Lines for a post-MFA summer: “remembering blue/ just when she needed to be startled most”

Two months ago, I graduated from a three-year MFA program. When I sat down today to consider what my life looks like with my shiny new degree, I became a little anxious. I was sitting at my desk, behaving how I imagine my composition students behave the night before a rough draft is due– my inner dialogue was going something like this: Hm, what do I think about the question at hand? What is the writer’s life like post-MFA? I don’t know, who else can I follow on Spotify? And, also, if something really depressing is going on in the world and I only just learned about it from my Facebook feed, I can’t not read about it, right? Because then I’d be a horrible person, and in that case I should probably just give up on writing poetry?

But then I thought, hey, I know what to do in these situations! I’ve been schooled. So I picked up a back issue of The Believer and re-read each of the poems—poems I first looked at sluggishly on a plane in May (directly post-grad, y’all); poems I could barely remember. And thank goodness I did, because Bob Hicok saved me from a downward spiral into a dark abyss where I become the version of me who has no idea what poetry is or why I used to say I wanted to write it. If it helps, you can picture Borges’s Aleph here, and be thankful I’m not walking straight into it.

Actually, Hicok’s poem, “Blue Prints,” reminds me a bit of Borges in the way it juxtaposes the idea of art-making with how we talk about art-making (very different things– a dizzying difference, sometimes, and potentially the most frustrating side-effect of MFA-ing and being an artist-academic in general). If you haven’t read “The Aleph,” by the way, you should, it’s hilarious and brilliant.  But for today, the beginning of Hicok’s poem: 

Up and up the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot
exactly the size of the house they would build,
and when they went to dig the foundation, the foundation
appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started
to set them in place, revealed that they had always been there,

“It was like coming into the room to find your diary
writing itself,” she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk
about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,

I’m not sure the poem is an ars poetica, but I can liken what happens in this passage to my own writing process. When I write a draft that eventually becomes an actual poem, the experience feels very similar to what Hicok’s narrator describes—it feels as if I’ve been walking up steep land in order to try to make space for a thought and suddenly I realize that, though I’m a bit out of breath, the space is already there and has always been there. I am sure that my poems need to exist, that they’ve maybe always existed in some abstract way. When I say my poems, I should add, I mean the ones that really feel like poems to me– not the many drafts I’ve made that read like a hodgepodge of ideas spritzed with some strained am I clever or what? lines (which, unfortunately I’ve crafted too many of).

Which brings me to what, I have a feeling, this poem is really about: trying to talk about the process of creating art, the supposedly sturdy questions we are taught to ask an artist, the degenerative questions we actually tend to ask the artist, and how easy it is to get off track when you involve yourself in these situations (this probably happened a few times over at AWP). Hicok’s artist/narrator keeps coming back to the image of her impossible house and the impossible world it exists in, while her interviewer, flummoxed, tries to intervene:

…“Don’t you think

it odd that my life has always had just enough space
for my life,” she asked the man’s recorder,
as much as the man, hoping the recorder
would consider the question and get back to her, “Then you moved
to Madrid,” the interviewer was saying, “and started painting
your invisible landscapes,” “I remember the first window

we lifted into place,” she replied, “that the view of the valley
it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box
away, we just lined them up, the premonition
with the day,”…

The danger of academic study of writing poetry, I think, is that the hard questions are really hard—i.e., why is a poem not successful yet? What brought the writer to this content and this form in the first place? Why does the writer think this poem needs to exist? And too often, in workshop or conference discussions, as the conversation starts to open up to this admittedly abstract level of thought, it immediately hits a lag; feet shuffle. The participants look away from the harder questions—what is the house? Why is she talking about it?—in favor of answering the easier ones: Where did she study? Who did she work with? Or even—what was it someone else has said about her work? I can actually remember a couple of occasions chatting amongst other MFA students when a fellow writer became visibly agitated that we were talking about the ideas in a poem rather than the poet’s credentials.

What I really love about Hicok’s poem is that we witness the interviewer’s agitation (hilariously, he wants his recording device to get him out of the fix), and his exhaustion is something we can recognize. Because, like I said, the hard questions are hard! I actually have no idea why the artist is talking about this surreal house-‘building’ experience, and I would be hard-pressed to come up with a response if I were myself interviewing this artist of Hicok’s imagination. Thankfully, I’m just reading the poem; I get to see the interviewer’s exhaustion– and then I get to see him overcome it:

…,” he had twenty more questions

but crossed them off, “I have always wanted to build a room
around a painting,” he said, “Yes,” she replied, “A painting
hanging in space,” he added, “A painting of a woman
adjusting a wall to suit a painting,” she said, “Like how the universe
began,” he suggested, “Did it begin,” she wondered, “is that
what this is?”

In his “Blue Prints,” Hicok consistently denies us any kind of blueprint. In order for the interviewer to have a good conversation with the artist, he leaves behind his agenda and reacts with his own imagination. I am liberated and revived by this.

At the end of the day (or the MFA, as it were), all I’m really left with is the art I came here to make in the first place. This has been hard for me to focus on as I look for jobs, consider how and when I may try to publish my manuscript, and do, I’m ashamed to admit, the MFA-graduate song-and-dance routine that is comparing my current and potential success with that of other writers. But today I’m able—and hopefully the next time I sit down to work on poems, I will be able—to leave that agenda behind.

*

As a PS thank-you-note, I’d like say that I have respect and affection for the teachers I’ve been lucky to work closely with and for many of my MFA peers, who have helped me to consider the harder questions of life, art-making, poetry, and the universe.

—Sara

Hicok, Bob. “Blue Prints.” The Believer 11.3 (2013): 49. Print.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Aleph.” The Aleph and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Print.