You’ll hear it as soon as you leave your first workshop—time counting itself down. Egg timer or hourglass, grandfather clock or moon’s lunar click, just as the experience has begun, you’ll feel your time is running out. It can create panic as easily as petulance, this sense of precarity, that you’ve finally arrived where you most belong, only to feel as if it were already gone. Panic can lead you to write as much as you can possibly write, fearing that on the other side of the degree, work’s weird wasteland might put a stranglehold on your inner life; petulance can lead you to say to anyone who might listen, in a desperation nearly inexplicable to yourself, “Look, look at what I’ve made,” seeking validation or seeking proof, and wondering why they can’t see it.
But you can learn to hear that ticktock of time’s relentless passing differently—you might need to learn to do so, to make the most of your time in your MFA. Not a countdown to nothing left, nor a sum of hours spent, but something more like a metronome, a tool not to teach you that time is a commodity, but a truer economy—a rhythm, a meter, a cosmos. You’re introduced to a sense of poetic order, a pattern that promises you that you do not live, as you feared, in scarcity. No, you’re learning to live in time of another kind—not one in which your worth is proved by how much you do and the assumed successes that follow (publications, awards, etcetera), but something far simpler and more beautiful: You’re learning to labor in language in such a way that you’ve made yourself worthy of the next labor. You write the poem that is no more than the clearing of the ground that makes the next poem possible—or essay, or story, or novel.
To do this you might have to take seriously ideas your younger self scoffed at—art’s odd eternity, poem’s strange paradise. Then time suddenly is no longer the precious resource of which you must take full advantage, but is instead the open field itself. Then you might find certain moments living on within you forever, newer by the year—talking with friends in a dark pub, taxidermy fox above the bar’s mirror, arguing over a line of Emily Dickinson as if nothing in the world mattered more. And nothing did matter more. Nor does it now. You’ll know what I mean, when you know what I mean. “And Being, but an Ear”—that’s the line. You might look back, a quarter century after your MFA is done, feeling no time has really passed at all, for there is hardly a thing called time that actually exists, not really. You’ll realize all you’d meant to learn was how to listen, the ever-present present tense of what now is, when now is when you’re listening. And you’re listening now, trying to listen, to words of advice that bewilder more than they guide. How do you make the most of your MFA? You might suspect a poem is a form of listening. You might define a poet as I have come to define it: a creature that opens its mouth to listen. You learn to listen.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is currently interim chair of the English Department at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.
Thumbnail credit: Kristy Beachy-Quick