low-responsibility MFA

The low-responsibility MFA program

In these stressful times for young adults there is a need for new kind of MFA program. The low-responsibility MFA program puts the student in control his/her MFA experience. Students are encouraged but not required to fall into a curriculum that involves any or none of the following pursuits—

• Getting a Tattoo: A Life-Long Accomplishment & Balancing One’s Piercings for Less Neck Pain



• The Tardy Muse: Strategies for Killing Time While Waiting for Inspiration



• Couch-Surfing Across America in the Kerouac Style



• Libraries Are Labyrinths: Getting Lost in the Stacks for Fun (Bring a Snack)



• Thrift-Store Safari: Developing A Good Eye for Bargains in Black



• Go Green Ghost: No Car, No House, Means Minimal Environmental Impact (Carbon in Pencils is Okay)



• Portrait of An Artist: Mastering the Slouch, the Pout, and the Ability to Stare Into Space for Hours on End



• Weekly Playshops: The antiWorkshop for Playing With Words (Location & Time to Be Announced When The Spirit Moves)

Teachers and assigned mentors will keep their distance so as not to stifle the free-wheeling creativity of their students. Students will self-report their progress toward a degree and upon completion of their variable terms of study will optionally present ‘some ideas that they had for poems’ to the director. The director is authorized to grant degrees liberally and without prejudice in respect of the diversity of student experiences and the efforts they have not undertaken.

Tuition will be billed directly to a parental or guardian credit card. Sorry no refunds for early withdrawal or student’s inability to attend because there is no way to tell whether any student is around or not. Note: This school complies fully with ‘non-interference policy’ of The Federation.

reckless

Always something reckless in the language of a great poem.

poetry invented

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. And from that need, from the relationships within ourselves and among ourselves as we went on living, and from every other expression of man’s nature, poetry would be—I cannot say invented or discovered—poetry would be derived.

—Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Wm. Morrow & Co., 1974)

weight of the pieces

One should be able to infer from the fragments an important whole. Like the Elgin Marbles, one can sense the grandeur of the greater whole from which the pieces came.

like water into light

The poem as osmosis mosaic.

arguments with the masters

Mr. Wordsworth, I’m less interested in emotion recollected in tranquility and more inclined to emotion collected into a full ecstatic trance.

no favor to the reader

One of those breathless hyperbolic introductions that no poet could or should have to read up to.

bodying forth

We body forth our ideals in personal acts, either alone or with others in society. We body forth felt experience in a poem’s image and sound. We body forth our inner residence in the architecture of our homes and common buildings. We body forth our struggles and our revelations in the space of theatre. That is what form is: the bodying forth. The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.

—M.C. Richards, Centering: in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (Wesleyan U. Press, 1969) [n.b.: M.C. stands for 'Mary Caroline']

second generation

His poems were like Frank O’Hara’s except he didn’t work for MOMA and hang out with cool, cutting-edge artists in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

not a pretty sight

Representation that sears the gauze onto reality.

one step ahead

Trust that the reader gets what you’re after just before you do.

military parade

Why do all those regular stanzas remind me of a military parade?

after heraklitas

One can’t wade into the same line of poetry twice.

at the back of the mind

Muse poetry is composed at the back of the mind: an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined; in which intuitive thought reigns supralogically, and personal rhythm subdues metre to its purposes. The effect on the readers of Muse poetry, which its opposite poles of ecstasy and melancholia, is what the French call a frisson, and the Scots call a ‘grue’—meaning the shudder provoked by fearful or supernatural experiences.

—Robert Graves, “The Dedicated Poet,” Oxford Addresses on Poetry (Doubleday & Co., 1962)

too thinned

A poem pared to air.

house slippers

The lines padded along in soft iambs as though written in house slippers.

years of mystical thinking

So much mysticism surrounds ‘the linebreak’ in free-verse poetics.

storied song

A lyric clad in narrative.

prose poem

Prose poem: A poem comfortable with the right margin.

empire of chimeras

Horace was not one of these who believe that the caprice of the poet suffers no law above itself. In modern times, Young sounded the tocsin of Pseudo-Romanticism, when he declared that “in the fairy-land of fancy genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” The poet, indeed, can create a world of his own, and, if he is endowed with the true genius of the poet, can insure our belief in his creation. But, even the poet must not offend our sense of congruity by endeavouring to unite things that are essentially incompatible. Horace would have no sympathy with the false Romanticism which could bring into being a world of chimeras having no conceivable relation with existing experience. Such things he would regard as the fevered dreams of a diseased imagination. He would thus look askance at the riot of imagination, and the unfettered play of emotion, which many regard as the divine prerogative of poets.
…
In a later passage of the Ars Poetica, he seems to go still further, when he insists that the poet’s fictions be “proxima veris.” [435-436]

—J. F. D’Alton, Roman Literary Theory & Criticism (Russell & Russell, 1962)