Next Stop: Graduate School!

Last week was full of personal and poetic happiness: the arrival of our first cat in over ten years (after prolonged negotiations with my husband), the arrival of the promotional postcard for my chapbook, and - most wonderful of all - the letter stating that I had been accepted into the MFA program at Pacific University, Oregon.

This last bit of news represents a huge step ahead in my journey as a poet, and I am so grateful to the two wonderful people who wrote letters of recommendation, to the instructor who put in a word for me, and the admissions folks who said yes to taking a chance on me.

The work is only starting, and while I am of course nervous about the work that lies ahead and whether I can bring enough to the program to really make it pay off as it could, I'm sure that a year from now, I will have grown as a writer.

I just found this helpful note from Wesley McNair, the Poet Laureate of Maine:

The poet takes a journey that opens his heart in two ways, deepening first his intuitive awareness, from which his poetic insights come, and secondly, his compassion for fellow humans and all the living things with which he shares the planet. Without the development of this second thing, his poems may turn inward and lose contact with the very audience to which poems must be addressed.

This leaves me very mindful of the need to develop "this second thing." I'd come to the same conclusion on my own, recently; ie., for my work or words to ever have any worth or value beyond some shallow self-therapy or mildly entertaining observations, I must love fellow humans and the natural world much more deeply than I currently due - especially in the case of the former. I need to expand my compassion and my capacity for compassion for the poetry. Here I veer dangerously away from this being a dry or objective blog entry toward territory usually reserved for my personal blog, but no mind. Let it be the beginning of the work of connecting with whomever might follow these pages.