I met with a fellow member of my cohort last week. We sat in a diner for nearly five hours and talked books, movies, television, last semester, nerd culture, Comic Cons, politics, trauma, the supernatural, and a few other things besides. It was a wonderful evening of catching up and reconnecting after so many months being isolated from everyone. He’s a fiction writer almost exclusively and I’ve been working with both nonfiction and poetry. We talked about the challenges of keeping up with the M.F.A. program while also working and maintaining what at least resembles a personal life. We talked about the upcoming semester, which is the start of the second year of the program. We talked about the essay we’ll be writing over the course of the semester and the different aspects of craft we think would made for good topics for our respective essays.

While talking with him I realized that, even though I was accepted into the program as a prose track student, what I really wanted to focus my thesis on was compiling and revising a collection of poetry. I didn’t realize it but even in the first semester, some of the pieces I wrote are poems. I might have intended them to be essays, but they are poems. Or, at least, essays that function as poems. Essay poems. Lyric essays. Poetic essays. Take your pick. And then last semester, I included a packet of poems with each packet of prose I sent my faculty mentor. And since then, since the end of that semester, I have worked on only poetry. Exclusively poetry. Every Thursday, I’m part of a virtual write-in with the amazing poet, Kate Gray, and every Thursday I walk away with a new poem.

I’m reading Illuminations by Rimbaud and translated by John Ashbery, a collection of prose poems that are, honestly, astonishing and beautiful. I’m likely going to reread this book because there’s so much in it, so much to each poem, that I feel almost overwhelmed as I’m reading. I’m also pulling down two more books on the craft of poetry, both from the Art Of series from Graywolf Press: The Art of Syntax by Ellen Bryant Voigt and The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach. I also intend to reread The Art of Recklessness at least once more this year, along with The Art of Attention because goddamn, I’ve never encountered two books on craft that were more inspiring or edifying.

The point to all of this is that, rather than finish my M.F.A. as a prose track student, I’ve officially shifted my focus to poetry. I mentioned that I wanted to do this to the student from my cohort I met up with and he suggested I talk with the director of the program and ask if that was even possible. I decided to do exactly that because, while I would love to revise and work on some of the essays I’ve written in the first year of this program, and while I would walk away with a fine set of pages and a lot of pride in what I’ve accomplished, I wouldn’t feel the most fulfilled. I am being drawn to poetry and I have been since before I started the M.F.A.

It started with my grandmother being diagnosed with bone cancer back towards the end of 2018. Knowing that she was in the process of slowly dying, that she was ill, that there was something in her body actively trying to take her away from me, ignited something in me that has only burned hotter with each new step in my life. Typically, poetry has been a short-term fling that comes and goes when things in life start to stress me out. But after she was diagnosed, that changed. I started writing poems more frequently. I started reading poetry more often. It was like a hunger a couldn’t satiate.

This hunger continued after my grandmother died. She was a lifelong poet. She wrote hundreds of poems over the course of her adult life and found some minor success having individual poems published. She self-published at least five small collections of poetry. And as a kid when I first discovered that I loved writing, she encouraged my newfound interest in the written word by buying me notebooks and pens pretty much whenever I asked her to. Poetry was something that connected her and I that no one else in our family had. It was special and unique to us. And now poetry is the way I still connect to her. It’s how I look for her, how I manifest her, how I find her around me in nature and in life.

Poetry is also how I processed through my divorce. Prose was a big part of that too, but poetry was really how I got through those first few months where I wanted to sink into the floor and just disappear. It was how I processed the heartbreak. During the first residency, I wrote a poem that I thought was an essay and actually had published as an essay in a writing contest, but now I see is a poem and was a poem all along. So I’ve been revising it, reworking it, expanding it. In hindsight, it was the first poem that started me on this journey of writing so many poems.

I’ve accepted a lot of things about myself since last semester:
I’m a philosopher. This is an intimidating and daunting fact to accept, but it is true. My faculty mentor pointed it out in his first letter of the semester and it was like a piece of me that was hidden but had always been there was revealed.
I’m a critical writer. I struggled with my annotations during the first semester because I didn’t fully understand their function. But it was during the second semester that I seemed to unlock a deeper understanding of what the annotations are meant to do. It’s a further way of understanding craft, of reading beyond the page. It’s relatively easy to look at a story or a paragraph or a poem and say, “Here’s what I see the writer doing.” It’s another thing entirely to really dig into the details and draw conclusions based on the facets of craft the writer is utilizing, and then applying those facets of craft to our own work. It means really listening to the work. It means analyzing. It means getting your hands dirty with ink.
I’m a poet. Poetry was how I first realized I wanted to be a writer, so it’s entirely fitting that now I’m owning this space. The thing I thought I could never do is now the thing I’m devoted to, the thing I’m running after, the thing I’m becoming obsessed with. I’ve actually started dreaming in poetry. (Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. All I can say is that the dreams are sensory and bodily and full of everything me and everything not me. I imagine it’s what people mean when they’re learning a new language and they start dreaming in that language; poetry is becoming my new language, so of course my subconscious is manifesting it in my dreams.) By the end of this program, I will have a collection of poems. I’m in awe of this. And I am full.

Sending love. Sending peace. Sending poetry.