Frustration and the Accidental Poet
This Friday I will submit my application for the Undergraduate Workshop. I will target poetry and creative writing with a preference on creative writing. I’m not sure I will get in. My recent work has not been up to the level of quality I would like. Time and work have conspired quite effectively to minimize my productivity and the project I was planning for my New Media class was eclipsed by another project that has stalled. Simply put, I don’t have a lot of fiction to submit.
This leads me to an even greater concern: I get accepted for poetry. You see, I never considered myself a poet. The poems I write tend to be for me. I write them purely as an exercise and that is all they were ever meant to be. I got stuck, though. My senior year is almost here and I wanted into the writing program. Since I came in as a junior, I was well behind. I needed a creative writing class for Spring and the fiction class I had signed up for wasn’t applicable. This left me scrambling. Poetry was available so I jumped for it. I like poetry. I enjoy the structure and the lack of structure. I love playing with words and poetry does translate nicely into the New Media space where I plan to make my professional home.
The poetry workshops are driving me insane, though. Only one of the students, an older student like myself, has fun with their work. Everyone else is so deadly serious and deadly boring. I worked with two poets at Kirkwood and they were fantastic. They were both gifted writers and professors and I felt lucky to have them. So far, my poetry experience at the U of I has been lackluster to say the least.
I don’t know. I have an advisor for the fall for my Honors Thesis. I want it to be a creative piece which means I need in to this program. Poetry or prose, I’ll let the fates and a committee of strangers decide.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Good luck, btw!