Bopie5

@pdh12 lol that was my rejection post--always think at least one person should post the form letter so future people can prepare themselves! But truly, I'm sure they get 500+ applicants, for 6-8 spots...wild! And those numerical odds don't even account for fit, or what the adcomms are hoping for that year.

@bardie True! Stanford was a reach given their cohort size anyway. Not trying to hope on any one specific place to try to avoid disappointment, but Davis posted on their website "Last year we received 124 applications, made 26 offers, and ended up admitting 12 students for Fall 2018," and that gives me some hope, just numbers-wise? I have faith in you too! All we need is one acceptance, right?

Same for me @bardie. Feeling like I'm going to get the same from Northwestern later today/later this week as a few phone call acceptances have been posted to the board. Blerghhhhhhhhh...

@The Wordsworthian @flungoutofspace BIG mood. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night (which is usually one to two times a night), I always just check my email right away. @swarthmawr YAAAAS looking them all up right now. Perfect material for our anti-prom book club!

My new morning routine: Check email. See nothing. Check spam. Nothing. Check portals. Again nothing. Shakingly and nervously check GradCafe results page fearing that all the acceptances and waitlists have already gone out. Rinse. Repeat!

Does anyone else kinda feel like waiting to hear back is sorta like a middle school dance? Like, slowly everyone you know has someone to go to the dance with, and you're stuck not knowing what's gonna happen to you ?

Do you all think not seeing a change in the applications status (mine still just says “Submitted”) in the Stanford portal is an implied rejection?

@fortschritt22 @j.alicea @Sav @sad_diamond THANK YOU ALL. You don't even know how helpful this is for me. Really appreciate the time and energy put into these recs.

Random but does anyone have any theoretical resources on the intersections of ecocrit and postcolonial crit, specifically focusing around: --decentralizing an anthropocentric viewpoint --relation of ecocrit to thinking around the Great Chain of Being/Shakespeare; and/or an ecocritical reading of how people in the Neoclassical period treated personal environments like gardens and landscapes --relation of ecocrit to persons considered socially dead (following Orlando Patterson's thinking on people considered less than human by the rest of society and therefore excluded from social structures) and whether socially dead persons become a part of the "environment" or ecosystem so to speak --ecocritical readings of The Tempest --or other similar thinkings???

I read only those first seven words and almost screamed at work before I read your parenthetical ahahah.

Ah you're too nice! Thank you. I sometimes feel like my projects are all too unfocused. Most of the time, directly or obliquely, my work is talking about what kind of bodies are permitted to enact what kind of actions, and what it looks like to be "permitted." But that leads me to looking somewhat messy in terms of period, genre, theoretical lens, and everything else haha, because embodiment work dips its toes into fem/gen, queer theory, critical race theory, ability theory, affects, aesthetics, and even sometimes ecocrit if there's anti-anthropocentric work going on. Fingers crossed for you as well! But yes, that seminar was incredibly life changing. Plus the deep discussions on so many theorists! I listed Halberstam too, but more by way of talking about queer-coded bodies in visual culture. Seems like your interests might be closer and who knows? Miracles can happen! Also, wildly and weirdly, I was reading Lowell's sonnet on Eliot when I got the notification on your reply. And AH. O'Hara is maybe in my top 5 poets. "For Grace, After a Party" and "Mayakovsky" live in my soul.

HOW did I not think of this!? Esp given that I'm thinking "Middle Passage!? Thank you thank you thank you. This is a clear one with a strong link. Have no idea what I will find as this project is still super nascent. Because you have things by HD and Williams and others that reckon at least with the style and legacy of The Waste Land, but I think I have to narrow what I'm meaning by "engaging" with it so this doesn't just become an examination of every 20th century "epic" poem. Thinking of maybe chasing the multivocal element, in which case "Puerto Rican Obituary" as a single poem might be a strong argument with the 5 characters and the all caps? Hmmmm...Thank you so much again for the suggestions! I staged a theatrical version of The Waste Land last year, and the way I staged the bar scene...Pietri in that photo would've been right at home!

Literature people--I have a question for a paper I'm working on, and wanted to crowdsource here. I'm working on a project that traces poems that follow in the tradition of Eliot's The Waste Land, either directly or obliquely. I'm starting with Anne Sexton's "Hurry Up Please It's Time" and also Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." Anyone know of other 20th century poems that are directly grappling with, imitating, or engaging with The Waste Land?

Ah thank you so much! What an affirmation to hear at this stage in the process. Honestly, I was really lucky to take a survey seminar on feminist theory where we literally read Foucault, Rubin, Chodorow, Gilligan, Pateman, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Crenshaw, hooks, Butler, Spivak, Mohanty, Hennessey, Haraway, Connell, Laquer, Moi, and others, all in one semester. It really changed my life and got me SO excited about feminist theory, gender theory, and queer theory, and really spurred me to dive deeper on my own. Queer poetics! And HALBERSTAM. Would be a dream someday to meet him/hear him speak. Your research sounds amazing and so exciting. I love the current work being done towards thinking a queer poetics. Have any favorite queer poets? Or any poets you particularly like to deploy queer theory with? Would love! Please email!

I can email it to you if you want! Or, if you meant you want to read Stabat Mater, I also have the PDF for that haha

My WS used Kristeva's "Stabat Mater" as a lens to examine dynamics of motherhood, suffering, and the boundaries/limits of language to speak the female experience in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev. I argued that the mother in the text hews closely to Kristeva's paradigms of the experience of maternal suffering being impossible to express within a phallologocentric framework, but that this fact manifests itself in the text as patriarchal oppression, wherein the mother's experience has no potential to voice itself. Instead, her son attempts to speak her experience through art, but the mother rejects this attempt to "speak" her. @azuree I'm primarily a feminist/gender theorist, but I generally apply the lens to 20th century American poetry and drama!

Thank you thank you! Fingers crossed for you as well--keep us updated on how things go. And let me know if you want some recommendations for journals/magazines for poetry.

I don't know if waiting for decisions is somehow counterintuitively spurring me to have greater confidence in my academic self, or if I'm just bored out of my mind and trying to keep myself busy, but the last few days I have been nonstop submitting my poetry and academic papers to various magazines, journals, and conferences. Or maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment looking to ramp up the amount of rejections I receive in the next few weeks/months!

Sometimes, definitely yes. I live in a really expensive area, and if you're not willing to have roommates, you're definitely going to end up in the $1100-1500 range for a studio. However, I have several friends who found houses or condos to split with roommates, and their rent is in the $650-800/month range including utilities. So if you can swing something with roommates or even housemates, it's much more workable. However, there's also the fact that gas is realllllllllyyyyyyy expensive out here. Like lucky to be under $3.30. AND sometimes even when you can find cheaper rent, it's usually because you're outside of the city center area, which means more traveling, sometimes with traffic, which means more money spent on gas. And also, groceries can skew really pricey too.

@jadeisokay Was it from CUNY!? I just got that too and my heart leaped into my throat haha.

@j.alicea Yeah! I was born on the north side and lived there for a bit, and then hopped around various suburbs growing up. Spent the most time in the Elgin area, about an hour/45 mins west, and not too far from Carpentersville! I moved to Colorado in middle school, so I never know which place to say that I'm "from" because I really grew up in both Illinois and Colorado. And yeah, California for undergrad, and sometimes when I think about moving back to the Midwest I think I've certifiably lost my mind...

@j.alicea Yeah honestly I was thinking the same thing about Chicago weather? I grew up there and it was normal to have school cancelled for "cold days" in the winter when there wasn't even snow!

This thread has a spreadsheet that @Warelin made listing the general funding packages of a lot of schools!

I also use the enneagram! It's my favorite personality test too. AND I'm also a Four, and have been feeling soooo called out by the EnneaThought of the day recently!

I was thinking this exact same thing. Blerghhhhhh why must the weather thwart us like this