James Allen Hall | Guest Writer for MFA Program

I think it was when I was four years old, and I stood on the chair in my grandmother’s dining room table and proclaimed, “Dee Dee died!” Dee Dee was my grandmother’s mother. My grandmother ran from the room in tears, and I felt very proud of myself. Words are powerful—that was the impression I got. In high school, I had a teacher who loved poetry and played us songs that were adaptations of poems. He played us an adaptation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” then I got curious and read it one night, probably to impress my teacher.

I just fell into poetry that way. When my parents realized, “Oh wow, he likes poems, rather than his older brother, who likes sneaking out at night,” they were like, “Let’s nurture that!” They bought me Sylvia Plath, and I took the eyes out of my head and washed them in her poetry. That feeling of saying something you’re not supposed to say really resonated with me.

I’ll start with the differences. I can’t be funny in a poem the way that I can be funny in an essay. The timing just doesn’t work with the line breaks. Certainly, there are comic elements in my poems, but I think I’m a lot funnier in prose because of the timing. In poetry, there are two ways of composing: the sentence and the line. In prose, you only have the sentence. What’s similar for me is making interesting sentences and crafting surprise through the way that the sentence will unwind psychologically and invite the participation of the reader.

I’m a queer person. I’ve lived my life in a lot of silencing mechanisms, so there’s something about poetry, for me, that’s a very clear form because it incorporates the silence. It feels right to me. I feel like I live in a line break or a stanza break all the time. Poetry is nonrepresentational. It’s lyrical, it uses the world of metaphor, it’s the dream world. Prose is the world of representational art. It conforms to those Aristotelian unities. We like to talk about place, time, action. It is coherence—you’re in a body in the real world in real time with other real bodies. In poetry, you can escape your body. You’re not beholden to the truth in the same way that you are in memoir.

When you live your life against the oppressive, systemic structures of shame that control you, and you say you’re going to throw that shame off, then you’re willing to say just about anything. It’s not that I’m brave, it’s that I have no shame.

I understand that people experience work as brave. I experience other writers’ work as brave, but I really do think it is just a lack of shame. It’s the way I process the world too. My identity has led me to understand that identity is a shaped thing, just like a poem is. There are layers to it, so I understand my writing as layering: the first draft is putting down some kind of structure or idea. Then other layers come into it, the last one being a sonic layer. Identity is the same. When you have those layers that form you, and you start peeling back those layers, you can understand that identity is a formation just like a piece of art is. We can peel back the paint and put down new paint.

Also, there are moments of hierarchies in the poems. The epiphany at the end, for instance. It’s all building toward that climax in a narrative. How do you graph toward that? How do you undermine and subvert it and create surprise? For me, that’s a very clear experience of structure and hierarchy. How do you build other sub-narratives? How do you let in other voices? Other people’s voices are so important, especially in memoir.

Finding the time for my own creative pursuits during a semester is certainly a struggle, but teaching and writing are very similar to me. Horace said something like, “Poetry should instruct and delight.” That’s what a poem does, and that’s what a class does. If I’m actively engaged in teaching, that energy doesn’t get directed toward my writing very often, but sometimes I work on a collaborative project, and that sort of peer pressure keeps me going.

I love community. I see art as a way to build community, so I just want to experience that and help this community thrive. I remember being a first-year MFA student and how nervous that can be and how my mentors helped to welcome me into that community. I hope to be able to do that same sort of thing.

For a person who has a job and a life and can’t necessarily leave that life, it offers flexibility. It’s like going to poetry boot camp. It’s intense, just like a poem is intense. It’s a time where you get to feel like a writer and an artist. You’re working even when you’re eating lunch in the cafeteria. You’re talking about a book of essays or poetry you’ve read that just blew your socks off. You get to have these conversations that you don’t really get to have with other people in your normal day-to-day. It’s so sustaining. You meet people that you will show your work to and read their poems as well for the rest of your life.