I am in the process of collecting all the poems I’ve written in graduate school. My advisor will read them and we’ll cut a bunch and revise a bunch and I’ll write a bunch more. My goal is to have 150 poems to give to her. So far I have 109.
One-hundred-nine poems, friends. Keep in mind that until just this past November, I was focusing on fiction, not poetry, so that’s quite the shitload for someone who wasn’t supposed to be focusing on poetry at all.
My thesis—I’m stressin’. I suppose most of us are. I want it to be brilliant and perfect and I want to complete it in a year. Tall order, I realize. And at first I was going to do a collection of science-themed poems. Now, I want to take a bunch of the fiction I have and turn them into narrative poems. And I want to do another collection of poems that are just ones I like that don’t necessarily have a theme.
(Hold on! I just found another one. Make that 110. Yeah!)
Is it just me, or does that sound like three books? Yeah, I’m not writing 3 books in a year. Or maybe I can somehow combine these—do 1 book with three sections. But… doesn’t that sound random? Like, “Hey, this part is about physics and astronomy, and this part is about my mom! And over here there are a couple poems about birds.” (Oh yeah, the bird poems. Revised total: 113.)
Really.
My point is, I don’t know how my vision of my thesis looks. It keeps changing, and I’m going to have to steer my craft toward some sort of vision of a project, but I also need to honor whatever I feel compelled to write, right? Or is that just a bunch of crap?
I hope this is the part where my advisor comes in. Like, she’ll look at my stuff and say something like “Clearly, you’re doing a lot of work that is X. So let’s make that into a book. Here’s step 1.”
I do not know. What I do know is that I’m totally overwhelmed, and how it’s all going to come together: a mystery. And this mystery, I want to hide from it right now. I want to go watch TV and shop for tank tops instead of think about how much I’ll have to do to figure this out.
Should the theme/vision/narrative of my thesis project somehow seem obvious to any of YOU, please, do enlighten me.
One-hundred-nine poems, friends. Keep in mind that until just this past November, I was focusing on fiction, not poetry, so that’s quite the shitload for someone who wasn’t supposed to be focusing on poetry at all.
My thesis—I’m stressin’. I suppose most of us are. I want it to be brilliant and perfect and I want to complete it in a year. Tall order, I realize. And at first I was going to do a collection of science-themed poems. Now, I want to take a bunch of the fiction I have and turn them into narrative poems. And I want to do another collection of poems that are just ones I like that don’t necessarily have a theme.
(Hold on! I just found another one. Make that 110. Yeah!)
Is it just me, or does that sound like three books? Yeah, I’m not writing 3 books in a year. Or maybe I can somehow combine these—do 1 book with three sections. But… doesn’t that sound random? Like, “Hey, this part is about physics and astronomy, and this part is about my mom! And over here there are a couple poems about birds.” (Oh yeah, the bird poems. Revised total: 113.)
Really.
My point is, I don’t know how my vision of my thesis looks. It keeps changing, and I’m going to have to steer my craft toward some sort of vision of a project, but I also need to honor whatever I feel compelled to write, right? Or is that just a bunch of crap?
I hope this is the part where my advisor comes in. Like, she’ll look at my stuff and say something like “Clearly, you’re doing a lot of work that is X. So let’s make that into a book. Here’s step 1.”
I do not know. What I do know is that I’m totally overwhelmed, and how it’s all going to come together: a mystery. And this mystery, I want to hide from it right now. I want to go watch TV and shop for tank tops instead of think about how much I’ll have to do to figure this out.
Should the theme/vision/narrative of my thesis project somehow seem obvious to any of YOU, please, do enlighten me.
1 comment:
I never made that far through university, so I just don't know jack about it.
My advice is go with your gut instict.
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