Red Barn at Bennington College

Seven years ago this month, I received my Master of Fine Arts degree from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Three months from now (April 7-10), my neighborhood in downtown Denver will be crawling with thousands of MFAs from all over the country, at the annual conference of the  Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP).   You won’t have to be a card-carrying poet or creative writer to attend the event’s full lineup of talks, readings, and panel discussions, or the associated Bookfair.  If you will be anywhere near Denver in April, click here for registration details.

If you had asked me seven years ago what I hoped an MFA would get me, I would have offered one word: publication.

I entered Bennington a few years after early retirement from a natural gas company, and I spent my two years studying poetry with four fantastic teachers: David Lehman, Ed Ochester, April Bernard, and the late Liam Rector, founder of the program.  It was Liam who summed up the Bennington MFA’s mission in these six words: “Read one hundred books. Write one.”  I read way more than a hundred poems in those two years, and I wrote at least one decent one.  I left hoping I would find a place in the literary world, publishing poems in ever-more-prestigious magazines. I dreamed of seeing a poem of mine one day in The New Yorker.

With W.S. Merwin in his garden on Maui

My idol was (and still is) W. S. Merwin, an American poet of towering skill and integrity, whom I visited on Maui for the sole purpose of having my photo taken with him, as he’d done decades earlier in setting up a photo of himself with Ezra Pound. I haven’t been able to locate that photo on the Internet, but I remember how reading about it emboldened me to write to Merwin and ask if I could stop by for a photo.  I did not bring any of my work or ask for his help getting published. I just wanted a photo, which hangs on the wall of my studio here in Denver.

I did publish a few more poems in good literary magazines, but I grew weary of the odds and the steady flow of tiny rejection slips.  The poetry editor of The New Yorker in 2007 said she received 600 poetry submissions a week. I shifted to writing book reviews for a while and continued to tend an earlier version of this blog while still noodling with my two book-length poetry manuscripts. I also helped out with an online literary magazine here in Denver, wazee.

In December of 2005 I first heard the word “podcast” uttered at a conference in Banff named “Blogs ‘n’ Dogs,” because the registration covered room, sessions, and a free dogsled ride.  My morning writing time in the past four years has gradually morphed into GarageBand audio editing sessions or Skype interviews for my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast, and on Wednesday Darlene and I are headed for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to cover the eBook sector with official blogger press credentials.

So what was the point of spending two years of my life and a good slice of my IRA getting an MFA?  Where’s the poetry, Jack? Where’s my place in the world of letters?  Twitter?  The podcast script? Here?

All of the above, actually.  This MFA revises his tweets endlessly before clicking on “update.”   And what I speak into my Snowball mic each Friday about the Kindlesphere benefits, I hope, from intangible lessons gleaned in Vermont about authentic voice, timing, and the right words in the right order.

I read a terrific article in The New York Times this morning titled “How to Train the Aging Brain” by Barbara Strauch.  Here’s a tidbit:

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Maybe beating my head against the villanelle and my own creative limitations for two years in my early 50s jiggled my synapses more than I realized.  The outcome so far has been wildly different than what I expected.  I have great teachers and fellow students to thank for that.  I hope I will see some of them when the MFA writing flock descends on Denver in three months.

With help from wizard Kindle formatter Joshua Tallent, I now have a new title available at Amazon’s Kindle Store.  It’s A Poet’s Progress at Bennington – Vol. 1. It comprises the work I did during my first semester in the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program, a mix of commentary on poets and my own original poems. My teacher that semester was David Lehman, editor for the highly successful Best American Poetry Series.  David was a terrific teacher and a great wit.  The way it worked was that I would send him a packet once a month during the semester, responding to his suggested readings and assignments, so this first volume contains four packets.  Then we all gathered on the classic New England campus of Bennington in southern Vermont for a 10-day orgy of workshops, special lectures, and nonstop conversations and arguments among fellow students.

I wasn’t the oldest student in my class, which graduated in January of 2003.  The low-residency MFA writing programs are terrific for people who have pursued other careers, like mine as a journalist and corporate executive, and finally decide to try their hand at serious writing.  I loved every minute of the program, even the ones which involved painful realizations about the inadequacy of my own work.  I always felt I was moving toward something those two years of the Bennington MFA. When I came across the saved files of my packets for David Lehman, I decided to edit them lightly and publish them using Amazon’s Digital Text Publishing platform.  I set the price at the lowest one possible, a dollar, and that usually means Amazon will discount it to 80 cents.

I left Bennington eager to take my place in the literary world, and I worked hard to complete a booklength poem titled Downsizing the Heart, excerpts of which appear in this new Kindle volume.  But along the way, new passions arose, triggered by a conference I attended in Banff named Blogs ‘n’ Dogs, where I first saw someone making a podcast. That was in December, 2005, and I’ve been podcasting and experimenting with audio and video on the net ever since.

I still write poems occasionally, and I dutifully pack my big leather notebook of works in progress whenever I travel, in case the muse lures me from GarageBand and iMovie to pen and paper.  Having my work from eight years ago available on my Kindle may spark renewed interest in poetry.  And I bought a paper book of poems several days ago, W.S. Merwin’s latest, The Shadow of Sirius, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year, his second.  I’ve been fascinated by the insights and observations that my new Kindlesphere friend Andrys Basten has emailed me in the past two days, as she has taken the time for a very close reading of A Poet’s Progress – Vol. 1. It’s wonderful to have readers, and to hear from them.  We all know the Kindle and eBooks in general are making a new world of reading possible.  What’s not clear is how this emerging platform will revolutionize creative writing.  I’m enjoying my own small experiment as a way to find out.

Here is my description of Vol. 1 as it appears on Amazon:

This volume’s commentary comprises considerations of The Best American Poetry 2000, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot, nine short stories by Henry James, The Mooring of Starting Out by John Ashbery, The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, Douglas Hofstadter’s translation of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, The Sea and the Mirror by W. H. Auden, The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, Sphere by A.R. Ammons, Garbage by A.R. Ammons, and The One Day by Donald Hall. Edgerly’s original poetry takes as its subject literary satire, travel in New Zealand, a villanelle on marriage, poetry. Also included are excerpts of a book-length poetry manuscript loosely drawn from the author’s experience as an executive at a gas company.

All that for a buck, and of course there’s the free sample available if you’d like a taste of the work first…

While working out upstairs on the cross-trainer, I finished listening to a New York Review of Books interview with Christopher Ricks, author of an NYRB review of a new biography of the poet John Keats.  The interviewer, Giles Harvey, did a great job of drawing out Ricks’s wit and wisdom regarding the poet and the biography, titled Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly.  (Click here for the Kindle edition, available for $9.99 compared with $16.27 for the hardcover.)  There were so many pearls to admire in the podcast.  One I remember is Ricks’s distinction between identifying with another person, which can actually be a selfish act of replacing that person with one’s self, and empathy or sympathy for another person, by which you consider the world from that person’s point of view while maintaining the person’s autonomous existence.  Ricks made the point that the genius of Keats’s poetry, and even more so his letters, was empathy.  He also said that if forced to make a choice, he would choose Keats’s collected letters over his poems.   I’m sure that Ricks’s written review will be a pleasure to read when it hits my Kindle through the miracle of Instapaper.  But the podcast dimension adds so much, because of the ability to hear the reviewer’s gravelly, joyful voice and to enjoy the informal, exploratory nature of the conversation which Giles Harvey hosted.   You could never take 20 minutes for such a thing even on NPR, so this is an example of the great new wonders that podcasting has to offer.

My next treat, also from the New York Review of Books podcasts, was Helen Epstein on prison reform. Again, part of the delight was due to the understated skill of the interviewer, Eve Bowen, who has perfected the art of asking very short, very clear questions.  The gist of Epstein’s piece in the June 11, 2009 issue, titled “America’s Prisons: Is There Hope?” is that the U.S., with five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates, may finally be on the verge of taking up fundamental prison reforms.  The piece is a review of Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All by Sunny Schwartz, with David Boodell. There is a Kindle edition, but I will not link to it, because Scribner Ebook has violated the $9.99 price standard and is charging $14.40 compared with $18.72 for the hardcover.  Ridiculous.  Click here for the podcast audio.

After my workout, I drove to a meeting that I attend each weekday morning. It’s a 20-minute drive, and my pre-Hawai’i routine was to listen to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” hoping for some red-meat political coverage confirming my view of the world as correct and that of those opposing it as sadly mistaken and headed soon for the Great Unmasking.  Instead, I plugged my iPhone into the cassette adapter and listened to Dave Winer and Jay Rosen‘s latest conversation in their truly remarkable “Rebooting the News” podcast.

Winer and Rosen are edgy and insightful as they ponder the revolution under way in journalism.  In this latest episode, Rosen, a faculty member at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, suggests that journalism is like a software program that enables citizens to use their democracy effectively.  Winer, who pioneered podcasting itself, as well as a few other major advances such as RSS syndication and blogs, immediately saw the genius of this comparison, because programmers are always struggling to make the user interface easier for real people to use.  He offered empathy as a key quality, which of course reminded me of the Keats podcast.  And on it went, one voice and one idea leading to the next, filling my morning up with new ways of seeing the world and renewed appreciation for podcasting.

Click here for audio of the Winer/Rosen episode.

I’m sure I will resume my consumption of political fare at some point.  But I’m enjoying the new bandwidth that’s opened up in my mind thanks to this pause from the daily ideological fray.  Not to mention the pleasure of returning to blogging on perhaps a daily basis.

If you’re a podcast fan yourself, I’d love to know what you’re listening to, so please feel free to offer some suggestions in the comments!

Here are a few of my favorites:

The air of an unknown genius running out of time.
The air of a dangerous mother’s boy.
The air of a French spy on vacation in Wyoming.
The air of a knave flying First Class.

The air of a cad learning the joys of fidelity.
The air of a trapper dining in tails at the Village Inn.
The air of a POW digging to freedom with a spoon.
The air of a mouse herding elephants to safety.

The air of a hunchback looking for his cathedral.
The air of a gargoyle breathing in stone.
The air of a guru who missed his bus to the interfaith rally.
The air of a panhandler issuing edicts.

The air of a poet whose tech startup can’t miss.
The air of a political genius from the next administration.
The air of just another bozo on the bus.
The air of a man who blogs regularly.