Ray Caesar "Power and Glory"

the word

Getting the MFA

Since I’ve been here, much has happened. It’s been a couple of years actually, and during that time I’ve been hard at work on getting my MFA in Creative Writing, in poetry and creative nonfiction to be precise. I know I said I’d never do it, never get the goddamned MFA, but here I am doing it, in spite of myself.

I’m a student at Vermont College, which is supposed to be a pretty good school. And what have I learned you may ask? Well, I spent two semesters studying poetry and as far as I can tell, I learned pretty much not a blessed thing expect that I can write decent poems even when I feel not even one iota of inspiration. I read books of poems and I wrote about poetry and I wrote some poems and learned about line breaks. Other than that, nothing much doing. I had no breakthrough. I don’t really know more now than when I went into the program, so the poetry study was pretty much a bust. I don’t know, maybe I’ll look back on it differently, but that’s how I feel at the moment.

I’ve spent two semesters studying CNF and I have one semester to go and it has been very, VERY different from studying poetry. For one thing, I get it. I can read it and absorb it. I understand the issues of craft that come up. I enjoy reading it, generally, and I just can’t say that about poetry. I also enjoy writing it more. I’ve been emotionally vested in the essays that I’ve produced and I can honestly say that I don’t give a flip for any of the poems that I wrote. Maybe it’s because I was still in a depression when I wrote the poems; I don’t know. But writing all these essays has meant a great deal to me and I’m looking forward to shaping them into a book. That’s the task of my last semester—to produce a couple of books, one in CNF, one in poetry. Since I don’t like any of the poems that I’ve written, I’m starting over from scratch with the poetry. My plan is to write a book of prose poems. We will see cause I don’t really know what prose poems are. We will see.

So that’s the sum of it. This summer was my third summer in Vermont in a row. The Vermont College MFA is a low-residency program. Once every semester I go to Vermont for ten days, once in June and once in December. I miss every fourth of July and every New Year’s. But it’s almost over. I graduate in January 2009. When it’s done, I’ll have my second Master’s degree and two books to show for it. It’s been terribly expensive and I don’t look forward to paying off the loans, but in the end my hope is that it will have been worth it. Fingers crossed everywhere around the world.

~r.

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