I love this thread. It's been so amazing to read about everyone's interests, and makes me doubly excited for actually entering a program with like-minded thinkers.
My writing sample is from an independent study during my MFA and it is on "ontologies" of lack and excess in lyrical poetics (obviously incorporating Lacanian and Freudian theories). I used the poetry of Rilke and Strand to show the way our imagery for excess and "too-muchness" is almost analogous to that of disconnect and alienation, and that our phenomenological renderings of each are eerily similar in poetry. It was very much a close-reading sort of writing sample, which might work in my favor for some programs but not so much for others, and I use a lot of critical theory which might be all over the place--everything from Baudrillard to Derrida to Bachelard. (Perhaps a sort of poststructuralist psychoanalysis, if you know what I mean?)