Giving Up

I have, finally, come to my breaking point.

I have been studying almost every day, for hours on end almost every day, for almost two months straight. It has gotten to the point where I am not absorbing and cannot willingly absorb any more. And when I say willingly, I mean that my studies over and over seem like I'm throwing things at a wall, hoping they'll stick, and they're not. I'm proverbially throwing books into my brain, pages upon pages of poems and notes and criticism and interviews and and and....and none of it is sticking anymore. In fact, I believe that I'm starting to lose some of the stuff I started with when I began studying those many weeks ago. Key concepts, even. People whose collected works I've read and taken notes on, yet I could not tell you one, solitary, single thing about if asked.

I spent two hours leafing through my five criticism books this afternoon. Of them, only two provided any real use to my studies (the others were, really, almost completely non-applicable as they covered poets not on my reading list). Yet, even though I read Eliot's On Poetry and Poets, and took good notes on his concepts and found them fascinating at the time, could I list any of them off to you right now? No, not really. And I did this reading and note-taking less than three hours ago.

My brain is full, and I think it's leaking.


Everything else in my life has basically been put on hiatus until comps are done and over with. I can't focus on those things, I can't worry about those things until I can be just. fucking. done. Everyone is encouraging me. Everyone is telling me I'll do fine and that I shouldn't be so preoccupied and so worried. Yet I still have this immense fear that I will go in there on Friday morning and completely bomb that exam. I can study all I want, I can pump myself full of knowledge, and I can go in there as confident as I can be, but it will mean little if I'm given a set of questions that I can't answer, or they're a set of questions for which the required knowledge has already leaked out of my brain. And it is for that exact reason that the zen-like calm I need will never manifest itself.

I told Daisy last night (at 4AM, mind you) that there are some poets that I just don't get, and will never, ever get. I can't make sense of Wordsworth, Keats, or half of Auden, no matter how I try. I cannot grasp it. I cannot grasp the language, the subject matter, the styles, or what any of them are trying to say, really. Do I know their themes? I guess. Somewhat. Maybe. W.B. Yeats, while some of his stuff I do like, the rest of it is much the same. And you try making sense of Eliot's "The Waste Land" without knowing about every little reference he makes in the poem. It's maddening. It's stuff like that. Then there are poets on the list that, while I like and/or understand them, I have no clue what I could be asked about them or how I'd answer questions on them. This includes people like Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, C.K. Williams, etc. I adore their writings, I do, but I have no clue what I'd say about them in a question. William Carlos Williams likes water. He likes people. C.K. Williams writes a lot about Detroit and the blue-collar lifestyle. Frost and Lowell really like God, and like William Carlos Williams, Frost writes a lot about nature and pastoral settings in rather plain language. Okay. Whoop-dee-doo. That's not going to be good enough for a comps question. I'd rather be given random poems from a given poet's body of work and be told to explicate them with knowledge of their larger body of work and common themes. That I could do, or at least bullshit, relatively well. Remembering minute details and/or huge themes without the poems in front of me for reference is going to prove damned near fruitless. That's not how I write, study, think, or operate at all in my head.

Because of these issues, I have decided to give up. I am going through my notes twice more -- once tonight, and once more tomorrow afternoon when I return home from campus after teaching, and I will be done. I'm giving up. I'm not truly going to learn or instill in my brain anything more than I already know, nor will I be able to retain anything more than I already know. That zen-like calm will not arrive, nor do I (or will I) have total confidence in my abilities because a large amount of what happens is left up to luck and chance -- the luck and chance that I get questions on that exam which I can answer. Yes, failing my comps is a real and frightening possibility, and it is a possibility which I cannot take lightly. Having to redo a question, if I must, is one thing, and not a huge issue, but failing all three of them is something else entirely, and something that sadly, is out of my control past a certain point. There is only so much that I can reasonably be expected to know and/or recall. This isn't like studying for a unit test in a single class, where one can study everything in a matter of hours; this is, inherently, an unfair exam from the get go -- we are creative writers being expected to study and recall a large amount of historical literature for which we are not majoring in. It's akin to telling a computer programmer to go study electrical engineering for a semester or two, because he'll be tested on it, and that test will determine whether or not he gets his degree in computer programming. While yes, they're sort of in the same field, they're completely different ballparks. I didn't go into grad school for my MFA to study more literature; I did it to work on my own literature.

I can't tell you how frustrated I am trying to get this stuff to "stick" in my head and having it just not take. I desperately wish I could memorize everything I've read, every note I've written, and be able to recall it at a whim. But I can't. It is too much to process. My brain can't keep it all in there. I could read through my notes ten more times tonight and not get any further. It really does feel like my brain is just full, and that it won't take, or retain, any more. This is the definition of psychosis. This is the definition of "studying psychotically" -- repeating the same action again and again and expecting a different result. I can only study so much, and can only look on the same material with "fresh eyes" so many times. Each time my eyes become a little less fresh.

Throughout all of this, I'm pretty sure I'll do fine. It's the law of averages, both with the poets on my reading list as well as the number of students who take their comps every semester and pass just fine, no big deal, in and out. I have also been known to be able to pull some insanely good writing out of thin air in pressure-cooker situations such as timed tests. Perhaps the knowledge is in there somewhere, buried deep under the surface, inaccessible until I must call upon its arcane power.

Or something.

Regardless, I'm pretty sure that zen-like calm isn't going to arrive. All I can do is study what I have and cross my proverbial fingers, hoping for the best. And I'm just so tired. I can sleep for twelve hours and it doesn't feel like enough. I can read everything I have over and over and still feel like it won't matter. And that's why I'm giving up. I am not a Jedi Master. But here's hoping that I can fake being one for a six-hour stretch on Friday.