a little teaching freak out

Last night, I sat down and tried to plan out the next/last five weeks of my first semester of English Comp. I realized that I have been slacking. I haven't done a single lesson on language choice (connotation/denotation, concrete vs. abstract, etc.) which was supposed to be one of the main focal points of the course. I've also only done one class about audience awareness and haven't taught them how to write good conclusions (which is so evident in their essays!). If I try to do all the stuff that I meant to do earlier, then I won't get to do the stuff I thought I'd do at the end. Decisions, decisions.

During my training for this course, we were told not to try to plan things too far ahead of time, but now I wish I would have. Then I'd know that fifteen weeks is not as long as it seems. Well, I guess I know for next semester. Hopefully none of my students flunk out of English Comp 2 next semester.

Slacker?

Hm. A half hour ago, I proudly posted that I was ready to send out my first chapbook. After that, I started browsing around on some blogs of other MFA students and started feeling like a slacker.

I submit stuff...but in small doses. 2 journals over the summer, only one last winter. I'm planning a bigger pile for this fall, but I know I'm already getting close to deadlines and have probably missed a few. I only plan to submit my chapbook to one contest. But now I'm thinking that's probably not wise. I'm bad at time management. I get stressed out easily and deal with it by watching lots of TV. I need time to turn my brain off. Perhaps I should turn my cable off instead. Then I would be forced to read, write, and get some work done. Maybe wash the dishes.

Part of the reason I'm so lax in sending my poems out is because I hate writing cover letters. They feel so cheesy. I have a formula, but I still hate it. The other reason is because I freak out about simultaneous submissions and the places that don't accept them. Do I have enough good poems to send to those journals? Or should I focus on those because I'll hear back quickly? Oh, and that "enough good poems" stuff? Seriously, someone might like the ones that I'm not crazy about, right? So shouldn't I just get everything out there? What do I have to lose? A few bucks in postage. Oy Vey. I need someone to light a fire under my ass.

Oh, and I still haven't heard from RHINO, which is making me cautiously optimistic. But I don't want to jinx myself.

finish chapbook...check

Well, I've done it. I picked some poems, put them in order, and decided to call it The Secret Prophecy of Thumbs. Tomorrow morning, it goes in the mail for my very first chapbook contest.

I have this weird feeling--like a sense of accomplishment mixed with fear of forgetting something. Like accidentally turning in the rough draft of a term paper instead of the revision. I can't explain it. I guess it comes from knowing that I've come a long way since I've been working on my MFA, but not quite sure if I'm ready to be calling a group of my poems a chapbook. There are some poems that clearly go together, and some themes threaded through all (or most) of the poems, but I'm not sure they work in a cohesive group just yet. And there are two or three poems that I wanted to include, but they just aren't ready, and won't be before the deadline for this competition.

The good thing is that I can now cross this off my to-do list and focus on other things. I need to write my class plan for next week and start really focusing on my Winter Wheat presentation. I've been thinking about it and planning it in my head, but I have yet to put anything on paper. I can't believe it's just two weeks away! When that's over, it's term paper time, then my first time grading freshmen portfolios, then Christmas break. After that...thesis. Holy cow. There's just not enough time!

To "ing" or not to "ing" and other stylistic concerns

In a workshop the other day, I mentioned that I didn't like verbs ending in "ing" in poetry. Mary says, "Oh, you're one of those," or something along those lines, and I get to thinking. Why don't I like "ing" words? At first, I think it is because other verb tenses are more direct, more impactful, but as I continue thinking about it, I realize that I only believe it because I have heard it over and over from a friend of mine who has always given me good feedback on my poems.

Needless to say, this got me thinking about all the other stlyistic choices I thought I had made about poetry, and realized they all come from someone else. I know it is impossible to spend a year and a half in various poetry workshops and not come away with some ideas that are influenced by others, but now I'm wondering if I even know what I like. (Anyone see the episode of Gilmore Girls when Lorelai worries that she likes everything she likes because her mother doesn't? That's how I feel.)

Now, with my chapbook nearly ready to send out and my thesis looming heavily on the horizon, I find myself asking: Did I write these poems, or did my workshops? This semester is probably the last time during my MFA that I'll take any workshops, so what is going to happen to my poetry and myself as a writer when I have to start making these decisions myself?

The Line Break Conundrum

There was an open mic last night in Youngstown, with Steve Reese as the featured reader. Nice crowd, some good poetry, some bad poetry (as always with open mics). I wasn't nervous prior to reading, since I've read in front of this crowd a couple times before, but when I got up to the podium--rather, the music stand stolen from the YSU Music department--my heart started pounding. I hate that! You think you're prepared and ready to go, and then your body decides something else entirely.

Well, getting to the line break conundrum. After I read, my friend Jay (whose opinion I trust quite a bit) told me that my poems have a much greater impact when read out loud than when he reads them on paper. The only possible reason for this is that I don't read my line breaks. I spend a lot of time revising my line breaks, looking for good enjambment potential and natural pauses, and I even practice reading the poem how it looks on the page. But when it is time to read for an audience, I just read the sentences, and line breaks be damned.

This goes back to tenth grade English, when Mr. Bordine told us that if a line ended without punctuation, there was no pause. So I learned to read poems without pauses. Which is fine, except that those editors out there that I'm trying to impress don't get to hear me read out loud, and are therefore forced to read the line breaks I type in. And what if they aren't working?

Getting There

In my attempts to become a visible part of the literary/poetry community, I sent out a seminar proposal to the BGSU Winter Wheat Literary Festival. I've been anxiously awaiting the day when people can sign up for my session, and that day is finally here! Check out the Winter Wheat seminars and workshops schedule to see my session (I'm in the 1:00 section).

Now, if I could just start getting good news in those SASEs...

And now, my first official mindful rambling:

I've been thinking a lot today about academia and my place within it. When I first started my MFA, I thought that I would want to go on for a PhD, then, for a while, I convinced myself I didn't. Over the weekend, I started thinking about it again, and now I'm not so sure what I will do come December '07, when I have a completed thesis and a diploma in my hand.

Before I started the NEOMFA, I did a year in the U of Akron's comp MA program. I had just lost my first "grown up" job at an insurance company and decided instead of looking for another job, I would apply to grad school. Unfortuantely, this happened in May, and I had missed most of the deadlines already, except for Akron's, which is where I got my BA. I knew I didn't want to study lit for two more years, especially with the same professors that I had studied under before (not that they weren't wonderful, but I thought I might end up studying the same stuff over again), so I signed up for the comp track, not exactly knowing what I was getting into.

For the next nine months, my brain was overloaded with Berlin, Foucault, Shaughnessy, and the like. I had a lot of trouble doing well in my comp classes and was even brought to tears one night while trying to prepare a presentation on "Power/Knowledge". You can imagine my relief and excitement when I found out that Akron was about to become part of the NEOMFA. I immediately applied, waited for my acceptace letter, and signed up for two workshops and a lit course for my first semester in the program.

Since then, I've had some minor encounters with deconstruction, new criticism, etc., and have found myself twitching all over again. I write pretty straight-forward, narrative poetry and sometimes struggle with finding the relevance of this heavy, intellectual stuff in my own writing. Which is why I decided a PhD wasn't in my future.

Nevertheless, the possibility has returned to my thoughts and won't let go. I once had a professor tell me I was intellectually lazy, and I think he may have been right. I have friends working on PhD's and I've heard the horror stories: massive amounts of reading, seemingly impossible amounts of writing, zero social life or down time. Do I want to make that kind of commitment? Will my creative writing have to take a back-burner to my academic writing? Can I handle the pressure?

On the other hand, I'm envious of people who can carry on a thoughtful conversation about lit crit or rhetoric as easily as they can talk about the weather. I would love to be one of those people. I want to spend more time immersing myself in the books I haven't read yet, I want to understand why people are obsessed with Nietzsche and Derrida, I want to be able to deconstruct a text and not make a mess out of it. Hopefully, these would all be aspects of my life as a PhD candidate. And I won't deny that the prestige and respect of being Dr. Tracey would be pretty darn nice.

It all boils down to this: will I be ready in 14 months to take on the job market? I have found over the last two months that I love teaching and hopefully will continue to love teaching. I'm aware that the market is not good for PhD's or MFA's, so wouldn't it be better if I spent more time reading, writing, and learning before I put myself out there? Or will I be setting myself up for failure (or, possibly, some success at the cost of my sanity)?

I'm curious how folks out there with MFA's and PhD's made the decision to do both. Any thoughts?

First Timer

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while now and practicing on MySpace, and I believe I'm finally ready to play with the big dogs. Besides, I think my high school friends are getting tired of reading about my academic and poetic woes, so I've decided to reach out to a wider audience--and hopefully an audience that will appreciate my ramblings.

I'm getting close to thesis-writing time and frantically trying to get some publications under my belt, so I imagine most of my posts will be related, although I can't deny that once in a while I'm likely to complain about grading papers or a failed sentence structure exercise in my freshman composition class. Either way, welcome to my brain.