Various Degrees of Graduating

Between returning my 101 student's portfolios, re-checking my thesis manuscript for typos, attending the 2 weeks of readings by fellow graduates I've hit a wall. I want a nap, but I also don't want this to end. My friends....they leave! This happened at high school graduation, college graduation...

In the past week I have: given my thesis reading with my friend Trina, complete with live jazz duo, dresses & heels. I have received notification of another poem publication (in DIAGRAM), and was hired as temp. for the English Department for the summer. Looks like I'll be sticking around for the summer, learning my way around departmental finances. So, I guess that makes me an employed graduate. Sure, it'll postpone my move to Chicago, but it'll allow me to keep my lease, spend weekends traveling to Oregon or Glacier Nat'l Park, and seeing a few friends who are sticking around. Trav will be off on a bike trip for the month of June-- from Maine to Pelee Island-- and then we'll take off running, UHaul in tow. When we can't afford any more gas, we'll stop, plead with a collect call to home, and wait it out.

But I digress. Also in the past week, my Nicaragua study class and I hosted a photography exhibit of Nica photos to benefit a community health clinic, Nueva Vida. Photos and gallery here, with a photo of the photo that I took on the trip:

And, as always, the parentals came to visit for "graduation". We stopped at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. They have a bear and ducks.

The families also climbed a mountain. And lived to tell about it.

This all leaves me with but limited time to think about the possibility of my (unpaid internship) "profession" as a writer. I've been keeping up on Post-MFA blog, and I'm too lulled with parties, sun and computers to do much more than quote myself:

I realize now I've learned how "to be a poet" from more observation and absorption and mimicry than I care (until now) to admit. I suppose this is no great shock or revelation for writers, however, this approach felt, at the time, disingenuous. Sure, we're careful enough to understand the line between regurgitation and actual digestion of material to produce carefully-rendered "originality" for workshop and a thesis, but is it not lecherous to await another's rush of inspired material and hop on the coat tails? Turns out, What the Hell was I Thinking? I needed everyone's voice in workshop to empty my head of void. I had a lot of waking up to do. So now, two years later, still groggy and caffeine-deprived, I am very much (prepared to be) awake. (Yes, I used "waking" as a metaphor...dang.) Thank you, all you amazing writers in the program.

Other forms of mimicry in my sordid past: I remember SAT words on "The List" that were so foreign to me that I clung to them so as not to lose what was deemed "necessary" vocabulary for a future college student. I clung to them longer than this test, though, because they felt silent and underused enough to be useful. Assuage, Cogent, Phlegmatic... I can mimic the effect of these words (long vowels lull in "assuage", complimentary to the words' meaning...) in my writing, but I'm never sure about the rhythms and power of conversational, everyday speech.

Visiting poet Ed Roberson asked our workshop if (and why didn't) we use our "speaking voice" in our poems. We didn't have an answer of that. Some commented that the world of common interaction can often be disappointing on the self-fulfillment scale. That's why we need "phlegmatic" because it sounds gross and compliments a gross-poem despite its ungross meaning, but we might have to leave it out of our everyday speech. We must at least partially partition language, even when that feels disingenuous.