"It didn’t take me long to realize that good teaching probably requires a certain degree of education specific to education (I had none), and that, while I could get by on a certain degree of charisma, patience, and enthusiasm, truly committing myself to my students’ needs (and they had many) would require 50 or more hours per week.At first, these notions stressed me out—I wanted to be a good teacher and was pretty won-over by the school’s apparent mission (“Admissions requirements? Who needs them! Everyone deserves a college education.”). But eventually I picked up on the dismissive attitude of those around me and learned to follow suit."
Full article here.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The True Confessions of an MFA Graduate Teaching Assistant
Hmm. Interesting. Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Northerners Available for Immediate Delivery!
Many readers of Tom's website have e-mailed me asking when my second book would be available for immediate delivery (as opposed to pre-order), so I thought I'd post the announcement here. Thanks to all for indulging me re: this personal note!
The book is also available from Small Press Distribution (Link). Below is the recent Publishers Weekly review of Northerners, as well as all of the back-cover blurbs:
Reviews:
Publishers Weekly. "This book will get a lot of well-deserved attention. A former public defender in New Hampshire and now a graduate student in Wisconsin, Abramson has picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News-style ranking of graduate programs in writing. After all that, what's left for the poetry? Plenty: serious and ambitious, full of torqued proverbs and hard-to-follow advice, Abramson's own work shows a poet uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live: 'Everyone knows what not to do/ in a dream,' he warns, 'and in a dream everyone has the heart/ to tell you who you are.' Waking life, he implies, turns out harsher, and stranger. Abramson's work as an attorney impinges on several memorable poems: 'the worst/ is meeting those people you know/ you can do nothing for.' American regions--the Upper Midwest, Boston, northern New England--also draw attention, and sometimes ire. Ultimately, though, Abramson's taut phrases show a personality, sometimes welcoming, and sometimes grimacing, at a tough, lovely, often inhospitable world: 'It is not too early for us// to turn out backs on the track,' he advises, before announcing 'YES--// there is no secret self--/ but still/ I follow it everywhere.'"
[Link].
Blurbs:
Cole Swensen. "From the first line of the first poem, this book takes us into mythical territory: mankind is walking backward, and it's back into the garden, yet this is not regressive, nor is it redemptive. A little later, an apple appears...Seth Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, and then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, and as relevant. And he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning, for while he says a lot in this collection, it's the torque and snap of the medium, used as a material for art rather than as a vehicle for ideas, that keeps the reader on the page, becoming a part of it."
Peter Gizzi. "To reckon the currents of muscular energy in Seth Abramson's Northerners is to recognize that poetry may be located in language's minute particulars and in the local but it penetrates every thought, every atom of one's daily life. 'Finding your form/ is not a form of discipline,' Abramson writes. It is, as this book shows us, a form of wonder."
Don Share. "Seth Abramson's intricate, absorbing, and distinctive poems wrestle not just with language--much poetry does that--but with the objects of language: the events, landscapes, and weather that surround us and determine our lives. Dream-like, yet ever-alert, this work is memorable and illuminating."
Donald Revell (on my first book, The Suburban Ecstasies). "Working in the vivid, revivifying borderlands of such American adventures as Paul Metcalf's Genoa and Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, The Suburban Ecstasies propounds a syllabic heroism, one in which even the gentlest, most lyric proposals set forth towards ecstasy. These pages glow with immediate mastery."
You can purchase The Suburban Ecstasies from Amazon here.
The book is also available from Small Press Distribution (Link). Below is the recent Publishers Weekly review of Northerners, as well as all of the back-cover blurbs:
Reviews:
Publishers Weekly. "This book will get a lot of well-deserved attention. A former public defender in New Hampshire and now a graduate student in Wisconsin, Abramson has picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News-style ranking of graduate programs in writing. After all that, what's left for the poetry? Plenty: serious and ambitious, full of torqued proverbs and hard-to-follow advice, Abramson's own work shows a poet uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live: 'Everyone knows what not to do/ in a dream,' he warns, 'and in a dream everyone has the heart/ to tell you who you are.' Waking life, he implies, turns out harsher, and stranger. Abramson's work as an attorney impinges on several memorable poems: 'the worst/ is meeting those people you know/ you can do nothing for.' American regions--the Upper Midwest, Boston, northern New England--also draw attention, and sometimes ire. Ultimately, though, Abramson's taut phrases show a personality, sometimes welcoming, and sometimes grimacing, at a tough, lovely, often inhospitable world: 'It is not too early for us// to turn out backs on the track,' he advises, before announcing 'YES--// there is no secret self--/ but still/ I follow it everywhere.'"
[Link].
Blurbs:
Cole Swensen. "From the first line of the first poem, this book takes us into mythical territory: mankind is walking backward, and it's back into the garden, yet this is not regressive, nor is it redemptive. A little later, an apple appears...Seth Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, and then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, and as relevant. And he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning, for while he says a lot in this collection, it's the torque and snap of the medium, used as a material for art rather than as a vehicle for ideas, that keeps the reader on the page, becoming a part of it."
Peter Gizzi. "To reckon the currents of muscular energy in Seth Abramson's Northerners is to recognize that poetry may be located in language's minute particulars and in the local but it penetrates every thought, every atom of one's daily life. 'Finding your form/ is not a form of discipline,' Abramson writes. It is, as this book shows us, a form of wonder."
Don Share. "Seth Abramson's intricate, absorbing, and distinctive poems wrestle not just with language--much poetry does that--but with the objects of language: the events, landscapes, and weather that surround us and determine our lives. Dream-like, yet ever-alert, this work is memorable and illuminating."
Donald Revell (on my first book, The Suburban Ecstasies). "Working in the vivid, revivifying borderlands of such American adventures as Paul Metcalf's Genoa and Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, The Suburban Ecstasies propounds a syllabic heroism, one in which even the gentlest, most lyric proposals set forth towards ecstasy. These pages glow with immediate mastery."
You can purchase The Suburban Ecstasies from Amazon here.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
A Day in the Life: A Low-Residency Schedule
To give you an idea of what a low-residency week might look like, here's my schedule for today.
9:00 - 10:30 Gateway Seminar - Reading as Writer/Stage and Screen
10:30 - 12:00 Craft Seminar - Fiction/Speaking the Novel
1:00 - 2:00 Graduating student craft seminars (many to choose from!)
2:00 - 5:00 Small group workshop
5:00 - 6:15 Graduating student thesis readings
8:00 - 9:30 Graduating student thesis readings (Nightly readings alternate between Faculty Readings and Grad readings)
I mentioned in a previous post the differences between craft and gateway seminars, large group and small group workshops. Also, at Queens, we participate in seminars outside of our genre. We have astounding faculty (yes, I'm biased), writers who teach at Queens residencies, and at universities throughout the country during the rest of the year. There is a lot to take in. I'm still ruminating, for example, over Tuesday's Fiction Craft seminar about character and the question of character transformation.
It's an intense week. It's a week of being exhilarated, motivated, then crashing down exhausted. It's all consuming. And I highly recommend it.
9:00 - 10:30 Gateway Seminar - Reading as Writer/Stage and Screen
10:30 - 12:00 Craft Seminar - Fiction/Speaking the Novel
1:00 - 2:00 Graduating student craft seminars (many to choose from!)
2:00 - 5:00 Small group workshop
5:00 - 6:15 Graduating student thesis readings
8:00 - 9:30 Graduating student thesis readings (Nightly readings alternate between Faculty Readings and Grad readings)
I mentioned in a previous post the differences between craft and gateway seminars, large group and small group workshops. Also, at Queens, we participate in seminars outside of our genre. We have astounding faculty (yes, I'm biased), writers who teach at Queens residencies, and at universities throughout the country during the rest of the year. There is a lot to take in. I'm still ruminating, for example, over Tuesday's Fiction Craft seminar about character and the question of character transformation.
It's an intense week. It's a week of being exhilarated, motivated, then crashing down exhausted. It's all consuming. And I highly recommend it.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
I Wish I Had Known That...
What, almost a month and no new posts? Ye gads! What is the MFA Blog coming to?!
Well, I guess this is kind of the fallow period in the MFA application cycle. Last year's applicants know where they are going, or not going, by now, and next year's applicants haven't geared up yet (or have they?)
So, I was wondering: maybe those of you who have been through this process before could do next year's newbies a favor by answering this question:
I wish I had known that...
Well, I guess this is kind of the fallow period in the MFA application cycle. Last year's applicants know where they are going, or not going, by now, and next year's applicants haven't geared up yet (or have they?)
So, I was wondering: maybe those of you who have been through this process before could do next year's newbies a favor by answering this question:
I wish I had known that...
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