Goals: For Personal Reference and Emerson College's Statement of Professional Goals

My fondest memories of high school involve a group of about nine artistically-inclined folks sitting in my basement and singing to each other. Literal singing did take up much of our time, but we frequently had other projects we didn't mind sharing with one another. We created for the sake of creating and most of us went on to get college degrees in liberal and fine arts.

I'm not actually sure if the proximity to Philadelphia helped our cause, but it certainly gave us a place to escape to. I may be able to fondly reminisce about the support network I had formed now, but back then, we all hated Pottstown. Our town didn't have much to offer us, and that was the glue that held some of those friendships together. Some of us looked to something stronger-- ears, eyes, a desire to have an audience for our perspectives. These are the friendships that have lasted and maintained me through an education 2700 miles from what was familiar.

I moved to Idaho because of its energy. I have made the error of assuming that Idaho is new, though its heavily-blanked underlying heritage is just as deep as Pennsylvania's. While I am curious about the pre-manifest destiny cultures that thrived in Idaho, the kind of constructed creative force that I had become accustom to is young compared the one in Philadelphia, or even the one brewing in my basement. I wanted to grow with something. I wanted to form a movement using my high school friendships as a model for artistic living.

This is difficult to achieve when there are few others who share your goals. I have spent three years trying to pump an artistic pulse into my Idaho experience, and while I had a partner who shared my passion for creativity, as well as friendships that have sustained me, nothing really resembled what I came here for. This has simultaneously been a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it has forced me to reevaluate how I function artistically, and a curse because I started creating for reasons that were not, for me, spiritually sound.

To be fair, I didn't realize the following until about a month ago. If I would have realized this sooner, I might have been compelled to change things. Here, at The College of Idaho, not many people share what they create because they love to create, and I fell into this pattern. Writing is confined to the workshop, and I have always felt a very strong sense of fear about stepping out of those bounds-- that if I were to find a venue through which I could share my poetry, I would be immodest or implying something untrue about my talent. The idea of improving talent quickly began to trump passion. This also invaded music. It seems that musicians I know here aren't really passionate about becoming better musicians-- we in the music department settle for the bare minimum and don't like to practice or perform, which makes no sense because it is what we are getting our degrees in. Why be a music major if you don't love to practice, don't love how it feels to sing, how it feels to share it with others? Why be a creative writing major if you hoard all of your poetry and stories for yourself? This is what I did for three years. I shared in class. I practiced, but alone, and avoided performance because I felt mediocre.

How did I not see this happening? Did I bury myself too far into my work? Now that I've noticed this, I feel things shifting. For instance, Brianne and I have been singing to one another in both Langroise and Jewett. We provide objective criticism, but mostly we are there because we love to sing and to listen. These experiences have made me truly want to work beyond the bare minimum, to aim to sound passionate, practiced, and polished rather than just aim to pass my jury.

I would like to start an underground reading series at the C of I this winter. It probably isn't wise of me to admit this on a forum that may or may not be read by some pretty official folks at the school, but there are some wonderful spaces on this campus that are easily accessed late at night. In my last 18 weeks here, I want to foster an environment that would encourage writers to share with one another and others interested on campus in an informal environment. I like to think that there are plenty of us craving this, craving community and support, and I'm not sure what is stopping me from doing this besides fear of it not catching on. So I'm going to do it. I'm going to send the email out to other writers, start a buzz. I'm jazzed for it.

The lack of community among artists here has fed my goal of wanting to start an arts' collective soon. Collectives are vogue in Philadelphia, but I don't want mine to be too "traditional." Ryan, Molly, and I talk about this a lot; we want to create a space that is a library and a studio, where primarily students (high school students) can come and create. We also want it to be a venue for our own endeavors. I want to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing mostly because I want to continue developing my queer brand of poetics that focuses illustrating the spaces between demarcated identity categories and re-signifying what we may think is familiar, but I also want to gain the skills that would help me become a stronger workshop leader. I want to run workshops that encourage everyone to find their own voice in a supportive community. I want to be able to share my poems in a way that will re-spark the arts, make readings and screenings and throwing bottles of paint on the floor just as important as watching television or consuming the internet. I want to have the space my friends and I didn't have the resources to create for ourselves in high school and that I didn't have the drive or foresight to create in college. This is my goal: to live a life that is focused on art and sharing within a community of artists.

Will getting my MFA really feed this goal? I think so. If nothing else, it gives me time and an excuse to focus on my writing without the worry of required classes or hopefully (fingers-crossed!) a job. It will put me in a community of writers who probably aren't at all interested in settling for poems that are "good enough." It will give me new teaching skills, new ways to approach art and writing, examples of those who make their living off of creating beautiful things. It will move me to a location that isn't Idaho or Pennsylvania. Overall, I hope I get in somewhere, but if I don't, I can always dive into renting a Victorian in South Philadelphia with some of my homies and start creating anyway.

Plan Post 12/4-12/8

Plan for tonight (the single biggest chunk of time I have to work until this Saturday, possibly?):

Finish online portion of University of Washington application

Work on Philadelphia essay (well, mostly try not to cry while re-typing a two-drafts-old version of Philadelphia essay as a result of my flash drive breaking in half...)

Go to Langroise. Print out Arizona paper elements to application. Print out newest draft of Philadelphia essay. Print out all of history reading for the second six weeks, plus the final study guide.

Do history reading.

I have to mail my writing sample to Michigan and I'm missing an LOR for Arizona, but otherwise Cornell, Brown, NYU, UArizona and UMichigan are all completed. The amount of work I have to do for finals looks relatively small, but feels terrifying because I've been running in auto-pilot and I'm not sure if I've actually retained anything from my history class. Luckily, I can spend most of the weekend wrapped in that, as my Philadelphia essay isn't due until Friday at 5.

Plan for tomorrow:

Mail writing sample to Michigan

Get forgotten UWashington cover form to recommenders

Another revision of Philadelphia essay

Project Runway night(!!)

Plan for Thursday:

FINAL revision of Philadelphia essay.

Apply to Iowa

Organize and start studying for History exam (AT LEAST two hours)

Plan for Friday:

Last edit of Philadelphia essay

Apply to Emerson

Study for History- 2-3 hours

Plan for Saturday:

Study for History. Basically all day.

If applications need to be bumped a day (for instance, if I don't finish Washington tonight...), apply to Emerson

Now that I think about it, it might be smart for me to wait to apply to Washington until after finals because I should really edit my critical writing sample...so I'll just do the online app tonight and save the rest for Wednesday/Thursday.

I want a milkshake.

Thesis Thoughts

Recently, I've been brainstorming concise ways to express the thesis of my honors project. I want to argue that while the confessional mode can lead to normalization (as argued by Foucault, if simplified), confessional can also act as the re-signifier discussed by Butler in Gender Trouble because by exploring the areas between already-defined identity sites, we destroy the notion of neat, controllable identities all together. It's easy to connect this idea to the idea that poetry illustrates and re-signifies rather than categorizes and defines. It also translates well to questioning the confessional in music; music, as the language of emotions...how can in be confessional, necessarily, in its own right? A lot of the scholarship I have come across talks of music destabilizing identity. For instance, from Judith Peraino's book:"...music demarcates a space and time wherein gender and sexuality lose clear definition" (7). This is frustrating because I just had a thread that would have been tied these ideas together in the bathroom, but it seems to be gone now.

This is good. I actually want to work on this. Unfortunately, I also need to work on grad school applications and thing for classes with due dates...

Brown application is in. After taking a closer look at their program, I've decided that if I don't get into grad schools this time around, I want to focus on creating experiments in poetry/music and send them to Brown for round two. I feel like my writing sample is much too conservative for their program, and while my personal statement is laced with allusions to the things I hope to do, I doubt my hopes will hold up next to my poems.

NYU time...

tangent?

"Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology"-- needs to be reread, appears to have a lot of theoretical holes that would be easy to argue against from a queer theory standpoint, but I barely skimmed the second half so maybe the paper heals the introduction?

Part of me gets frustrated when people give me new ideas to bat around because then I just want to play rather than do my work or try to get passionate about what I need to be passionate about...

but yay! Thanks Scott!

Cornell application is in! I didn't achieve my goal for tonight, but all I have left to do is the Statement of Purpose for both Brown and NYU, which I might be able to do tomorrow night after the show. If not, Thursday...

Plan for 11/25-12/1

I've hit the grad school home stretch at the same time senioritis has hit me like the plague (chicken pox?) I'm trying to combat senioritis by changing my work environment and the structure of my day. So far-- no improvement.

Basically, what I have left to do on my grad schools apps is:

report GRE scores over the phone (do this on Monday)

doctor SOP to fit each school

submit applications

My plan for this week involves:

Monday: finish and submit Cornell application

Tuesday: finish and submit Brown application; finish NYU app EXCEPT SOP, which...

Wednesday: finish SOP and submit NYU application (I have tickets to the Juliette and the Licks show...)

Thursday: finish and submit University of Michigan and University of Arizona applications

Friday: work on University of Washington writing sample

If I don't get everything after the NYU app finished, it's not the end of the world...my last final is Tuesday, 12/11, and I think I'm going to hang around for a week to finish the rest of my applications and clean out my car and do other things I have neglected this term.

In fact, I will be overjoyed if I get the first 3 apps in this week with two vocal concerts in which I have to perform, two concerts to which I have tickets, an essay due next Monday in my creative nonfiction workshop, and a book to read for my history class...not to mention juries coming up.

It was good to go home, but I wasn't too terribly constructive. I did, however, read a lot of Adrienne Rich. I'm officially in love with the poem "Transcendental Etude." If it weren't so long I'd post it here. I'd like to write an entry about it, maybe this week; it meshes with my Gipson intentions perfectly. There's also a quote in an interview I read with her that has opened my mind to further research possibilities:

"I've written a great deal about that whole issue of dead language, the oppressor's language, a language that is no longer useful, and the need to try to find a new language, a common language, if you will. It's the question of associations with words and of the history of words, and how they come down to us and how we go on with them. But I'm beginning to think and talk a lot more again about that which goes along with language and poetry-- which is music, the vibration of a voice. I see that intonation, that vocal quality, as something that is very personal, out of the self, and then combines with the many traditions, the many histories that we've been exposed to, that we come out of." -- Adrienne Rich, from "Adrienne Rich: An Interview with David Montenegro" (1991), p. 258 of Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose

This quote, well, most of what she says in this interview has forged connections between Rich, Julia Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" (which I need to re-read soon!), Anne Karpe's work on the human voice, and Meredith Monk's music.

More on this when I don't have a paper to work on.

"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" by Adrienne Rich

"Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society" (Rich 167)*

p. 168 has a very rich paragraph about the position of Man in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski, but it is the following quote that serves what I'm looking for at this moment: "And, in the work of both these poets, it is finally the woman's sense of herself-- embattled, possessed-- that gives the poetry its dynamic charge, its rhythms of struggle, need, will, and female energy" (168).

"...I was looking in them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted women poets to be the equals of men, and to be equal was still confused with sounding the same" (171).

"Looking back at poems I wrote before I was twenty-one, I'm startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote the poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men" (171).

"For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of mind is needed-- freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, know that your motion can be sustained, the the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away" (174).

"You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming" (174; emphasis mine)


"...much poetry by women...is charged with anger. I think we need to go through that anger, and we will betray our own reality if we try, as Virginia Woolf was trying, for an objectivity, a detachment that would make us sound more like Jane Austen or Shakespeare" (176)

When I read this essay, I can't help but think about how it was written in 1971; this version was taken from Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, edited in 1993. In the introduction to "When We Dead Awaken..." the editors note that: "The challenge flung by feminists at the accepted literary canon, at the methods of teaching it, and at the biased and astigmatic view of male 'literary scholarship,' has not diminished in the decade since the first Women's Forum; it has become broadened and intensified..." essentially by challenges made and questions posed by other identity groups (166). As it is necessary, people in society cling to people of similar experience, whether they claim a name for themselves or not, which means the challenge to this canon is going to be constantly evolving, constantly re-signified. In 1993, Judith Butler had already released Gender Trouble, which points to this...hmm. A guess a good next step to take would be to revisit "A Poetics of Transit" and see how my thoughts can really be used for re-vision (as well as other things?). I need to revise this essay as well, as it will serve as an excellent jumping-off point for the rest of my project.

Hmmmm....I'm still up for the challenge. I keep thinking of a poem I wrote last spring, "The Mummer at the Caldwell Night Rodeo." It feels almost like a summary, the seeds of images that need to be inhabited in order to be felt. I think it's a nifty juxtaposition to ponder; the pageantry of the festivals of cultures on separate coasts, and there is no need for me to introduce the "I" into the poem, but at the same time I need to inhabit the bodies of a mummer and of a cowboy and insert some real feeling, something sensory, luscious...

I will start this experiment with revising this poem.

"I"

I have been wondering lately, as in the past two days, whether it would be a helpful exercise for me to try to eliminate the word "I" from all of the writing I work on until the new year (writing as in poetry and prose pieces, not this blog...) I am not foolish enough to think that I can capture a universal perspective and eliminate my "eye," but as of late I've been wondering if my writing has been limited in terms of the stance that I take in relation to my words.

There are many places I can go from here; I know that this will be a helpful exercise, even if it doesn't change the way I write in the long run because imposing limitations on creation usually leads to more focused work. Still, I feel linked to what I create, and I could probably track the ebb and flow of artistic creation with the ebb and flow of my life; for the past two years, this has been the time of the year where I become fixated on the existence and instability of the "I," and how we mold ourselves and our identities. This knowledge gives me the power to know that I can change the way I write and the way I sing, I have the power to change an outcome but I can't control what that outcome might be. If anything, this exercise will just be a challenge and help me to focus on other areas of writing besides perspective.

However, I am worried about this being a limitation that would thrust my writing into a more "traditional" and disillusioned fold that, while the words sound beautiful to me, frequently the absence of the "I" or the purposeful deletion of an initial, "it sounds good this way because I bled on the page this way," rids the work of an urgency, an intensity, a pace that creates a warm, nervous rise in the chest more like the one associated with the emotional language of music. Thinking about this brings me back to Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." Every time I read this essay I glean something different from it, but the most poignant part is when she looks into her poem "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers." While a beautiful poem, it lacks the ping of so many of Rich's other poems (like, say "How to Talk to a Man"), and if I am remembering correctly, she attributes this to stripping the poem of the "I"; stripping it of a personal perspective. The ping provided by Rich's perspective is what brings me back to her poems time and time again. Maybe it would be helpful for me to revisit this work...I think I will look for it on my bookshelf...

Anyway, back to considering the ebb and flow of my artistic life...I find that similar issues in my writing and in my singing voice arise at the same time. I have worked hard to get rid of a "belly vibrato" that creeps in in my middle voice when my instrument is collapsed either due to an ill-fitting bra or just poor posture. It also creeps in when in some way I am holding back. Right now, "holding back" may be synonymous with "holding on"; if I think I have control over the volume of my voice, or certain elements of my written voice, it's less scary that I broke up with my girlfriend, or that people in my family are dying. I can't imagine holding on for too much longer. The last major "renaissance" in my life occurred in my senior year of high school around the same time of year, when I broke up with my boyfriend of two years. I held on to so many little things for about a month, and then I just opened up and I having the time of my life writing and driving and creating art just for the sake of art. I don't expect this experience, four-years more mature, to be identical to this, but I have reason to hope that I will open up and just write and sing through my doubts and inhibitions and to work past this rut into a full rebirth.

So maybe I will try this challenge, because if I have a challenge, it forces me to write more poetry than I have for the past month (I've only really worked on 2-3 poems...). If it causes me to open up and pour more from my "I" and create something musical and exquisite, I won't be bummed that the experiment "failed," because it wouldn't really be a failure...

I wish I felt comfortable posting poetry in here, but there is so much ambiguity surrounding what counts as being published and what counts as copyrighted that I'm afraid to share in this public of a forum. I do know of many poets that do post to their blogs, so I might ask them about their feelings on it and go from there.

Today, I hope to: re-read Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing for Re-Vision," print off Gipson elements to put in my Gipson binder, record myself singing and work though some technical challenges, work on the expansion of my Philadelphia essay, and get at least three different version of my statement of purpose modified. I think these are realistic goals to accomplish before tomorrow's plan post for my week in Pennsylvania.