Writing Orientation was Wednesday, and I finally got to meet/see all the incoming poets. Prior to Orientation, I took the free tour of major buildings on campus that I'd likely need to find/go to, and met some fiction and nonfiction kids (they were . . . whatever, didn't make friends there), but I met a poet who originally hails from Switzerland named Emily Martin! She went to Columbia for undergrad, met her law school boyfriend, married him for love and deportation reasons, he had something of a breakdown working in corporate law downtown, and thus they moved to upstate NY and she now commutes to school.
I really like Emily--she's very European: low key, soft-spoken, but everything she says is very deliberate and blunt. There's no bullshit, and she's genuinely very helpful and keeps telling me secrets and insider information about food, etc. on campus. I'm not sure why she's so nice and kind to me, but I accept, and we're pretty good friends. I won't be seeing her much outside of school, but I'm really glad to have met her. I feel calm around her. It's quite nice.
There's only about 22 incoming poetry students, and we're vastly outnumbered by the many, many fiction (SO MANY) and many nonfiction students. Timothy Donnelly talked about the program, and while I may have initially been skeptical about enrolling in his Meter, Rhythm, and Form course, I now realize that it would be wise to take anything that he teaches because he is so damn awesome!
He talks really fast and makes quick connections and overall seems spastic, which reminds me of myself when I get really excited, and he was very friendly, chatty, and nice. And I liked that he non-bashed bashed Iowa's writing program. That bit was pretty hilarious.
For the most part, Emily and I were relieved to meet/see others like us, and to see that they weren't arrogant, cocky, or mean. Everyone seems to be in the same boat, and we all hail from everywhere.
There's an American who has my Swedish backpack because she married a Swedish man and has been living in Stockholm for the past 6 years. Oh, and seemingly everyone lives in Brooklyn, or in student housing by campus.
I'm kind of glad that I don't live in BK. Remember Keegan? He seemed to have been waiting for me to arrive, and during one of the breaks, took me aside outside and made me dish my gossip on the workshop teachers that I knew from Cal Bedient. Then he shared his scoop, and like, we banged fists because we're supposed to be BFF. We're in 3 of 4 classes together . . .
But I met other cool kids! I really like tall, skinny JC Longbottom (Longbottom!) who grew up all over Europe, but is American; he's very friendly and easy-going/laid-back. Like everything bad would just roll off of him because he'd just laugh and nothing could be so terrible! I like this kind of energy. Plus, I like that he's unassuming and is genuinely interested in what people have to say. Let's face it: most artists are self-absorbed. So it's refreshing.
Behind JC, I met Jay, the hindjew (half Hindi, half Jewish) from Harvard, who's awesome! I met more kids, but I don't really remember their names (or I didn't care enough about them to describe them.)
All the Fall semester professors introduced themselves and their course in the library that looks like where Ghostbusters was filmed (maybe?), and it was mind numbingly boring. I kept playing Words with Friends discretely. But it was good to see all the different faculty members, and to see which ones were especially witty/funny.
I later got very very drunk with the funny ones! It's so easy to banter with silly people, duh.
So at the end, there was a reception with food and wine, and I hung out with drunk poetry kids talking to maybe not as drunk professors, and it was pretty surreal. In my head, I kept thinking: I'm at Columbia, drunk on a Malbec wine, getting brownies for a poetry girl whose name I've forgotten (Lauren? Maybe . . .), lamenting over the fact that no more wine is left with the funny professor, Gary Shteyngart. He responded: "No more wine? THAT IS TERRIBLE!"
He also told me and the two other poetry kids next to me that Columbia is known for having the most attractive MFA students. He then talked about his visit to Syracuse "They all looked so . . . and they all date each other . . ."
He's hilarious. I should have known, since he's teaching a course called, "The Hysterical Male," which is pretty awesome.
Oh yea, I only have classes Tuesday/Wednesday (so I definitely need that second job), and they are:
- The Beginning of the End
Richard Howard
In the last decade of the 19th century, the culture of the British Empire appeared to be marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Readings from these seven English fictions will explore ways in which that perception of loss was cast into archetypal narratives, myths of transfiguration which sought to account for the culture's troubles, if not to assuage its anxieties.
She(Rider Haggard) 1887
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) 1891
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) 1891
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) 1894
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) 1896
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (R.L. Stevenson) 1896
Dracula (Bram Stoker) 1897
Close attention will be paid to representations in these works of three forms of fin de siècle decline-national, biological, and aesthetic-which late-Victorian degeneration theories utilized to "explain" how the nation's twin obsessions with Decadence and Imperialism became intertwined in the iconography as well as the mythology of the period.
- Avant-gardes, and Then Some: 20th-Century Experimental Poetry
Marjorie Welish
This seminar will focus on poetry that seeks to revolutionize the word, the phrase and the sentence. Imagism, Vorticism, Russian Formalism, Toronto Research Group, Objectivism and its legacy in the provocatively named Language School will provide the core study, with meaningful side trips to the New York School and other relevant poetry. Emphasis on poetics will guide our understanding of the cultural strategies in utopian activism that would mandate formal invention.
Readings to be studied will include some of the works below:
Ezra Pound: Cantos: Cantos XIII and XIV
Gertrude Stein: Motor Automatism, from Tender Buttons
Mina Loy: from Love Songs to Joannes
Vladimir Mayakovsky: from Selected Poems
William Carlos Williams: from Spring and All
Louis Zukofsky: from All
Jackson MacLow: The Pronouns
Clark Coolidge: The Crystal Text
Christian Bok: Crystallography
Emmanuel Hocquard: This Story is Mine
Lyn Hejinian: from Oxota
Barrett Watten: Conduit
- Meter, Rhythm, and Form
Timothy DonnellyThis craft course is designed to provide students with a historical and theoretical overview of prosody in English and also to encourage original composition in—and informed experimentation with—traditional poetic meters and forms. Extensive primary readings will range from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse through Modern free verse and onward to contemporary traditional and innovative work. Considerable emphasis will be placed on iambic pentameter (Surrey, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Frost) and the history of the sonnet. Critical readings will be rigorous, including Derek Attridge’s The Rhythms of English Verse and John Fuller’s The Sonnet as well as excerpts from Antony Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse and Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. We will also examine a handful of key defenses and manifestos, including Sidney’s “A Defense of Poesie,” Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” and Wordsworth’s Preface; crucial essays such as Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” Federico García Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende,” and Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought”; as well as shorter articles such as Louise Bogan’s “The Pleasures of Formal Poetry.” In the spirit of that essay, participants will be expected to question any received notion of traditional poetic form as merely restrictive. Weekly written assignments will aim to deepen the participants’ understanding and appreciation of traditional versification while affording them the opportunity to experience firsthand the aesthetic and expressive possibilities that traditional versification offers. Beginning in the third week, the third hour of every class will be devoted to an investigative workshop of students’ written work. The workshop will be ‘investigative’ insofar as our objective won’t be to provide editorial input towards the polishing and perfection of the individual work so much as to scrutinize its makeup, to perform an inquest into how and why the poet chose to make the poem the way he or she has chosen to make it.
- Sarah Manguso's poetry workshop
I'm very excited for classes to start (especially the Avant-Gardes one). Except, I have reading to do already, which is kind of a bummer, but the biggest stress factor is that I have to not only submit a poem for the workshop by midnight, Sunday, but then also bring in another poem for the next workshop to class on Wednesday. That's two poems in less than a week. AHHHHHHH!
It's mostly nerve-wrecking, since these two poems will be my first impression/introduction to my fellow classmates. And c'mon, we're all judgmental. I'm mortified. And scrambling, because I have work tonight, and a double shift tomorrow, and work Sunday. FUCK!
Fodder, feed me fodder.
Oh yea, after the reception, Keegan and I drunkenly collected some poetry kids to a local bar, 1020 (I said, like Spoon? But no one heard me, or got it . . .) The entire night, Keegan kept trying to kiss my hand (I said, you can only really do that once, since we're not meeting again and again . . .), and I was pretty impartial with him, but he still didn't get it, so then when he tried some other drunken quasi-advance, I said something blunt with a smile and then walked to the restroom. When I came back, he informed us all that he was leaving.
I later got a text which said, "goodbye 4 eva"
Who knew boys were so dramatic? I told all of this to Emily the next morning, and we laughed about it together.
It was interesting at the bar, how I sat at a booth full of boys (Emily left early), and the next booth were all the girl poets with one guy! I can't really stand that one guy--his name is Sasha, and he's kind of a know-it-all cocksure fellow, but not mean. How come I always end up with all the chill guy friends? Aside from Keegan, the other male poets (and one fiction guy who was a roommate) were all good company. I'm making fast friends!
This is all very, very exciting. And I was informed that the department has lots of wine at events, so I guess drinking with professors is soon to be a common thing.
I'm neither in love with nor loathe Columbia (I kind of hated UCLA when I first started for stupid immature reasons), but Columbia has been extremely gracious to their incoming students with giving us all the resources and information we might need. I'm truly impressed, and am very very glad that I am at such an amazing place. I'm so amazed how comprehensive and thorough they are. I didn't really realize it until I compared Orientation experiences with Mindy!
I have no regrets. And after talking to professors and second year students, I realize that the next two (plus) years will be lots of networking and creating invaluable connections and situating myself in the school, NYC, and writing world. This sounds inconceivable to me at the moment, but so exciting at the same time.
I'm not doe-eyed, but I cannot imagine a life back in San Francisco at this point. I don't think I could turn back. This is a sad note.
-------------------------------
Today is shit Friday since not only do I have a full blown cold sore on my lip (again), but it's also affected the entire left side of my face and body. The nerves all hurt and are extremely sensitive to touch, and I feel like I have the flu.
Somehow, I have to manage work, and 2 poems. And red tide is coming. What a great big, "Fuck you, d." from my body.
I'm considering wearing a paper bag to class on Tuesday.
FUCKKKKK
Somehow, I have to manage work, and 2 poems. And red tide is coming. What a great big, "Fuck you, d." from my body.
I'm considering wearing a paper bag to class on Tuesday.
FUCKKKKK
