Posts Tagged ‘Samuel Amadon’

Letter to an MFA Applicant by Samuel Amadon

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

The new Poets & Writers MFA rankings have just come out. And I have to say: don’t buy them.

Maybe that’s not fair. I guess all I can really tell you is what happened to me. First, I applied to eleven MFA programs and got into none. The rejection letters went to my parents’ house, where I didn’t live, and my mother had to call me every day and tell me that nothing had come or who had said no. I got a little confused. The next year I applied to sixteen programs. It was all I thought about. Not writing, and not going to a program, but the list of programs I was applying to. I kept adding programs, but for weird reasons: to balance out the aesthetic of the list or to add something a little quirky, as if the list itself was what I was creating a list for. That year, I got into seven programs. Full-funding at two schools I didn’t really want to go to, some funding at two schools I really did, and no funding at three. Though I never would have expected it, I ended up going to Columbia.

At that time, there had been no new ranking of programs in years, and the perception that MFA programs were unrankable still persisted. But in web forums and other places applicants discussed schools, Columbia was viewed as a good program, but one that you would be foolish to attend (or even apply to) because of the cost. I paid. Or rather, I borrowed. I was going to borrow anyway and it wasn’t that much more. I mean: I was twenty-four. So I saved some money and I sold my car. I went all in. When I got there, it turned out everyone else had gone all in too. No one ever skipped a workshop. No one ever said they didn’t feel like writing. We knew the exact amount we were paying for every hour of school and we held every one of our teachers accountable.

They delivered. My first workshop was with Richard Howard, who doesn’t run a workshop. Instead, he reads to the class once a week and students meet with him individually at his apartment: once a week and for at least one to two hours each time. By the end of my first year, I had spent over sixty hours in Richard Howard’s apartment talking with him about my poems. That’s insane. But it’s not just Richard. My workshop with Lucie Brock-Broido met six times after the semester was over, and for five hours each time. Timothy Donnelly met with me and read an entire manuscript of mine before I had even taken his workshop, which, incidentally, also met extra times and usually ran one to two hours over.

The essential explanation for why Columbia is such an expensive program is that it’s part of the School of the Arts and not the English Department. That also means every class I took there was in the School of the Arts and taught by a writer or by a critic who knew they were talking to writers. Besides the workshops I took with Timothy Donnelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, Richard Howard, and Mark Doty, I studied with Mark Strand, Ben Marcus, Marjorie Welish, Ilan Stavans, Richard Locke, Henri Cole, Mark Wunderlich, and Helen Vendler. Everything I did fed into my writing and that was what all my teachers wanted.

I didn’t get any teaching experience. But I’m finishing a PhD from University of Houston now, where I’ve gotten plenty. I went into debt. But, and I say this to the poets in particular, I wasn’t ever going to have any money anyway. Am I saying you should go to Columbia? Not exactly. Am I saying you should go into debt? No. I’m really not. It was probably a really stupid thing to do. But I loved it and I became a better poet because of my teachers and because of the incredibly amount of time and energy they put into me and my work.

None of this shows up in a ranking. Which is why this year’s Poets & Writers ranking of full residency programs puts 46 schools in front of Columbia. So forget fair: what I’m telling you is that’s absurd. But it’s also absurd that there are 46 schools that are better than the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which ties with Columbia. There aren’t. I can tell you there are 29 professional baseball teams that are better than the Houston Astros, but not that there are 49 MFA programs better than Boston University, and certainly not that there are 59 schools better than the University of Maryland. Why? Because the Astros have actually lost more baseball games than anyone else in the league, but the Poets & Writers rankings are based on what people who haven’t actually attended these MFA programs think of their websites.

You’re not getting an MFA to get funded by an MFA program, nor to have a good teaching load, nor to move somewhere with an ideal cost of living. You’re getting an MFA to have your writing taken seriously by serious writers who you respect. There’s no way of knowing ahead of time if someone is going to be a great teacher and especially not if they’re going to be a great teacher for you. But I swear that anyone who tries to tell you teachers are not the most important part of an MFA program has been spending too much time on the internet. Don’t buy it. Put the rankings down.

Pick up the books of the faculty. Pick up the books of the alumni. Try to talk to people who actually go to these programs. They aren’t the ones voting in these rankings. But they are people who can tell you if a young faculty member is bright and full of energy or bewildered and doesn’t know how to handle graduate students. They can tell you if the Pulitzer winner is never going to learn your name or is going to keep meeting with you four years after you graduate. Read about the programs. Don’t go into debt—or do—but make your decision about your writing and the writers you want to work with first, and money after. Don’t buy these rankings. I mean really, don’t buy the actual rankings. Tell your friends not to too and hopefully, someday soon, Poets & Writers will stop printing them.

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Like a Sea

Friday, July 16th, 2010

by Samuel Amadon
University of  Iowa Press 2010
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

8_5

“each country has made these phrases for / us”

amadon like a sea coverSamuel Amadon’s new book, Like a Sea, is like a sea in that, when you are floating out the middle of it, you have no idea where you are.  It is also like a sea in that nothing but a sea is really like a sea.  The book’s twisted intelligibility comes together over pieces of language that are not strictly supported by meaning or uninterrupted relay of information.  It is easy to trip over the big, heavy things Amadon hides amid his poems’ scrambled logic.  The poems obsess over the limits of language, moving from clarity into complicated washouts of prepositions, copulae and pronouns.  They do plenty of philosophizing.  “Each H,” a series of poems that provides a strong, philosophical skeleton for the book, is a premiere example of the book’s overarching mode.  “Each H (IX),” for instance, begins with the simple first line, “That it could sound like him.”  The speaker then folds the line under itself with, “That it could sound like him / sounding like he knew / what he sounded like.”  By the final stanzas of the short poem, we are racing to keep up; it disintegrates into ambiguity:

we all sounded saying that
was it, but that was it
again, and then wasn’t this more

it anyway, or just it with more
people, more to say
that it could sound like people.

Because the speaker begins clearly, it is easy to imagine the rest of the poem as an intricate word puzzle.  The “it” and “that” and “was” are ordered so they lose their original points of reference.  The words become less specific, opening them wide for interpretation.  The idea that these two, three, and four letter words might veil some earth-shattering revelation is itself a revelation.  There are underlying forces—unidentifiable forces—that push all the components of language together into its primary use as a communicative tool.  The poem implies that language can seem to make perfect sense without the burden of meaning. 

This implication brings to mind a telling adage that Wallace Stevens, whose influence is made explicit through an epigraph, slipped into a short essay defending the artistry of one of Marianne Moore’s poems: “Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.”  It is tough to know what Stevens meant by “aspect.”  One suspects it refers to a kind of aura of connotative and denotative meaning that exists around very real, hard things.  The ambiguousness of some of Amadon’s poetry fulfills this definition.  But applied strictly to Amadon’s book, “aspect” might mean something like “component.”  In the middle of “Cognitive Burr,” the effect is kaleidoscopic:

                                                 This is the scene for the less-

than-casual gardener. The gardener of import
is not the gardener of intrigue
which is why we have levels rewarding the non-

native English speaker works for a mapmaker
who strikes that those are not
the phrases I would use cultural to assume

each country has made these phrases for
us.

The effect is kaleidoscopic because the poem breaks the world into disconnected bits of language (words, phrases, idioms, points of view), holds these bits up against one another, and argues which is the purer, prevailing thought.  It is also kaleidoscopic because it fluidly forces those components back together into something fractured but softened, something that avoids simple representations of time and space but takes on an “aspect” of reality.  When the speaker in “Cognitive Burr” explains “why we have levels rewarding the non- / native English speaker,” we can’t be sure what he means by levels or by rewards.  We can be sure that some kind of hierarchy exists—one that seems to parallel the hierarchy inherent in an economy.  We are given a bit more guidance with the words “import” and “strike.”  Ideas about money, the economy, and personal relationships hover here, suspending the pressure each exerts on the other.  The lines are like individual thoughts pulled from a collective consciousness; the complexity of the relationship between these thoughts and the finiteness of language allows the poems to seem bursting with meaning.

From its opening line, “I could not sound like anyone but me,” Like a Sea is possessed by its fascination with the limits imposed on communication by the concept of “voice.”  The voice Amadon lends his speakers is just one more restrictive container of thought and emotion.  It is one more thing his speakers must overcome to communicate clearly.  In most cases, the poems exemplify these constraining elements of voice, but there is a definite, self-aware desire to explain these limitations.  In “Like an Evening,” Amadon’s speaker makes a fumbling attempt to characterize his own awareness:

                       I could go several ways
with how best to put everything
should come together is no longer available
now that I am aware I govern
what makes what I govern
differ not from how it must seem

In a book of poems that takes every opportunity to shrug off intelligibility, moments like this are attractive.  But even when communication is intended, language can prove a flimsy system.  It takes much effort to understand how the “govern[ing]” is occurring here, though the lines are likely worded in the clearest possible language.  Parsing out the kind of reflection found in “Like an Evening” (and elsewhere) is still not easy, and Amadon has made the distinct decision to avoid clear-cut, nostalgic adventures in aphorism.  In avoiding making perfect sense in perfect syntactic units, the big emotions, the ones that make us cry or punch people in bars, have been set aside.  By forgoing manipulation of the big emotions in favor of initiating nervous laughter or confusion, Amadon avoids simplification and approaches a portrait that seems much closer to the emotional and intellectual environment in which we–always a little claustrophobic and scatterbrained–live our lives.

*

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Spy Poem

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

by Samuel Amadon
Projective Industries 2009
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

8

 ”we understand goats wholesale”

amadonspySamuel Amadon’s latest chapbook, Spy Poem, exudes a quality of overhearing.  Its jarring, syllabic headspace, informed by observations that are mightily susceptible to interruption and misinterpretation, impresses both the elusive hum of a single conversation in a noisy room and the open quiet that characterizes an erasure.  Such is the smartly executed oxymoron of Spy Poem: to communicate clearly the unclear.

The notion of espionage is a nearly perfect apparatus to expound the ways language can pop in and out of perceivable meaning (see John Hollander’s Reflections on Espionage).  Theoretically (or cinematically), espionage employs all of language’s potential for overhearing, underhearing, interpretation, and misinterpretation.  In the latter half of one early stanza, Amadon makes the poem’s procedure clear: however hard we listen to what his speaker says, we will not hear what his speaker means:

 but by most accounts this conversation

             does not exist

                          as he orders

 coats we understand goats wholesale

Here, Amadon’s speaker steps from behind a curtain of misinformation. The stanza is a rare moment of self-consciousness that serves as a clear guide to the poem’s intentions.  But even as his speaker necessarily understands that his perceptions may be misguided, Amadon avoids being trapped by second-hand philosophy.  Instead his speaker is soaked directly back into the dismembered swirl of the poem with the lines of the following stanza, “now close the door now ice cubes or / paneling now that kind of light,” and the very same circumstances that keep the speaker aloof to the truth hold the reader from full comprehension.  Amadon hijacks a direct and effective method of instruction: he tells us what he is going to do, and then he does it. 

To the same effect, where the poem’s speaker surely finds the distinction between “coats” and “goats” an important one, the implications of the miscommunication are withheld.  For a reader, this bit of misinformation floats around without particular distinction, and even if the moment did suggest some sort of philosophical or emotional message, it would be impossible to know whether such an inference should be set in motion by “coats” or “goats.”  Spy Poem warns against the stilted sort of connective tissues a reader might tack on to the poem by keeping the success or failure of their application an impossible issue.

In the aforementioned reentry, the first line’s symmetrical meter and internal rhyme (“now close the door now ice cubes or”) butts against the weaker meter of the following line, but the two lines remain connected by a third repetition of “now,” and they typify the various ways in which Amadon’s attention to sound helps hold his poem’s disjunctive lines together.  This attention to sound also occurs in a broader way, keeping the beginning, middle, and end of the poem bound by common language.  In another early stanza, what seems a non-sequitur, “a boy the kid he means the kid,” recurs two stanzas later as “boy does he mean the kid he means.”  Another variation occurs in the final pages of the chapbook wherein Amadon writes, “kid means boy the kid means back to.”  Each line is a nuanced address to multiplicity of meaning, and together they keep the poem moored to its themes throughout.  That the lines are syllabically identical is no mistake, as they are part of larger syllabic structure that emphasizes their similarity while highlighting the alterations they contain.

The poem’s discontinuity initially and falsely conveys spontaneity and improvisation, which seems appropriate when considering its imposed urge towards miscommunication.  But, as mentioned, Spy Poem adheres to a strict set of syllabic guidelines (with some flexibility allowed for ambiguously pronounced words like “Israel” and “realizing”).  The syllable count for the seven lines of each stanza—correspondingly eight, eight, six, ten, four, four, and eight—extends the poem’s reliance on repetition with subtle limerick-like pacing.  The shorter third line and more fully truncated fifth and sixth lines turn each stanza into a visual and aural funnel that widens again with each final line.  The resulting syllabic pattern pushes the poem along by mirroring the peaks and troughs of narrative, and more importantly draws attention to the poem’s unifying rhythm and sound, oblique in an architectural way, illuminating particular bits of space through certain-shaped windows.

Because of the jerky irregularity of its syllabic structure and the unreliable, flighty voice of its speaker, Spy Poem’s lines approach a parity of importance, wherein no line seems truer than any other.  This is the natural result of being continually misled; lies breed comprehensive mistrust.  Thus even as lines perplex and clarify in turns, they all pretend themselves an important point.  Take a representative stanza:

             or and again with whom begin

                          who’s there holding himself like he’s

                          no better than right where

 right is a simple alternative to

              what makes one good

                           yes yes that one

 who seems as if he wasn’t aware

There is more than a vague connection between some of the lines (the “one” in the sixth line seems to refer to the “who” of the seventh, the “right” in the fourth might refer to the “what” of the fifth), but even when the literal logic of the stanza is clear, its mathematical logic cuts each line abruptly away from the former.  Here, this is most evident in the connection between the first line and the rest of the stanza; the connection is thematic and almost inexpressible in its ambiguity.  The poem is dosed heavily with these mysterious disconnections which improbably provide another cord of cohesion.  This cohesion serves to undermine a different sort of cohesion, in which words cohere into larger, more connotatively rich divisions of comprehensible language.  When these divisions are separated from each other, they lose their designations as phrases, and occupy an attractive world of autonomy.  In its curving continually away from comprehension, Spy Poem is like one of its lonelier lines, mingling with order, but holding fast to its idiosyncrasies.

*

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