It's done. Comps are over.
The past two months of madness, studying, and stressing is all over.
I say "all over" because I'm pretty sure I did well. Pretty sure meaning "eh, 90% sure" or something along those lines. If I were to grade all three of my questions and average the scores together, I'd give myself in the realm of an 87-92%, which is in the B+/A- range. No, I didn't go in there and say "psh, this is cake," but I did admirably. I'll put it in the words of one of my friends who took the comps with me, in reference to his own performance: "I'm sure there are many people who did much worse than me who passed with no problems." That's how I feel. I'm confident I passed just fine, really.
So, now that I've said that, here's the story.
I awoke Thursday night, as you know, around 11. Something like that. I don't remember the exact time, but I was awake. I talked to Daisy on Facebook while she was at work in the middle of the night, I wrote the previous post here, and I reviewed my notes again -- twice. I knew it wouldn't do much good, and that I wouldn't magically acquire any more real
knowledge from them, but I wanted to refresh myself; I wanted to be as confident as I could be.
I should have, in hindsight, forced myself to go back to sleep in any way possible for at least a few more hours in the overnight. I was tired. By 5AM, 5:30-ish, I was
feeling it. I told Daisy how tired I was, how much I just wanted to go back to sleep, how much I just wanted to curl up with the cats downstairs on the bed with the electric blanket, and pass back out. I now know this was more than likely my subconscious nerves fucking around with me, because I was about to do something that I absolutely did
not want to do. Yet, on some level, I
did want to do it -- I wanted to get it over with so that I could spend the next month or so relatively stress-free.
At 6:15, I left the house early to go get gas in the car. The car's running fine, though the rapid ups-and-downs in temperature and humidity levels is messing with her a bit, and I can tell -- she's a little growly, a little sluggish at times, burns more or less oil depending on the day (because when your car is as old as mine is and burns oil, you can smell it faintly) and I'd run the gas tank down a little farther than I normally do before filling up, which always makes her a bit cranky. So, as preventative maintenance (read: once every month or so), I put a bottle of fuel-injector/engine cleaner into her when I filled up. She took almost 11 full gallons of gas (it was 10.92 or something like that) and she'd been driven 208 miles since my previous fill up, which means she's getting a little over 19 miles to the gallon. That's a little less than normal, as she usually averages about 20-22, so I wanted to put that bottle of stuff into her anyway to see if I could knock out some of the kinks. I filled up, I got back into the car, and I turned the key.
Nothing.
What? You've got to be shitting me, right? On the most important morning of my graduate school career, my car won't start in the parking lot of the gas station.
I took the key out and looked at it. The key was fine, I was putting it in the right way, nothing was wrong. She'd fired up just fine less than five minutes before when I drove her to the gas station. I put the key back in and turned it again.
I had to hold it in "start" position for about ten seconds before she finally fired up, the starter whirring and trying desperately to turn over until that point. When she did, I revved the engine a few times, tapping the gas pedal to get everything flowing. She sounded just fine.
Hm. That's interesting, I thought. It wasn't cold this morning, or at least not as cold as it has been on most mornings -- it was about 40. I also know that my battery is just fine; I bought the car in June 2011, and the day before I bought it, the battery had been replaced. Occasionally she does this -- she has her moments where I call her "whiny" and she doesn't want to work correctly. Once I got on the interstate, she was fine, and for my drive home in the afternoon she fired up strongly and ran just fine as well. I really think she doesn't like abrupt temperature or humidity changes, really. It's been cold most of this week -- hell, on Monday when I got up it was snowing like crazy -- but for the past two days or so, it's warmed up quite a bit, even though it's been chilly in the mornings. Yesterday afternoon when I finished and came home, it was well above 60. Right now, at 5:32 PM on Saturday evening, it's 75.
Anyway.
Before I went to campus, I sent Jay a message that I'd be in my office around 7 if he wanted to come up and get some coffee before we had to head over there for the exam. Four of us were taking it -- me, Jay, and two fiction guys. I know one of the fiction guys pretty well (and he's even read this blog on occasion) but the other no longer teaches and has not been an
active member, per se, of the department for over a year. Jay arrived around 8 or so, and we had coffee, nervously chatting about what lay ahead of us.
"Here's what I'm unsure of," I said. "Is [Director] going to give us easy, lowball questions just so we can get it over with and pass easily, or is he going to rake us over the coals and
really test us on our reading lists? Because if he goes the latter route and discusses the people that I really don't 'get' or know a whole lot about, like Wordsworth, Auden, Keats, etc -- I'm pretty fucked."
I studied as much of those three poets as I possibly could understand or get from their writing, but much of it, even after repeated views of their works and my notes, still remained lost to me. As mentioned before, I don't connect that well with the pre-modern poets, or even with some/most of the modernists, such as Eliot and Yeats. I could, however, if asked, write a lot about Eliot and Yeats, but most of it would be putting it into a historical or modernist/stylistic perspective.
Jay and I looked up a bit on Keats' "Hyperion" to refresh ourselves -- he knows a lot about Keats; apparently he wrote a twenty-page paper on Keats for one of his classes here, so he was on his reading list too. As for me? I barely read anything of Keats that was substantial, even for the comps -- again, I just don't connect with or "get" it. I really didn't research a lot of my poets, especially the older/classical ones, for my reading list -- it was more of a "oh, him. I've heard of him, let's put him on there" sort of exercise. Not to mention that a fair amount of them were basically picked for me by my director, as he was like "nah, take that person off, put this one on" for several of them. My thoughts on this were along the lines of
well, whatever, their works are all public domain and you're writing the questions anyway, so... My classics/pre-modern selections were Dickinson, Whitman, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare (specifically his sonnets, and
Hamlet only if necessary).
At about 8:30 we went downstairs. We were supposed to be over at the testing center -- which is right next door to our building -- by 8:45.
"I won't lie," I said. "I'm a little nervous about this. It could be easy or it could be really, really hard, depending on the questions."
I felt like I was repeating myself, but it's what was on my mind. It was a thought that surprisingly had not occurred to me until this morning -- the possibility that, because it
is comps, that he could make the questions either incredibly easy and open-ended or ball-smashingly hard and specific. I'd almost rather take a short-answer or multiple choice test of 500 questions than deal with an essay that I may not know how to write effectively.
Anyway, we went up to the testing center early, and since all of us were there, we were allowed to start early. The testing center, at least for our purposes, is a small room with cubicles and tables in it. Three of the four of us, including myself, were testing on computers. My computer setup was less than ideal; the keyboard was too low, the monitor was too high, and I couldn't move things around because the cables were strung in such a fashion as to where they were immobile. It was pretty uncomfortable. We were led into the room and each handed envelopes containing our first question. The lady running the center set the clock, and said "okay, you have ninety minutes...starting now." And we tore into our envelopes.
Inside my envelope, my worst fear was realized: the first exam question (as we have the ability to pick from one of two options on each one) was
not. pleasant. Both options were at least ten lines long in their instructions, and neither one was incredibly ideal to write on. I picked the latter of the two options, a question asking me how Whitman's writing influenced at least two others on my reading list who, in a sense, carried on his traditions in relation to subject matter and style. That's what it boiled down to, anyway. I chose Allen Ginsberg (for obvious reasons, if you've ever read him; he's like Whitman reincarnated 100 years later), but had definite trouble coming up with a second author on my list to use. I eventually, with maybe twenty minutes left, brought in C.K. Williams -- who, I argued, used Whitman's long-lined, explanatory style as well as seemed to bring in a lot of the stream-of-consciousness stuff Whitman excelled at as well, and made references to Williams' wonderment at our place in society and his snapshots of people and how those people interact with one another as well as the world. All of it was pretty basic stuff, and given maybe three hours for that question I could have gone into much greater detail, but part of it was that I was so shaken by a choice of questions that difficult (even though, in hindsight, it doesn't seem
incredibly difficult now). I finished it with maybe two minutes to spare before time was called.
By the way, the other option to that question was to write a conversation of sorts between Keats and Shakespeare on how they would view the more contemporary poets' works on my list, such as that of Anne Carson, Sexton, O'Hara, etc. I read that and was like
you've got to be fucking kidding me, right?
"Verily, my friend John, this poetry doth suck. O, why hath these fools abandoned metered verse?"
Etc.
I understand that was my director's attempt to put a bit of creativity into an option for a comps question to possibly make it a bit more amusing to complete, if chosen, but nobody in their right mind is going to attempt to answer a question like that unless they're
very, very well-versed in Shakespeare or Keats, or both. Aside from his sonnets, I haven't read anything by Shakespeare in over ten years -- my last Shakespeare class was in 2002. And, while I enjoyed it, it's not like I was ever going to remember anything major from it. Aside from
Hamlet, we didn't even read any of the major plays -- it was more the historical ones.
Coriolanus, Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II, Richard III, etc.
Ahem. Anyway.
The first question jarred me. I was more confident in my writing in it by the end, once I'd been able to put everything together, but still, it was a bit rough. I was hoping that all three of them wouldn't be like that, that the other two would be relatively painless in comparison.
I sort of got my wish.
I opened the second question (after our fifteen-minute break) to find a fairly straightforward explanatory question that was something along the lines of "you have many contemporary 'confessional' poets on your list; choose three of them and write about their confessional styles, themes, motives, etc." I chose Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, and Michael McGriff. In that order. And made a detailed five-body essay out of it. By the end of the ninety minutes, I had written four pages singlespaced and in as excruciating detail as possible, bringing up examples and even paraphrases/references to some of the poets' lines and larger body of work within the collection, such as Olds' reference to her newborn child, in one of her poems, as a "glistening verb" (something that stuck with me), and references to Sexton's lines about how the undertaker was already making her coffin, etc. I tried to be as specific as possible, and in the end thought that I'd pretty much nailed that question. I don't remember what the other option was for the second question; I was laser-focused on answering that one.
After the second question, we got a lunch break of a bit over an hour -- they told us to be back in the testing center at 1:20, and let us go. All of us went over to the student union to eat. I had nothing, for I knew that if I ate anything before I was done, my blood sugar would spike and then crash (I hadn't consumed anything but coffee and cigarettes, in order to stay focused); if I eat when I'm tired, I very quickly pass out afterwards. It's just how my metabolism works, and as I know that, this is why I rarely eat anything while at school, and why I generally only eat one meal a day. It's how I keep my girlish figure.
Now, to put all of this into perspective, we'd had two questions at this point -- and not one mention of any of the four poems we gave our director to include on the exam. Sure, the authors of some of those poems had come up as examples to draw from in questions, but the poems themselves had not been included in our packets for the exams thus far. This led Jay and I to believe that the third question, the final question, would
have to be the example/explication poems question. My four poems were Ben Lerner's "Reading is Important," Anne Sexton's "Buying the Whore," Frank O'Hara's "My Heart," and Bob Hicok's "After the procedure." For all four of these poems I drafted out explication answers in my notes, answers which would address anything that our director could come up with in reference to those poems, and I studied them meticulously. By the end of my studying, I could have basically quoted to you the vast majority of the draft explications for any of those poems. So, really, I was ready for it. I was hoping to get O'Hara or Lerner, as I'd not written anything about either of them yet in the exam, and I'd covered Sexton in as much detail as I probably could have in the previous question. Hicok was the wild card; I had a lot to say about Hicok, but with O'Hara I could've drawn in his manifesto of Personism, and with Lerner I could've drawn in the numerous pop-culture, advertising, and 1980s references he made in his book
Angle of Yaw, which the poem was taken from.
Upon getting in there, I found that the last question was
indeed the example poems question, and for the most part, to answer it would require explication and dissection of the poem itself in reference to its themes, language, line breaks/stanza breaks, as well as any differing use of syntax or other tropes in reference to the poet's overall body of work (or the body of work we knew which was included in the collection we'd read/had taken the poem from). Okay, fair enough, I could do all of that. I looked at the poems he was letting me choose from: Sexton and Hicok.
Fuck. No Lerner or O'Hara. Oh well. He also added "feel free to pull in anything from your criticism books that may be of use as well, though do not feel as if that is absolutely required" or something to that effect.
On one level, I was actually delighted that he'd chosen the Hicok poem -- in my studies before bed on Thursday, hypnotically, I'd re-read through the entire book of Hicok that I'd taken that poem from,
Words for Empty and Words for Full, and had enjoyed it immensely. It also gave me a good sense of his overall style and how he uses language, switching the order of words, switching letters to make nonsense, etc. Having already written on Sexton and not wanting to drive down that depressing path again, I chose the Hicok poem and
completely dismantled it almost on a line-by-line basis, explicating what it meant and how Hicok went about bringing that meaning to the poem. I talked about the duality of objects and images within the poem. I talked about the poem in reference to Hicok's other works in the book. I talked about Hicok's syntactical and lyrical style, and how it differs in this poem than many of his others. I talked about wordplay and how the switching of letters or the order of words in the poem helped to demonstrate certain effects. I talked about how the way his stanzas, even, lent themselves to a particular way of reading the poem. I had this question
by the balls, and proverbially nailed it to the wall. When I came to what could've been a logical finish, there was still 20-25 minutes left, so I channeled Eliot's
On Poetry and Poets and some of the major themes in that book of criticism, slinging them in and attaching them to Hicok's poem like
I was Obi-Eliot Kenobi. When the time was up, I had typed up over four pages, singlespaced, and had written over 2,100 words (oh yes, I looked at the word count) on that
one, solitary poem.
"So, this concludes your exam," the lady running the place told us, adding cheerfully, "I hope all of you did well!"
"So do we," I added just as cheerfully. And we left.
It wasn't until afterwards, when Jay and I were preparing to go home, that I was able to come down a little bit and relax, and realize the bullets I'd dodged in that exam. Wordsworth, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Keats, Frost, Levine, Lowell, Carson, Dean Young, and William Carlos Williams were all mentioned, though briefly and in passing. Major poets who I was sure would be included in a question or two, such as Auden, Yeats, e.e. cummings, and T.S. Eliot were not mentioned or brought up in any question
at all. Our director is even teaching an Eliot class this semester. Also going unmentioned were the surrealist manifestoes and poetry of Andre Breton, who my director
specifically requested I add to my reading list, and someone he'd asked me about last week via email. I don't know; perhaps maybe he thought I knew enough about Breton and surrealism already.
So, really, I realized that I could have studied about 1/4 of what I'd actually ended up studying, and would have been able to take the same exam with the same results.
Again, as I mentioned I wouldn't be,
I'm not even mad. I'm not. I don't care. It's done now. I may have been a little shaky on the first question, but if I were grading that question myself I would give it a 75-80% or so if it were an essay one of my students turned in. Well, none of my students would be writing anything that literary, but you get my meaning. Again, I am not at all concerned that I won't pass the comps; depending on how well they think I did on my latter two questions, I may get a "high pass," though I doubt it.
I came home and called Daisy, updated my Facebook, and sent a message to Parker to tell him how I did. Then, I ate and passed the hell out. For many, many hours. When I awoke, of course, I got on here and began writing to tell you folks the good news. As for the results of the exam, I don't know exactly when I'll get them. It could be as early as Monday, or it could be sometime later next week. All I know is that for the rest of this weekend, I shall relax and try to decompress; I told Daisy that sometime soon, I plan to order pizza (because I'm still too tired and worn-down to go shopping, and like hell if I'm going to go shopping at Walmart during the daytime on a Saturday) and that I'm going to try to catch up on all of the lost sleep from the past several weeks, sleep that I've lost in studying and in forcing myself to awaken so that I can study more. I also feel very isolationist-like; I don't want anyone to bother me, and likewise I don't want to bother anyone. I want to get some me-time, to myself, so that I can properly recover and begin to, y'know,
like life again. Because, for the past several weeks/months, I have wholly hated my life, as it's consisted of getting no real sleep or relaxation and studying/reading thousands of pages of books (most of which ultimately turned out to be meaningless) and little else -- as you know if you've been paying attention to this blog
at all during that time.
To those ends, I haven't a lot to do over the rest of the weekend. I have one student's rewrite to grade, and aside from that, I think I'll catch up on all of the video games and household chores I've neglected over the time since I've been studying many hours every day. Last night, when I woke up, I did a ton of laundry -- laundry that I'm still working through even now, since I've been putting it off for the past two or three weeks. My hamper was not only stuffed full, but it probably weighed forty pounds when I dragged it downstairs. I still haven't slept since I got up last night; I spent my day watching most of
Red Dwarf X (which I purchased off Amazon last week
specifically to reward myself after comps were done) and, for some reason, I got the urge to watch
Pearl Harbor again, so I did that too. I plan to do several more things before bed as well -- I want to go do my aforementioned grocery shopping, I want to run the dishwasher, and if I'm alert and/or energetic enough, I'd really like to switch out my wardrobe for summer -- again, it's 75 outside right now, even as the sun is setting, and I doubt we have to worry about any more cold days for the rest of the spring. Hell, they're predicting severe/tornadic thunderstorms on Tuesday (oh,
goody, can't you just feel my excitement for that?) so I'm guessing warmer weather is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Time to break out the tie-dyes, shorts, and flip-flops again. Yeah buddy. At least if the tornadoes get me, I'll be stylishly dressed for the season.
So yeah, that's the comps story. Could've been better, but could've been much, much worse. More than anything else, I am very,
very thankful that they are over, and that I can once again relax and continue my life.
