mandalay

graduate purgatory

as you may know, i am hoping to go to grad school for creative writing in the fall. the research i did for choosing schools to apply to was extensive and i ended up applying to all but one of the schools i had wanted to (by the time i got to feb. 1st, the prospect of one more application hit me like the proverbial straw - sorry alaska). i applied to 11 schools. that's right, let me spell it out so you get the full weight of it - e l e v e n. did i mention that i'm also insane? in my research, i went to the library with a list of all the poetry teachers in all of the programs that i was remotely interested in. i alphabetized the list. now you may think that's a pretty anal thing to do, but the poetry section at UT spans quite an area and i promise the other way would have been more difficult. anyway, there were about 90 poets on the list. i went through and got one book from every poet that had been published (which was about 75) and i read at least three poems from each one. then i found the poet on my list and if not one of their poems sparked something in me, i crossed them off my list. if they did, i put a little star by their name and moved on to the next one. when i had finished (and had done internet research and scoured some anthologies to find the remaining poets) i crossed the schools off the list whose poets hadn't impressed me. i tried to only keep those schools who had at least two poets that i liked. this eliminated certain schools which i had planned all along on applying to: i.e., columbia, brown, the new school, and iowa. i figured that if i considered our styles so different, they would probably feel the same way about mine, and i wouldn't have too much to learn there. i don't want to write postmodern poetry. it did put some schools on the list that i hadn't fully considered though, like ASU and NYU.

well, the letters are starting to arrive. and as they do, i'm starting to think that maybe the universe knows more than i do about my desires. why is that? you may be wondering. well, because the schools which have rejected me were schools that i couldn't really see myself at - utah, houston, montana. they were schools that i applied to because i felt i should. even though they have great writers, there was part of me that really balked at having to live in houston (houston was my one concession - the one school in texas i applied to because it's sooo good, despite the fact that i want to get the hell out of dodge, which is to say, out of texas). and i applied to utah also because it was a good school even though i never felt i could be comfortable there. as far as montana, i've been to montana, i had my important experience there and it was with photography not poetry. it felt done. now, i'm not saying that i'm not going to get rejected from places that i truly would have liked to go to, but the fact that i got waitlisted at michigan makes me think that things will turn out as they should. jill said that i wouldn't get accepted somewhere that i wasn't supposed to go. it makes a lot of sense, too: the schools that think my writing is worth something and think they have something to teach me are the ones i'm supposed to be at. all my rejection letters are up on my fridge. 4 down, 7 to go. and if nowhere accepts me, then i'll know i shouldn't be in grad school right now and i'll find a photo job somewhere.

and in case you're keeping tabs, here are the schools i'm waiting to hear from:
virginia, george mason, nyu, syracuse, indiana, illinois and asu.

Labels: poetry

posted by amanda @ 8:03 AM