WAITING
It has been four months since I graduated with my MFA in writing and in that time I haven’t written a single poem.
I’ve seen whales, welcomed my first niece into this world, taught 4th graders vocab words like debris and bewilder, proposed to my fiance in an alcove on a beach, got proposed to while hugging my favorite tree, made matzo ball soup, walked onto a frozen mountain lake, applied to dozens of jobs, made salty chicken and vegetables, pitched freelance articles, gone for long walks, sobbed while watching Toy Story 1-4, listened to owls singing outside my window, read, cleaned, slept, and waited. All this beauty but no poetry.
I knew to expect a period of rest post MFA, but I’ve struggled to feel at peace with it. Not writing makes me incredibly moody. But so does forcing it. When my writing life is not in flow, it feels like being a cystic teenager with sexual frustration: a blistering energy inside me that builds and builds and builds with no place to go. Writing prose has been a way to lessen the internal pressure I feel, but without poetry something within remains volatile.
Rachel Ranie Taube recently published a piece at Catapult about the post MFA experience that spoke to the challenges of this transition. She writes, “Whatever your MFA experience, it takes time to create or recreate the life you can keep writing in. There is no race.” My MFA experience was fractured by the pandemic and I never truly got to build a life/community centered around writing. I was constantly interrupted by the anxieties of survival (we all were). So the challenge post-MFA has been grieving the loss of a life I only got a glimpse of and creating a new dream simultaneously.
It’s unclear what I want to dream into these days. As Saturn returns, the structures of my life are collapsing and taking methodical time to rebuild. I’m waiting on something but I don’t know what it is yet. The world feels hazy from where I stand and I wish I could write my way out of it. My work, home, and relationships are all in transition so of course my writing is in transition too. Sometimes I forget that the problems I have in life are usually the same ones I have in writing. I can only hope that the inverse is true too. Meaning once the elements of my life find their flow, so will the poetry.
