Excerpts


Strange MFA experiences seem to be the rule rather than the exception.At least that's what I gather. A few months back, a lot of bloggers were telling their MFA stories. Mine is far too long and complicated to relate here, but I basically got screwed. Screwed good. It had to do with essentialist ethnicity, blind obedience, and paucity of aesthetic options.

As for poetry community, there is NO poetry community here, unless you count the blue-haired octogenarians who show up at the occasional "working class" poet's reading and clap and sigh politely. Oh, and there are a few slam poet things, though that's not really my thing. My main poetry "community" is a virtual one. I've made a lot of friends the cyberway...I might not still be poeting without it. In Eugene, Sharon Olds and Philip Levine are considered the paradigms of poetic excellence. Not simply a couple of poets, or even a couple of good poets. They are pretty much IT. Carolyn Forche perhaps exercises an influence by way of her anthology. I was at a reading last year where a poet prefaced every poem with the comment "[t]his is a poem of witness." Most of her poems were about family or nature. That's the aesthetic, too. You write working class poems or domestic family poems; anything else and someone might accuse you of being the dirtiest of all things, the fearsome "Language poet."