Tag Archives: Goddard College

Au revoir, institution

It was not a huge surprise–the proverbial writing has been on the metaphorical wall for some time–but the college I attended for graduate studies has announced that it is folding.

In January 2001, shortly after I won a grant in poetry from the PA Council on the Arts, I rallied myself and my work, packed a bag, and took the family car by myself to Vermont for two weeks. In a burst of confidence and enthusiasm post-grant, I’d applied to creative writing graduate programs. There were none nearby enough to commute to, and Goddard’s low-residency model seemed my only choice. Well, I could have abandoned my husband and young children and moved to another area, but that seemed untenable and unkind.

But Goddard was perfect. I met new people and made (so far) lifelong friends-in-writing and friends-in-feeling. The work challenged me; the reading was intense! When I look at the bibliography at the back of my thesis, I admit I wonder how I managed. Hard work, intellectually demanding work, constant revision. Well, I needed less sleep in those days. Many times I read and annotated while waiting for my kids while they took piano lessons or riding lessons or whatever they were doing in middle school.

Sometimes my parents or spouse spent a Saturday or Sunday with the children so Mama could study and write. It is kind of a blur, but the community of fellow students seemed so supportive at the time. It’s not that I was without supportive people in my life–but the folks at Goddard, students and faculty, deeply understood my passion for writing. I found I could spend hours talking about things that matter to writers (which is kind of everything, but also, WRITING), which wasn’t easy to do in other areas of my middle-aged, middle-class, mom-life existence.

The iconic Goddard College Clocktower

Goddard often has been termed an “experimental” college. That term covers a whole host of meanings in the world of education. No point in trying to define it, since one thing that experimental institutions tend to do is change and evolve. The program I attended in 2000-2003 differed from the programs of 1985 or 2015. Which is as it should be–education should not be a static set of activities even when some exploration of canonical texts is necessary. One reason I chose to pursue my education at experimental colleges (The New School, Thomas Jefferson College, Goddard) is that I am a slightly odd bird, an autodidact who did well enough in standard subjects but who got the most benefit from deep study of things I felt passionate about–literature, history, botany, poems, dance, philosophy, feminism, visual art. Experimental colleges offered mentors who could guide me in self-directed learning, recommend books and authors, feed my often-changing interests, offer personal, one-to-one advising and critique. I am 100% sure I would not have excelled in universities that followed more standard educational subjects and protocols, and I’m glad I received good guidance (usually) and a well-rounded, if eclectic, education.

Many of the poems in my book Water-Rites are from my time at Goddard, since Water-Rites in an earlier form was part of my graduate thesis. And a fair number of the poems in The Red Queen Hypothesis were first drafted during my years there, when I was experimenting with forms. So, having just learned for certain that Goddard will cease to function as an offbeat, transformative, self-directed institution of higher education–thus joining my undergraduate school, Thomas Jefferson College of Michigan, as defunct institutions–I will post a poem that I know for certain I drafted just before I graduated. It’s a response to the events of 9/11 and was not quite ready, nor suited, for inclusion in my first collection; it appears in The Red Queen Hypothesis and Other Poems.

~

Shreds
	 for Judith

We ran, leaves before a bitter wind,
& some ran headlong & some in circles,
we did not know what to do with ourselves,

& watched, pressed to our windows & could
do nothing: streets erupted with people
like clustered beetles wakened from dormancy.

We walked, in all directions but mostly north,
& we were silent and our mouths were dry.
Things like shoes and hats made us human.

We wept and it was not sufficient,
& swept, then, for months & recalled
mostly paper, the ways we occupy ourselves,
the mild wind carrying what lingered. Scraps.


                   (after “Exhibit 13,” Blue Man Group, 2002)


~

Shift

This past weekend, I decided it was time to submit to some changes in the way I have been submitting.

Submitting manuscripts, that is.

I have sent out a full-length collection of poetry, my second manuscript of over 60 poems, for three or four years now and the time has come to re-assess. On the spur of the moment Saturday I sent out a chapbook-length collection of poems in a completely different vein, on another topic.

Sometimes, a writer just needs to shake things up, shift direction–whether she wants to or not. It is far too easy to get comfortable in a routine (in this case, easy to send the same manuscript file through various online submission portals, at regular intervals depending upon motivation and spare time). Submittable has become the most common software portal for submissions in the poetry world; but I recall vividly the days when I had to print everything out and photocopy the manuscript, then send it by postal mail to each prospective publisher.

So everything shifts, and we adjust.

Alas, The Red Queen Hypothesis and other poems has had no takers. Maybe I need to tear the manuscript apart, rearrange and update it. Maybe the poems just are not as strong as I thought they were, even though more than half of them have been published individually; maybe there is simply no audience for that particular collection of poetry.

I do not consider this giving up on the collection or on the poems in it. I merely aim to make transition, to move along to something a little different for awhile. Wake myself up to the work I have been composing more recently, concentrate on those pieces instead.

Submit to change, and make the best of that change, and allow the change to change the writer. I think I learned that in my MFA program at Goddard.  🙂

grassesA

Online workshops

For the month of October, I participated in an online poetry workshop with Daisy Fried (see this post). I enjoyed the workshop and gained a great deal from it; I wish I had had a little more time to put into the writing, however. As is often the case, “life intervened” and I did not find quite as much creative writing time in the month as I had hoped.

Then again, all writers have to juggle. Life intervenes, always. How dedicated are we to making art? We have to ask ourselves that now and then. If distractions too readily remove us from the genuine work, maybe we’re dilettantes. On the other hand, not all of us choose to devote 100% of ourselves to the work. That does not make us less serious about the hours it takes to compose art.

One thing I learned from the online workshop experience is that, with the right participants (our group seemed well-chosen), you can get to know one anothers’ work and topic concerns fairly quickly, and even glean things about personality, cultural background, and literary influences of the people in the group. This may be more true for writers than for other artists, perhaps, as writers are experienced at…well, writing…which is how the critique and feedback exchanges operate on these forums (via comments). The exchanges were interesting and useful because the perspectives varied greatly; and instead of talking together in a room real-time, and perhaps feeling inhibited by face-to-face shyness or fear of interrupting one another, the participants had time to write our thoughts and think a bit before posting feedback.

The downside of an online workshop, for me, mostly entails the quantity of on-screen reading necessary for full participation. I suppose I could have printed the lectures and comments, but that seemed a waste of paper and was not simple because of the Blogger-framework, the format of which does not play well with my printer defaults. Ah, technology! How I love and hate it! And the beauty of a face-to-face workshop is the beauty of human beings, faces, flesh, vocal tones, body language, gesture–subtleties lost in a virtual forum. When I was enrolled in my MFA program at Goddard, the intensity of the low-residency on-campus workshops and lectures were crucial (and irreplaceable).

Nonetheless, I found the workshop online this past month to be a valuable learning experience that expanded my thinking about poems and narrative, about revision and experimentation, and about the various modes of teaching or critiquing. I recognized, for example, how much preparation Daisy had to do to organize a one-month online workshop, how much organization, and how much thought as to purpose and guidance and feedback, let alone figuring out which low-cost method to employ to deliver the lecture, set the context, and permit easy and rapid feedback on the part of both teacher and students. Not an easy task, and she did a yeoman’s job of it. One thing I deeply appreciated was Fried’s devotion to the value of deep revision rather than just to tweaking the draft. I had forgotten how I used to wildly and almost randomly revise drafts “just to see” what might happen if I made radical changes. Often I would return to the earlier draft with renewed focus, and sometimes the radical revision took the poems to much more interesting places. These days, when I have less time to mull and experiment, I tend to stay on the safe side and take fewer risks with revision. Risk is worth it, though. I need to get back to that approach.

All in all, a positive workshop experience, and one which yielded a couple of poems worth revising and some poetry colleagues whose work I like and whose feedback I value and may tap in future (who knows?). Without leaving home.

home-window

Autodidact as adult student: Goddard & me

In a previous post, I mentioned my peculiar undergraduate experiences at alternative institutes of higher education (The New School) and how being a book-loving autodidact influenced, perhaps even configured, my approach to education. My favored learning strategies led me to a non-traditional graduate school program, as well. Reflecting upon my higher education, I realize that every institution I attended chose alternatives to standard pedagogy–and I am grateful that such colleges exist. The world needs outliers.

A kind of heaven.

The New School’s pedagogy for the “Freshman Year Program” was seminar-based. That worked very well for me. Classes were small, discussion-centered, predicated on the reading of significant original texts–no textbooks. The professor was not a lecturer but a participant-coach and mentor.

The program was only a year long, however, so I had to transfer. There were a number of experimental college programs in the 1960s and 1970s; without the miracle of internet searching, however, they were not easy to locate. I did not find out about St. John’s College, Reed, or Evergreen, for example. I stumbled instead upon Thomas Jefferson College (now defunct) in Michigan.

I completed my undergraduate studies without ever seeing a syllabus. Yet I read more books than the majority of my standard-pedagogy-educated peers and discussed classic and contemporary texts, science and history and literature, in depth with my peers and with scholars. I wrote a lot and did hands-on projects, independent studies, experiments and interviews. TJC drew criticism for its ‘flakiness’ and ‘lack of oversight,’ (some of which, I can attest, was deserved); however, the former college president “described TJC as perhaps too far from the mainstream, but attracting excellent students, noting that ‘Thomas Jefferson College…was sending a larger percentage to graduate school than the College of Arts and Sciences.'” Yes, but in my case it took awhile to get there.

Much water under the proverbial bridge: suffice it to say that in 2000, I returned to college to pursue a masters degree…and I wanted to learn in the kind of environment that suited my style. There were other factors then, as well: two children, for example, and responsibilities I had not encountered as an undergrad. On the other hand, by 2000 I was an adult and more motivated and disciplined than I could ever have been at age 19.

I chose Goddard College for a number of reasons, foremost its small seminar-style instruction, its mix of workshops and instruction, its focus on readings, annotations, mentoring, and community-building among students and faculty–reaching outward into the world at large. The low-residency format only works if the student is independent and self-directed, which–as a returning, “adult” student–I certainly was. I appreciated the school’s more interdisciplinary approach to the creative writing program. We didn’t have to face off, pegging ourselves as poets or fiction writers. And creative non-fiction was taken seriously as a genre to develop voice, style, and depth…it could be studied and parsed. That endeavor of interdisciplinary arts education is true of a few institutions now but was rather new among MFA programs in the late 1990s.

Another college without core requirements, without syllabi, without standard formats. But, like New School and TJC, Goddard offers excellent professors dedicated to students’ intellectual enrichment and personal transformation, small-group discussions, and narrative evaluations. I knew how to balance life’s responsibilities when I enrolled, and I knew what kind of teaching I’d respond best to. How did I learn that? See above. Suits my philosophical, bookwormish, autodidactic approach to–well, practically everything!

Generous community of writers

Lately, my days have been busy with gardening and household chores and efforts to promote my book Water-Rites. I find I can jot ideas into my notebooks but that more sustained creative writing efforts are not possible at this time. That’s okay. Writing, for me, often comes cyclically, with the slow periods acting as collecting points and reflective opportunities that may result in poetry later on. Also, when I am not writing much, I have time to read.

On this blog, I have a page devoted to ART which featured links to work by painters, sculptors, and other artists of my acquaintance. Today, I’m posting links to websites of and books by friends. One thing about the solitary life of writers is that we still require community of some kind: readership, first and foremost; but also reviewers, friendly but useful critique, emotional and career support, and misery-loves-company ranting and hilarity. This community develops many ways–face-to-face, mentorship, virtual collegiality, networking, even postal mail–and sustains the generous community of writers over years and miles.

The event that precipitated my desire to post these links was reconnection with poet Alfred Encarnacion, whose first chapbook, At Winter’s End, David Dunn and I published in the early 1980s when we were running LiMbo bar&grill books. You can find Alfred’s 2012 collection The Outskirts of Karma here.

One poet who has quietly been disseminating poetry for 25 years from his tiny press in Kanona, NY is Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing. From his website, you can order books by many of the people in my writing community: Michael himself, and also Craig Czury, Heather Thomas, Karen Bashkirew, Paul Martin (whose beautiful 2009 full-length collection is available here), Steve Myers, Kelley Jean White, Elizabeth Bodein and many others…including two of my own chapbooks.

Finishing Line Press, which sells through Amazon as well as its own site, has published many of my colleagues in the poetry community and particularly supports female writers; I urge you to purchase books by Celia Lisset Alvarez, Kelley Jean White, Nancy Scott, Elizabeth Bodein. Finishing Line also sells my book The Minor Fauna.

Through Dave Bonta, I met the folks behind Phoenicia Publishing and, through Dave and through the Women’s Poetry Listserv, met Ren Powell. Dave’s book and Ren’s book are available through Phoenicia, and so are print issues of Dave’s online blog literary journal, qarrtsiluni. Also through Dave, my literary community grew through meeting Luisa Igloria, whose books you should definitely check out. Another connection with the inimitable Dave Bonta? That would be Ron Mohring of Seven Kitchens Press, which will be publishing Dave’s next collection and which advocates for the work of Pennsylvania-based poets such as the late Lou McKee and another of my colleagues-in-writing, Harry Humes. August Evening with Trumpet is a particularly lovely book, and Harry is a master. Other Pennsylvania poets to whose tribe I am happy to belong include my much-lauded friend Barbara Crooker, the unpredictable and enthusiastic Barbara DeCesare, Patricia Goodrich (sculptor and poet), and that magnificent woman of letters, Elaine Terranova.

Attending an MFA program at Goddard College granted me an immediate community for which I continue to be grateful many years later. Books by my fellow students and by my mentors include but are not limited to the following (really, there are too many to recall!):

Alan Smerdjian, Jessamyn Johnston-Smyth, Elena Georgiou, Christian Peet, Bea Gates, Ian Haight, Barbara DeCesare, Jan Clausen, Janice Goveas, Bill Moser, Jen McConnell, and forgive me for running short on time or forgetting others…and from my long-ago days at The New School, the amazing Maurice Eidelsberg, whose poems in Shit, Sex, Love, Palsy will have you viewing life from a perspective you may never have imagined.

Through the Women’s Poetry Listserv I mentioned earlier and through conferences and festivals, the generous community of writers has led me to Diane Lockward, Pat Valdata, Elizabeth Raby, Rosemary Starace, Julie Kane, Elaine Heveron, Lori May, Juilene Osborne-McKnight and Steven Allen May of Plan B Press; Ned Balbo, Jane Satterfield, April Lindner among many others. Wendy Ellsworth has written a book on beading and spirituality; my cousin Scott entered the world of book writing with a children’s book you can find here. And my brother, a true Renaissance man, has published a novel and is working away at a non-fiction Rip Van Winkle-type story of archeology, empiricism, Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel Morton.

So  you see, the life of a writer need not be–and seldom is–solitary. Writers love to read, and they therefore support one another inadvertently. My community also includes Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Robinson Jeffers, Dante, and Dostoevsky. To name a few.

Interview

“Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain?  It rose:           the scenery of farewell.
Easy to recognize. The well-known garden…”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
~

primrose by Ann E. Michael

Herewith, a recap of my side (much edited) of the ArtsAlive! conversation this past Sunday at Soft Machine Gallery. SØrina Higgins was also reading and being interviewed by Lehigh Valley Arts Council director Randall Forte, but I can’t adequately summarize her insightful comments. You can find her book here, however.

~

RF: What is your favorite poem in the collection Water-Rites?

AM: I hate to try to pin down a favorite poem, by my favorite writers or by myself. I once heard Billy Collins reply to that question by saying his favorite poem is always the one he is currently in the process of writing. That’s kind of cleverly evasive, but it’s also a little true. Though sometimes I hate the poem I’m currently working on…

I like the title poem, but I get a kick out of “Doxology” because it is so odd; and perhaps my favorite poem is “Tailfeathers” or “The Big Umbrella” or, for purely sentimental reasons—not because it is my best poem—“At Bull’s Head Pond.”

~
RF: What was the most difficult poem to write?

AM: The most difficult poem to complete was probably the long poem in the center of the collection, “The Valley, the Whitetail: A History.” That was difficult in terms of managing the length and the purpose of the poem; also, it required some research. Yes, occasionally poems take quite a bit of research—I have no desire to be inaccurate when I am writing about history or geology or botany (though I often am, inadvertently, despite my best efforts). Not all poetry is solely a work of the imagination.

There are other ways to be “difficult” however. A poem that was hard to complete was the elegy “I Shall Never Be Nearer,” which came quickly initially but took a long, long time to revise and to come to terms with. Not all of these poems—or any of the poems I write—are “about” me or my experiences, I mean, not as biographical as they may seem. But this poem does deal very specifically with the death of my close friend. It was the day after I learned of his passing, and, completely numbed and sleepless, I went with my family for a canoe trip on the lake. I titled this poem “Single Lines” for several years while I was revising it, because the images came to me in – well – single lines. Single images. I must have revised little tiny things in it oh, about 14 times. So I guess that means it was “hard to write.”

~

RF: So, the opposite question. Which poem was easiest to write?

AM: Some poems do come quickly and relatively easily. Not often, and sometimes those that come rapidly end up being sort of crappy poems. But “Lot’s Wife” only underwent about 2-3 drafts and mainly arrived, haiku-like, as a visual image that carried with it some cultural freight.

Another poem that arrived rather miraculously is “River by River.” That was the result of a car trip to Indiana with my kids and is kind of a list poem. It spooled out as a result of a kind of inadvertent prompt. Will Greenway and Elton Glaser were looking for poems about Ohio for an anthology. I read the call for work, went back to my notebook about the car trip, and recalled an incident with my son and a roadmap. The editors chose it as the opening poem in the main text of the book—immediately following the preface poem by James Wright. I felt completely graced and humbled.

~

RF: How did you choose the title of the collection?

AM: Early on, while I was working on my graduate thesis project, I chose the title for the book. I’d written the title poem but hadn’t really thought of it as the title poem until I recognized how many of the poems dealt with drought or with bodies of water or rain or artworks that portrayed water. And spelling the second word as “rites” as in ritual, rather than as an other interesting aspect of water—the “rights” to water that have caused so much conflict over the centuries—seemed fitting given that there are also rites associated with death. Funerary rites, religious rites. And rites in the form of chants and dances people have done to invoke rain during times of drought. So there’s a pun there, rights and rites, and I love literary puns.

I wanted to use Steve Tobin’s sculpture as the cover art, and Steve granted the rights for that photo (more rights, legal rights) and Keith at Brick Road approved of the image for the book cover. So I am gratified by all of that. The sculpture is an early work of Tobin’s, when he was making art using surgical glass piping. It’s environmental, site-specific art that really looks like a splashing creek. But it isn’t—it is glass.

~

RF: Tell us about your publishing history and about how and if poetry publishing has changed over the years.

AM: I had my first poem published in a tiny literary journal back in the days of Xerox-ed micro-magazines, 1981 or 82. I’ve been publishing pretty regularly since then, regularly but not ambitiously. Lots of individual poems and essays in individual journals. I had no academic reason to get a book out, and I had no real direction either. It didn’t seem to be on my to-do list when I was in my twenties. Then, at 30, I had my children. Most of my creativity went in the parenting direction, though I continued to write. I didn’t really work toward book publication until about 1999. Then I began to think about it—after David Dunn had died. In fact, I got a chapbook and a full-length collection of his work out after his death. This is hard to do—to convince a publisher to put out a book posthumously. After all, the poet cannot promote his work. That’s hard on small publishers. But I succeeded. So I thought, I guess I can get my own books published. Maybe. And my first collection was a chapbook Spire press published right after I graduated from Goddard, 22 poems about building a house, sort of ecologically-invested nature-type poems.

Things have changed in the world of poetry publishing, but it is still hard to get your work into actual print—ebooks and POD self- or partially-self-published options, as well as the web and blogs, have changed the spirit of the poetry world only marginally, though I do think these options have made it possible for more people to read and encounter poetry. The absence of critical, discerning, well-read editors & proofreaders is a loss, in my opinion; but poetry is finding other ways to deal with that. And those editors are still out there. Underpaid and overworked and cranky, but out there nonetheless. MFA programs, perhaps. Critique groups have maybe replaced salons and absinthe cafes. I don’t know.

~

RF: Any advice for aspiring poets who want to get published?

AM: I’d advise aspiring poets to be ambitious. But there are many ways to be ambitious. I’m a bit of a plodder, but I hang in there. I’m not great at networking or schmoozing or even being sort of normally assertive—I’m quite shy with strangers and hate to ask even small favors…like asking an editor to consider publishing my work. Or asking people to host readings. I mean, that goes with the job, but it’s taken me a long time to get good at doing that. I hate that stuff lots more than I hate being rejected. I don’t take the rejections hard at all. My weaknesses lie in other areas. So I can say, if you want to get published, you might not want to do what I did…anyway, if you are eager to see print soon, you might want to be more assertive and organized. On the other hand, I have been self-promoting rather badly for thirty years; and I’m okay with that because the poems are better after thirty years even if my publicity skills are not.

I’m kind of outside the box as far as the “po-biz” goes. I do my job at the college, which is only marginally poetry-related, and then only when I am teaching a section of intro-to-poetry. (Mostly I teach remedial comp and tutor students in English; I like to remind myself that Kay Ryan has the same kind of job!). I attend conferences when I can get away and when I can afford them; I have taken seminars and workshops over the years, but not religiously or frequently. The “big thing” I did for my so-called career was to get an MFA from Goddard College in 2003. This was after I had won a PA Council on the Arts Fellowship—back when the council was giving those out. Please lobby your congress people for an increase in federal and state arts funding. That was so crucial for me, earning that grant. A great confidence-builder.

Since then, I’ve earned my MFA and have four chapbooks and this full-length collection coming out and a job in academia that I probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for my graduate studies and a certain amount of dogged persistence of a sort of quiet variety that I seem to possess in abundance. I still send out individual poems for publication in print and online, though not as often as I should if I were really eager to stay on the po-biz radar. I keep up a blog and a Facebook page for “promotional purposes” but don’t expect to see me on your Twitterfeed anytime soon. Technology takes me away from my reverie zone and is, generally, bad for my poetry. What’s good for my poetry are long walks, gardening, and genial loafing, visits to museums, viewing architecture and geological formations, long face-to-face chats with friends, and reading reading reading.

The quote that opens my book, the Rilke quote, kind of sums that up for me. It’s really the well-known garden that makes me recognize where the poems are coming from. The scenery of farewell, in this case, opened up the place this collection began, in loss and later in fullness.