out and trying not to let too much poetic wonder float through my head because I need to be up by no later than 8 so I can be in classes, and workshops and other exciting school-like endeavors.

I am not proofing this.  Does the donut high show?

 

Final Paper Done!

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Ok maybe it isn’t the best paper I have ever written but my final residency paper is done! Granted for January I have to do a longer 8-10 pager on my craft seminar that I have actually done some research on, but that is a different type of paper.

Going to go play/workout with my Wii Fit here shortly.  I was leasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed using the game when I picked it up yesterday.  To the point where I didn’t want to do it this morning because I wanted to save WORKING OUT for a reward.  Can you beileve that?

Got my hair cut, eyebrows down and lots of errands run so I should be in a good shape for Sunday.  Even printed off one of the last two things I need to do.  I’m not in the workshop mindset yet but I’m sure I can shake the dust off my critiquing charms once I’m in a physical class room again.

Can’t believe it is almost time!