Last week I received feedback from my faculty mentor on my first packet of my last semester of grad school. (I still might get another graduate degree, but it’s gonna be after I take some time away from school.) Her feedback was absolutely amazing! I’ve struggled a bit this semester because I am much better at generating new content than I am with revising and editing existing content. Especially when I’m revising poetry. My process for revising poetry is a fairly long and drawn out process that includes reading a poem over and over for weeks, and then deciding to change one or two things, and then the process starts over. I thought that the more I worked on poetry, the more this process would change, but that has not been true.

Instead of trying to change my revision process, I’m leaning into it. I’m reading more poetry every week. I’m taking notes on what I read. I’m writing down quotes that are inspiring. And I’m continually expanding the kinds of poems and poets I read. This, more than almost anything else, is what helps me revise my work. So yesterday and today, I did a ton of work on my second packet, which isn’t due until Friday of next week. I’m excited to see where this packet continues to take me. And I’m even more excited to see what happens in packet three.

It’s interesting how things change. When I first went back to college in 2014, I had no intention of getting a bachelor’s degree. I was going to finish my associate’s and try and find a good paying job. But my community college was offering a new associates in English, and I was thrilled by the classes required. It was a transfer degree to a specific university close by, and after talking to advisors at the community college and at the university, I felt something spark in me that I hadn’t felt before: a sense of purpose, a direction.

I decided to enroll under the new associates degree and then to transfer to the university. While at the community college, I felt that I would more than likely make my literary pursuits focused on fiction. I read more fiction than anything else, and I felt more confident in fiction than any other genre. I participated in NaNoWriMo two years in a row, completing two rough drafts of fantasy novels. But when I transferred to the university, my creative writing teacher told me that I was clearly an essayist as well as a novelist. I was shocked. I did not expect that. I had friends who were much better nonfiction writers than I, although I thoroughly loved writing research essays. I decided to write more nonfiction to see if I liked it, to see if it spoke to me, to see if I felt I could keep doing it. For two years I wrote prose, only. I wrote so many short stories, essays, and short memoir pieces. And I had many of them published online and in print.

I concluded then that I would write prose. As much as I loved reading poetry, it just wasn’t a genre I felt comfortable in. And when I transferred to grad school for my M.F.A, I intended to write some poetry, but to mostly focus on prose. I wanted to fill my life with essays. But what I found myself gravitating towards was poetry. More and more, I turned away from prose and filled notebook after notebook with poetry. And now, I consider myself to be a poet first. I still love nonfiction. I still love fiction. I still intend to write both. But poetry is my obsession. It’s my first great literary love. And the more I study poetry, the more I write poetry, the more I work on my thesis, the closer I feel to the heart and soul of what makes me me.

Poetry runs in my veins. My grandmother was a poet. She wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of poems throughout her life. She didn’t write them for fame or money or recognition. She wrote them for family. Every four years, her family would have a reunion, and every reunion would have a silent auction. She would include at least one new self-published book of poetry for each silent auction. Some of her poems were published in literary anthologies, and she was most proud of those. In her last two years of life, she wrote more poetry that I had ever seen her write before. She would share some of these with me and ask for feedback. And when I was a kid and well into my teens, she encouraged me to write poetry more than anyone else in my life. She could be harsh and critical of my writing at times, which looking back is probably one reason I struggle to have confidence in my poetry, but her goals weren’t ever to stifle me. They were to challenge me. I didn’t realize it then, but I do now.

I wish she had lived long enough to see me graduate with an M.F.A. in poetry. I wish I had been able to share some of my poems with her. But it comforts me to know that she lives on in some ways through my poetry. And this thesis, which will become my first ever book length manuscript, has allowed me to give a voice to so much that I have struggled to carry. It’s the first of what I hope will become many other books of poetry. Poetry is one way I live in this world. It’s one way I love. It’s one way I love myself. I’ve been told that there are people who need my poetry, especially the poems which focus on pregnancy loss, and I know it’s true because I needed the writings I’m producing now when I first lost my pregnancies. I forget who, but a writer said to write what it is we most need to read, because we aren’t the only ones who need it. But not everyone can write it.

That’s what I hope this semester allows me to do: keep writing the poems I need to read. That’s what I hope this program will allow me to do for the rest of my life. I may not ever write a novel. I may not ever write a collection of essays. But if I spend my life writing poetry, I will have fulfilled my purpose.