pom-poms for poetry

I finished summer school just over a week ago, and since then, I've been getting reacquainted with my home, my family, my friends, and the other business of life that's been neglected since the beginning of June.

Last week was a hard transition for me. I was relieved to be finished with class--it lifted a large load of stress off my shoulders to no longer have assignments looming over me each week--and yet I also felt like I was mourning the end of such a wonderful, powerful experience.

I went into this class expecting to meet a requirement. I needed a poetry class before I could start my thesis in literary nonfiction. I was originally signed up for the regular seminar in poetry, but ended up volunteering for the advanced workshop in poetry--a class designated for students doing their thesis in the genre--as the class would cancel if more students didn't join.  

During the first week of class, I was pretty intimidated--peeing my pants, to be more precise. I'd messed around with writing poetry on my own before, but there was no method to my madness. I'd never taken a formal poetry class, and was rather ignorant about contemporary poets.  I was excited about taking a class with our professor--Frank Montesonti--who is the head faculty of our entire MFA program, and who assured us rookies that we could hang with the advanced curriculum.

Well, long story short...at about week five...the half way point...something started to shift in me. To put it bluntly and over-dramatically, I started to fall in love. As I became more entrenched in this new and excited genre, I started to feel as though the poets we were reading experienced the world in a different way than fiction/nonfiction writers, and that perhaps they held the world in a fashion more similar to myself. Their writing didn't consist of sweeping narratives bound together by plot and character. They focused in on the simple moments of life--the moments that so many of us miss on a daily basis--and they explored how these moments are significant to life itself.

By the last two weeks of class, I was engaged in a full-fledged identity crises. A dangerous little voice inside was rooting wildly for me to switch my thesis genre from nonfiction to poetry, but I resisted her peppy cries from the bleachers. I hissed, "Sit down, little girl. You're changing the plays, and you're not even a part of the game!"

My game plan all along was to do literary nonfiction as my area of focus. For my thesis I was going to write a New York Times bestseller, a personal memoir, a tale of my military nursing days, my deployment-stay-home-mom nightmare, all woven in with our adoption journey. It was going to be brilliant, a real page-turner. It was going to be selected for Oprah's book club and read by housewives across the globe! (Feel free to laugh at my delusions of grandeur.)

Only...I didn't want to write it. The deeper I sunk my teeth into poetry, the more the idea of writing this book felt like drudgery.

I started praying about this decision, and that little girl I mentioned before--the one sitting in the bleachers with pom-poms for poetry--she started getting really obnoxious, out of control.  She started doing splits, hand stands, even back handsprings. I couldn't calm her down. It was a lost cause. 

Then I "accidentally" stumbled upon a book that was released last month--a memoir about a wife whose husband was deployed in Iraq for a year. She cowrote the book with her husband. It suddenly appeared that my original idea had already been done before, and how could I really compete?  Her husband was deployed an entire year, which would make my complaints about a three-month deployment look petty. Plus, he was Army, not Air Force, which further enforces the pettiness of my complaints. Oh, and did I mention that her family has also adopted?

So...all the signs stacked up...and after some intense conversations about the big switch with several trusted sources, I decided it was silly to try and fight it.  

Poetry it is.

RA RA RA!

It turns out that I only need to take one extra class in order to do my thesis in poetry. The next class offered starts in November, but we might be traveling to China while that class is going on, so most likely, it will still take me a few years to take the final four classes I need to finish this long-drawn-out degree. I'm in it for the long haul though.

Some people might not understand my hesitation to make the big switch to poetry, might not get why it felt like such a big deal to me. 

But let me ask you this...

How many poets do you know?

How many people do you know who actually read poetry?

How many people do you know who make a decent income from writing poetry?

How many Christian poets do you know?  

Isn't that some kind of oxymoron?

What images come to your mind when someone says the word "poet?"

Are you're thinking of that guy in a coffee shop, chain-smoking cigarettes, sporting a scruffy beard, a beanie hat, a black trench coat, who looks like he could use a shower or five, and drinks his coffee strong and black because he likes it intense, just like he is?  The one who's off in his own world, brooding over his paper and pencil like the world is hanging on his sentimental thoughts? 

Well...to tell you the truth, that's what I envision when someone says "poet," and I didn't want to be placed in that confining, marginal box of society, even if I do have an unbridled affinity for strong coffee, brooding, and all things melancholy.

So, I suppose the point of this post is to share more of what's going on with me, literally, or literarily, or something like that, and to officially come out of the closet and say...

i love poetry!

I love to write it and read it and may some day want to teach it! And maybe that means I'm a bit eccentric, a little "out there," a strange bird, but so be it. In case you haven't noticed, I've started a little poetry page on this blog--upper right hand corner.  It's still in the works. I'd love to just post all of my favorites here on this blog, but that could be a major infringement on copyright laws, so I'll just have to try to link up to what's available online. I hope you'll check some of the links out--there's a lot of pleasure in poetry.

More to come about this. There's some fun stuff to share about what I learned over the past couple months, but for now, I need to bring this post to a close. Thanks for reading, if you still are...this poetry post was quite a novel. :-)