"Learning to Write the MFA Poem" [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve heard people argue that there’s an awful kind of poem
called an MFA poem, and usually these people

who hate MFA poems have never earned an MFA,

so the MFA poets argue vehemently in defense

of their craft and their MFAs, and I, an MFA poet

try to agree and say, I’m on the MFA’s team.

We’re right and they’re wrong. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

But the truth is, well,

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write

when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree

from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess

I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,

though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well

(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),

but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,

which I despise, not because the poems are bad

but because I was taught how to write them

by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)

who was abusive to women, mostly,

fucked with their heads if not their bodies,

you know the type.  Back then

the women took whatever he dished out

because he was famous I guess.

I hated that, and how he would write poems

about being an asshole, which he was and is,

and about everything and anything else

because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,

so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,

that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems

though nothing is ever really happening

because the poems are usually in some static place

like an airplane seat, where he is safely buckled in,

or a dream, or a therapist's office or a hospital room . . .

He was so often in hospital rooms

because he had just had an appendectomy

or a case of gout or a kidney stone

or gangrene or hemorrhoids or who knows what else,

hypochondria maybe, and usually there was a TV on

(this is America, after all, and everything

is always happening on TV, he said),

and so the I of the poem is always watching

scenes of violence and destruction from far away

while obsessing about himself

and thinking of what the I really wants

which is usually pretty predictable:

a shower, a cup of Starbucks,

a few martinis, a really good fuck.

Yes, he smirked, a good fuck is always nice,

and it’s nice to fuck or use the word, fuck,

in a poem as often as possible

while on TV people are drowning in the mud

at the Grande Island at Angra dos Reis

or being tortured, bombed, or raped in South Waziristan

or maybe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

or they are being massacred in Conakry, Guinea

or dumped into mass graves in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero . . .

and somehow the poet usually picks which crisis

to write about, depending on the sound of the name

of the place.  The poet likes the name of the city of Sarajevo,

for example, because it sounds like music on his tongue

and reminds him of his first love, Sarah De Angelo.

Yes, Sarah De Angelo.  He says her name aloud

as he wonders whatever happened to the lovely Sarah De Angelo

whose name still feels like an ache in his gut,

whose name still fills him with longing and angst,

even now so many years later, even in this hospital room

with horrible scenes of death and disaster playing over and over again,

he thinks only of Sarah De Angelo, and he remembers

the first time he saw her.  He was eleven years old

and new at Saint Charles School in Toledo, Ohio,

and she was wearing a pink frock, pink socks,

and pink ribbons in her yellow hair.  Yes, frock,

he thinks, now that's a word no one uses much

anymore.  Maybe the poem should include

a few more words like that, like slacks perhaps.

Slacks aren’t nearly as nice as a good frock, of course.

But maybe the poet remembers when the girls

were first allowed to wear slacks to school . . .

and there was that distinction, carefully explained

in the dress code manual, between pants and slacks,

between trousers and slacks,

and as far as he was concerned, slacks

were a big mistake.  No one should ever be allowed

to wear slacks, those polyester twills

that made the girls look shapeless and manly . . .

Even Sarah De Angelo looked like a penguin in black slacks.

And at some point (who knows when, but it was never soon enough)

the poet realizes that his poem is getting a bit too long,

and he also notices that the nurse on night duty is wearing slacks

beneath her white gown, and he can't help thinking

of Sarah in a silk white blouse with ruffles and black slacks,

and how he wouldn’t mind if the nurse would linger

a while longer and maybe ask him how he feels for once,

and pretend she gives a fuck about him,

and he then begins to wonder what it would be like

to release the nurse from those double knits.

Maybe he could do her a favor or two,

make her smile, laugh, sigh , , ,

but when she rolls her little tray up to his bedside

and hands him a pink pill and a plastic cup, she just says, Take this,
and he does.  Yes, he takes whatever she gives.

-- Nin Andrews

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Wow. Terrific.

[Edward Nudelman]

Yes, well, I don't have an MFA but have written far too many MFA poems. Right now I'm hacking with abandon a manuscript of 50 poems to beautiful little pieces, each one. Somewhere in that burning house, in a corner, wagging its frightened tail, the real poem is barking

[Bean]

Wow! that was fucking good! Thank you. That is on par with the freshest cup of coffee brewed, and delicious, the first one in the morning, that make both eyes go: PING!

[David Grove]

I went through the MFA program at the University of Michigan when I was 23. I wasn't taught how to write an MFA poem; I wasn't taught much of anything. Simic says people called his early poetry "crazy images strung arbitrarily together"; that's a good description of the poetry I wrote then. My teachers had little to say about it. My classmates had almost nothing to say about it, and most of them hated me. They didn't write MFA poems--they lacked the chops. They wouldn't have known what you meant by MFA poem. They wouldn't have known what you meant by sonnet. They didn't imitate, admire, or even read the poetry of our teachers. I lusted after several attractive classmates. They were all married, or lesbians, or involved with men in sensible, unpoetic lines of work. I never fucked them; the other guys in the class never fucked them; the teachers never fucked them; they never fucked one another. None of us had any charming vices. The workshop was as dionysian as a prayer meeting of seventy-year-old eunuchs. Yes, those were the days.

[Raylotekka]

I'm not sure why (or when or how, much of the time) ... but this poem was awesome -- rather, it was fucking awesome. Woke up my brain and made me smile.