So. . . . tired
29-Oct-02
I swear, I come back from lunch and am ready for my nap! Argh! It’s really rough– all I want to do is sleep, but of course I can’t. I’m at work.
At lunch today, I read over the exam questions from 2 years ago. I felt more confident about the poetry section of the questions, and I felt very confident about the explication comparison/contrast section of the exam.
Candidates have 3 hours to complete the whole exam. Not finishing is Not A Good Idea.
Parts A and B can be interchangeable, but they’re always the same general format: Part A has three essay questions about novels or short stories, and you are to pick one to answer. The questions generally call upon you to write about at least 4 authors or works: one British nineteenth-centure, one British 20th c., one American 19th c., one American 20th c. A typical question will introduce an obscure quote and prompt you to discuss the implications of that quote in relation to English-language prose literature in the last 200 years. Sometimes, a quote is so far out of context, if you don’t know its source, you’re just screwed. If you’re going to find a drama question, it’ll be in this Part.
Part B is similar in format, but with poetry. In Part A or Part B, you might be prompted to discuss a specific work, like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Professors in the department differ in their advice: some say if you know The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock instead of The Waste Land and discuss it intelligently, they won’t grade you down. Others point out that answering the question with a different poem is still not answering the question (you do not pass with non-answer responses). It is all part of the perilous journey of passing this fucking exam– unclear guidelines and advice from the very professors who grade candidate efforts.
Part C is the one that can make even the most rigorous candidate break into a cold sweat. Two poems are printed side-by-side. The instructions are to explicate the poems, and then compare and contrast them in the historical and geographic context of their composition. The poems are not named, nor are the names of their authors given. Yes, you pretty much do this one blind. Typically, one poem will be a sonnet of some form, which is nice, because if you know sonnets, you don’t have to start jabbing your No. 2 pencil into your eye. I have yet to see a haiku in the practice exams, however. Inga, my study partner, says that, even if you’re wrong, if you can argue convincingly that these particular elements indicate this is a Victorian English poem, then you will probably pass that part of the exam. In one of the practice exams we used, the two poems were Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird” and Charles Bernstein’s “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree.” After we discussed the poems, I searched for them online. Finding the Frost poem was easy. However, Bernstein’s was less easy, and I eventually found one site that discussed his poetry– from the context of the fashion industry. Urk.
The last time I took the exam, I spent an hour and 15 minutes writing my response to Part A. It was a phenomenal response. I turned in my paper, unable to even answer Parts B and C, as I was so completely befuddled by poetry, I couldn’t even face it.
This time, I feel much more prepared. I can answer at least one of the essay questions in Part B on each of the practice exams I’ve evaluated. I was able to frame a response to Part C today, looking over it at lunch and deciding that the first poem was a modernist sonnet– fitting none of the three traditional sonnet forms, yet still strictly regulated by rhyme and rhythm and form. I decided that it was probably English, though there was not much to lead me to that conclusion, since it was a generic poem about winter. Still, I felt that the English spend more of their poetic energy on exploring the natural world in their lyric works, whereas an American poet would be just as likely to frame a lyric sonnet in a city park. The second poem was a series of iambic alexandrine triplets in the rhyme scheme of ABA, with the only variation being the last stanza, which was ABAA. Though I don’t know if this form has a name, certainly it was not free verse– it was strict, regular, and the longer lines combined with shorter, repetitive stanzas provided a sense of being stuck in a repeating pattern, like a record caught in a scratch. Overall, the poem reminded me of Marianne Moore, and certain images (such as the Times newspaper) indicated that this was an American, urban, almost certainly New York poem. Though both works are modernist, the movement in the second (American) poem was fairly circular, really only returning to the beginning (or perhaps spiral, though still without moving appreciably forward). The first poem, split into two stanzas, pivoted on the ninth and tenth lines to produce the forward momentum and to drive the poem lyrically onward, even though both were, in the end, tributes to repetitive cycles (the first, of nature and the cycle towards winter– the second, of city and working life, weekends, and the cycle of meetings and partings in human and especially romantic relationships).
Other than that, I’m just kind of plugging away here at work. Trying to get a project done this week so I can feel even a little bit productive. After all, if I don’t finish this week, I’ll not only miss a promised deadline, I’ll also not have something to brag about in my biweekly progress reports.
I wonder if I should mention my MA exam in my progress report on November 11? Maybe I’ll just wait until I know if I passed first.