"But now I'm happy for a time and interested"

*title from Frank O’Hara (“Personal Poem” [Lunch Poems, 1964])

I took it personally in an undergraduate poetry workshop when Geoffrey G. O’Brien warned me to pay attention to when I was really writing poems and when I was just talking on the page. He spoke of writerliness the way Charlie Altieri down the hall spoke of painterliness—I had been reading Frank O’Hara in high school and desired only plain speech, direct contact, “facts” like plaid flannel and orange peels, things casual and visceral. My own poems were deliberately superficial—and unwittingly immature—in that they were quickly-thrown-together, suited to render those deep and fleeting infatuations with the erotic other that preoccupied 19-year-old Kayla. Her resultant poetic language was flat and automatic, precise, but defensive: a sort of sheen. (It was not explicit.)

I went to extremes: I either labored over syntactically-impenetrable phrases of post-emotion, telling it too slant, in pursuit of dense hyperpoeticity (for Geoffrey and his ilk), or I gave up and spoke as I would to my dog, affectionately, with limited vocabulary and a lazy grammar. I relied heavily on tone, since, in the case of the former, meaning was a dog is a dog (as well as a perfected expression of the godhead, I knew, even then… and yet!). In my 19-year-old’s binary of great poetic language users—O’Hara and Ashbery—GGOB fell in “the Ashbery camp”; I (and my lack of nuanced understanding) felt there was something detached and self-satisfied about those types of poems dominating the landscape...

Either way, I figured I fell between the two camps, since those ‘Ashberyer’ poems I wrote defied colleague comprehension and were met with confusion in the workshop setting —although they were admired, and affected everybody, and won university accolades, nobody could explain why they worked. My Frank poems—my talking love poems—I hid away like rags, fearful that their frankness demonstrated weakness, laziness, lack of cognitive deftness, failure to have selected more ‘difficult’ themes than the domestic. (In what the fuck theme inheres more ‘difficulty’ than humans relating to others and themselves?)

The confessional and the love poem were misunderstood as identical, I see now, by some of the poets in the Berkeley English department. Or they were deliberately collapsed as an ideological statement (that was bent also on androgenizing/masculinizing literary language that is always lifting up Snyder and forgetting Kyger). I do not think that I was writing confessionally; but thanks to this workplace culture, I was still ashamed. I thus held myself at a steely and down-the-nose-looking remove in those poems that I publicized in workshop and published in the university magazines and submitted for competitions (most of which won).

When my coastal-elite attitude airdropped into the Midwest for the MFA, I brought out those same big guns to the opposite effect: I was berated, sometimes politely, sometimes dramatically, for my penchants for abstraction and sticky syntax, what these poets (my faculty advisors and my cohort) labeled my Academese. They workshopped all the ‘theory' out—contemporary nonsense. Michigan status quo wanted Deep Image and the loosely iambic epiphanic lyric—it wanted to maintain itself. I had just honed my adamantine, fussy, Bay-Area, post-modern ‘writerliness’ and now they were telling me to back way off of all that implicit, abstracted, depersonalized, ‘meaningless’ avant-garde crap.

I scorned the program and did not respect the insipid, conservative writing of most of its members. They read neither Ashbery nor Frank O’Hara here: or, the ‘academics’ read Ashbery (i.e., one English professor, not affiliated with the MFA program, had read him), from a defanged remove, whereas any ‘artists’ (the MFAs) who read O’Hara did so as a guilty pleasure, snuck-in fluff, and mistook him as lacking in erudition and density. In this new workshop setting, I personally was considered cruel, because intellectualizing; these writers didn’t want critical feedback, they wanted to be reassured in their feelings.

I found this self-hating/self-aggrandizing group therapy stifling and creativity-neutering. I had a year-long crisis of not being able to write followed by a summer of falling in love and writing 160 poems (supplications) in an agonizing rush. To stick it to the man (—— ———-, program director and my erstwhile advisor), I built my thesis manuscript exclusively from this ‘extracurricular’ output. It won no prizes there, and garnered no functional feedback (useful criticism apparently held to be in bad taste). I packed and left with an actual bad taste in my mouth, irritated with my ego for being genuinely hurt by the lack of support, recognition, and encouragement there. But now, for the first time, I trusted the source of my poems in a way I no longer felt I could trust any advisor. My writing became for me.

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Knowing I wanted a PhD, probably involving German poetry/philosophy, and knowing I needed to take time away in order to cultivate a little nostalgia for or amnesia about the idea of U.S. graduate school, I went to Vienna. In two years I forgot about the bad taste in my mouth. I wrote two books, a non-fiction travel memoir and a manuscript of ekphrastic poems about the city and about paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Belvedere (Oskar Kokoschka, mostly). When I met people and they asked what I am, I told them I am a writer. This was new in two ways: not to identify as a student and to out myself as a poet. I felt confident in taking risks of self-describing since I was abroad, alone, lonely, and feeling reckless. Why not tell strangers what I am? Be explicit.

Clearly I still am reacting to the psychic trauma of the student that I was when I was younger, and struggling with donning again her positive qualities (work ethic) without simultaneously sacrificing my experience-gained wisdom/individuation (mostly earned through Michigan and in Vienna). Where I had obeyed and mimicked at Berkeley, I was rewarded. At Michigan, where I had tried to change to fit the “Academy of American Poets” mold and found I could not, I was marginalized. How I understand myself as an initiate scholar at Santa Cruz has yet to be determined. I have horrified myself this quarter by reaching a new extreme of slackness, possibly itself indicative of paralysis, likely the result of fear.

I suspect I am afraid to try, or to reveal that I am trying, because the last time I felt good in academia I was a babygirl (Go Bears) and the feeling-good came exclusively from external validation (faculty, peers, prizes). Michigan beat that out of me, for which I am grateful; but my ego still clung, and clings, to my writing. I selected Santa Cruz perhaps because I was afraid to take myself seriously as a thinker, and compared with the other programs I was considering, the reputation of this school’s environment seems more ‘forgiving…’ Again with an experience of extremes. Historically, self-flagellation and starvation are the symptoms of my intellectual/spiritual discipline; lately, in my new slackness, I smoke weed with my cool new friends and procrastinate my schoolwork (…followed by self-flagellating and starving as penance for both the pleasure and the perceived negligence).

Striking some balance must be possible, and is clearly necessary, but I don’t know what that looks like in a lived life. I need a book of hours… I’ve wanted to get a PhD since I was about eleven years old. I decided to become a poet when I was seven. I must now be willing to acknowledge that it (the program = the energies of my writing Self = my life’s work) is not something that can be valued via external validation. I have to care about myself to do this work. For someone whose anxiety once prevented her from relaxing into fuller personhood (obey professorial trends, stay in school, take no risks), I am now trying not to be horrified as the pendulum swings to the other side of effort. I intend not to disappoint myself. I will work on trusting that your recommendations align with my best interests. I apologize for the slow, reluctant start—I was not prepared to hit the ground running.

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