A Personal Statement

Recently, I was admitted to FIU's MFA in creative writing. Along with a sample of my poetry, I submitted this personal statement...all 19 pages of it.

Pictured: Me repping FIU on Langston Hughes’ stoop in Harlem, 2021

A couple of weeks ago, I received a voicemail from Denise Duhamel, an accomplished poet and professor at FIU’s MFA creative writing program.

I field goal kicked a patio chair (that was not mine to kick) when I heard the words:

“Hi Chris! This is Denise Duhamel calling. How are you? Well, I’m calling from FIU with some really good news, um, we have accepted you into the MFA program, and I really hope that you will be able to attend…”

I’m a stubborn fool. I decided I wanted to go to FIU’s MFA, and so, I only applied to FIU’s MFA. Do or die.

I submitted the application, secured my references, submitted twenty pages of (what I consider to be) my finest work, and. . .I needed to write a personal statement.

The website listed a personal statement as one of the requirements for applying, but didn’t offer much in the way of specifications. It merely said:

“Applicant Statement / Letter of Intent: A statement of the applicant's writing interest and background, which also contains, if applicable, the applicant's request to be considered for a teaching assistantship.”

I found it ambiguous. How long are these things supposed to be?

I did some research into the art of writing personal statements for grad school applications, but most of what I found concerned other fields of study. Most sources on the subject suggested keeping one’s statement down to about two pages—something closer to a cover letter than anything else.

But still, I wondered: shouldn’t the personal statement for an MFA in creative writing both answer the prompt and serve as a demonstration of my creative writing chops?

I reached out to the department for clarification, and received this reply:

Hi Christopher,

To answer your question about the personal statement: there isn't really a single standard format for the personal statement. Most students compose it in the form of a cover letter about 1-2 pages long addressing the admissions committee, however that isn't how it needs to be. Some people write something similar to an essay that talks about their history with reading and writing, while others take a more lyrical and creative approach to the document with something almost like a prose poem. There isn't really a wrong way to compose your personal statement. Just be sure that it is well written, well edited, and provides a clear picture of who you are and why you would like to be a part of the creative writing program.

I know that sounds a little vague, but there really is a wide variety of personal statements that come through with these applications. Just find a form that you think represents you and go with that.

I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out.

And even with this straightforward clarification, I still harbored doubts and suspicions.

What if they were implicitly trying to tell me, with the second sentence, that the normal thing to do was to send a 1-2 page cover letter? What if they were trying to tell me that other approaches were allowed, but abnormal—detrimentally so?

By this point, I had already scrapped one attempt that even I felt would have taken the creative license too far (it was very meta, and a little presumptuous; I wrote it on one of my typewriters—if I find it, I may upload a photo of it here).

I was also running out of time.

In the end, I decided to take a more traditional approach, an autobiographical essay, and run with it until I had said my piece.

Academia has been known to have it’s own language: one of grant-writing, conference-going folx who wear eccentric frames—shibboleths of a certain entrenched, upperish class progressive milieu.

These signals of in-group membership—like saying ‘Latinx’ instead of ‘Latino,’ ‘Holding Space’ instead of ‘listening,’ or referring to certain individuals as ‘bodies’ (am I the only ‘body’ who hasn’t finished Discipline and Punish?)—serve as much to indicate affiliation with the tribe as they do to convey their literal meanings.

Does anyone remember this scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

I already felt self-conscious about whether I’d violate some unspoken norms, come off as unmannered, tone deaf, rough, and rude—or worse: lacking in self-awareness. For all I knew, one small infraction of mannerly decorum could disqualify me from being the right kind of cool, groovy, hip, or square.

I worked on my personal statement for weeks. If I hadn’t been capped by the deadline, I might still be working on it.

The final piece is a hot air balloon that I inflated with my own lungs. It’s sprawling, a little unwieldy, and exhaustive. I had serious doubts that the faculty wouldn’t take me for some raving lunatic, a manic foam-flecked fuck, a potential occupational hazard without the faintest clue of how to carry oneself in the academy.

My partner assuaged my fears, but I still worried, ultimately, that I’d blown it. It can be very hard to predict how others will receive your writing—it’s ambiguous business.

But then…

It is my understanding that one’s chances of being accepted to this sort of program lie, primarily, in the strength of one’s portfolio.

When I called Denise Duhamel back, I made it a point to ask whether she had read, or just skimmed, my personal statement. She told me that some of the faculty asked why it was so long, and skimmed it, but that she and the rest of the faculty did, in fact, read it in its entirety, and thought well of it.

I may never truly know whether I was accepted to the program, in part, because of my personal statement, or despite my personal statement. Maybe they just really liked my writing sample!

In any case, I got in, and I did it while sending a behemoth of a personal statement that I’m almost certain to cringe at someday, but that day has not yet come. I hesitated to share this, at first, because it expresses my candid opinions about some matters that could be construed as political. . .because they are.

As stated in my personal statement, I intend to give voice to a side of my self that has remained, publicly, dormant so far. In the next few years, I fully intend to use my writing instrumentally, expressing the truth as I see it for ends that go beyond mere entertainment, beauty, or ‘l'art pour l'art’ (art for art’s sake).

But I will never reduce my art to mere instrumentalism. Artists can, and perhaps have, a responsibility to engage in the political, in advocating for the Good in human affairs—human rights, justice, peace.

Anyone who tries to sell you on a sanitized version of art, who tries to tell you that true art is never political, who tries to throw up popular figures like Shakespeare or Picasso as examples of apolitical, pure artists. . . is selling you bullshit. Do your research, or don’t.

With that said, I also believe that political engagement on the part of artists should be voluntary. Artists should not be expected to produce political art if they don’t want to. I celebrate the poet who writes about nothing but their cats, about trees, about heartbreak.

I’m as politically minded as they come, but if you come with some “you only get to say that because you have the privilege of saying that,” respectfully, shove it up your ass. That’s the talk that makes people tired of your shit, and like it or not, people are what we need, no matter the political aim. Alienate people who aren’t completely inline with your politics at your own peril.

We’re all just trying to get by here, and say what you will about the the canon being a mere artificial construction, but the art that gets remembered is that which transcends its day, that which strives, in the face of impossibility, to capture and speak to the universal essence within all peoples’ souls. Or to speak to the nothingness within people’s nothingness. You catch my drift.

Anyways, I’m posting this statement of mine for selfish reasons, but also as a reference for the next guy who applies to FIU’s, or any creative writing MFA program.

Whoever you are, I wish you luck!

And now, before I leave you to my personal statement, I offer a few final thoughts—some contradicting guarantees about what you can expect from me going forward:

• I will write political pieces

• I will write pieces that are apolitical

• I will critically analyze texts through various theoretical frameworks

• I will read texts with nothing but love for their humanity and their beauty

• I will continue to write way too fucking much

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -Uncle Walt

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Personal Statement for Admission to FIU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and Teaching Assistantship

What I See

Note: I didn’t include photos in my actual personal statement. I’ve included them for your viewing pleasure! ;)

I was born on the 4th of July in Miami, Fl, and I’m still here. I want to write about America in a way that is honest. This means acknowledging that I live in two countries, and always have.

One is the country of the Everglades and Yellowstone. It is the country of the Seminole and Iroqui. It is also a country of brave men and women, of John Brown and Lincoln, of the Union, of FDR and the countless GI’s who defeated facism once upon a time. This country is the country that put men on the moon. This is the country where Martin Luther King marches. This is the country that welcomed a poor family of guajiros from Matanzas looking for a chance at something. This is the country my father came to when he was just a boy, where he was able to grow, have a family of his own and be prosperous. This is a common story in this country–not all that interesting or unique, maybe, but special every time, nevertheless.

This is my country, but it is not the only one. It pains me, but there is another–just as real.

It is one that is borne of an evil chain of violence whose links extend, bloodied and unbroken, from its inception to its present, wrapping around the world, and now itself, stealing our very breath with each passing hour. This country has an identity that talks out of both sides of its mouth, whose putrid, botoxed face wears a crumbling mask of civility, whose fingers are crossed behind its back when it shakes your hand, stabs you in the back as you try to walk away, then sermonizes as you lay dying. An identity of hypocrisy, that makes claims to universal morality, the good, but knows only violence.

In this country, we teem about the giant, blighted body of a great deceiver, seducer, whose marble heart pumps oil, who worships death, who kills for the immortality of taxidermy and formaldehyde. This is a country of blinding myth. Ego.

It is in this country, I believe, that poetry, amongst many other things, is needed most.

James Baldwin wrote of denial as one of the cardinal traits of this country, wrote of that ultimate reckoning America would need to have with itself, its imminent need to look in the mirror, confess its many sins. Through honest, brutal self-reflection, we of this country can regain our humanity. The sight may turn us to stone. So be it. Our feet of clay may crumble. So be it. We will rebuild. He understood what a pity we are. The machine continues to hum.

Silence poisons our souls.

But this is it. I was born on the 4th of July, and I am a citizen of two countries.

This is an integral time for America—a crossroads, a shatter-point. We would all do well to soul-search. I think about the American religion of Whitman, Emerson, Melville, and John Brown: transcendentalists looking inward but also outward, fundamentally understanding that we are the same, that we are not isolated beings unto ourselves. We must pay respect to our individuality, our intuitive connection to the world, but we must also reach for something larger than ourselves if we wish to survive. We must pay respect to what comes after us–planting trees whose shade we will never sit in, here, in this place where we’ve cut down too many trees and it’s getting hot. Above all, we must speak the truth.

Poetry will not change the world–people will, but poetry will name it, for whatever a name is worth. To enshrine a new mythos, we must, already, sift through the rubble that is certain to come. By doing this, we may find it in us to avoid imminent disaster. Paradox is the order of the day, and we must move comfortably through it, live with it. As Marjane Satrapi said, “...nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.”

Sober vision, scathing criticism, pointing at what is, is not enough. The important work is that of the imagination–imagining new possibilities to work towards, new worlds to build, fighting against our fatalist impulse to envision a dark future, blank space, a loss of consciousness. To the last we must go on, with open eyes full of love and laughter on our chins. We must take pleasure in this exchange with life. It is a fun, lovely, beautiful thing. We lose everything, becoming country only to death, if we lose our sense of humor.

The feeling of my meaning is made plain by the closing scene of John Ford’s film rendition of The Grapes of Wrath, “We're the people that live. Can't nobody wipe us out. Can't nobody lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa. We're the people.”

My Poetry & My Influences

My approach is eclectic; my first attraction to poetry is reverence of the sublime. It's also about not finding the words to speak directly about what I see (in me, and around me)—being at a loss for words and needing to find, create, and use them well in ways I cannot with prose. I am speechless. I need song to disappear into. The song I write today becomes the song told long from now of great disaster, a song impersonal and estranged, that of Noah or Troy.

But these are stories, constructions—not life. I can only survive the day to day if I let myself play: daily meditations on my inner seismology, sketches of the outer terrain as it comes to me (that capture both the SPAM cans and the sunsets; or, as Professor McGrath described it in a poem: “Cheerios or Pop-Tarts” and “chestnuts and pomegranates”), and childlike manipulations of language for its own sake.

I want to play with my sense of self, coming to know and construct myself in pages. While I want to come closer to some epiphany of myself (that I know can never really come), I also mean to transform what inward turn becomes fetishistic of the self. I have enjoyed and written my share of confessional poetry, but I have also noted that this sort of work exists on a spectrum–it can be a place of self-acceptance and healing, but it can also become masturbatory and narcissistic. Part of my interest in the written (and spoken) word started with insecurity and ego, a fear of seeming and sounding like a too quiet, dumb brute, a fear of not being liked, of social anxiety and wanting an escape hatch from any compromised position in a conversation. This is a point of tension in a time when we are constantly barraged by that which diminishes us while being offered, as a balm, an invitation to retreat into a regime of endless self-interest, into solipsism. I cannot speak for all as to how to find the balance in this, but I strive to find the balance in me: what I write for myself, I write for you, but, what I write not for you cannot be had by me.

I teach my students to write clearly, to speak for the benefit of the reader—not to indulge in

self-conscious flourishes. If it seems like I’m doing so here, I promise you this is how I talk. This is the writing of my breath and body. So is my poetry.

My favorite novel is Moby-Dick. I love the black humor of Wallace, Céline, Fante, and Vonnegut in the face of the impossibility of modern life and its indignities (Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow are also on my radar). I love the elegant American prose of Henry James and Faulkner .I've been given hope from bell hooks and Erich Fromm’s explorations of love. I have grown as a teacher by John Dewey and Paulo Freire. Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals (and the bits of Foucault that I’ve encountered) changed the way I think of the power of words to preclude our thought, and and how the changing of their meaning suggests a radically changing , unstable perception of the world through history (bringing into question my own thinking and wonderment at what linguistic games imprison me). I'm reading Fanon, or trying to. I keep cheating on my nonfiction with my singing masters: Shakespeare, Whitman, Donne, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Cummings, Yeats, Frost, and many, many more. I'm reading Purgatorio now (I’m stuck in limbo with it because I tend to jump around through books). I mean to read the Bible, Paradise Lost, and John Brown’s Body. I try to pull out a little of this and that most days.

As of late, I have spent time with more contemporary American poetry. Robert Hayden left me in heavy silence after reading “Night, Death, Mississippi” and “Middle Passage”. James Wright slaps me with the spitfire laconic lines in “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave,” and caresses me with his beautiful, dreamy account of innocent nature in “A Blessing”. I have been arrested by what I’ve read of Adrienne Rich, not the least bit when I recently read her poem “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” against Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” (which I was seriously moved by in its own right). I read William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All and still meditate on his realm of imagination, still remind myself that there are “no ideas but in things.” Every experience with Ginsberg’s “Howl” has been a trip. Billy Collins easily amazes, and he gave me an excellent conversational aid with “Introduction to Poetry”, but I mean to write an after poem in response to his broadside on the Bee Gees in his poem “More Than a Woman”.

My car is a mess, full of typewriters and books strewn about and wound together like a heaping growth of roots that are ripped about daily. I regret the physical condition of my copy of Homeland of My Body, but it was well used–cover to cover. The extent to which Blanco’s work made me feel is something I strive for in the best of my work. The kind and variance of subject matter he broaches through his poetry helped me expand my own scope–I was pleasantly surprised to encounter his poem about photographer Andy Sweet, “What You Didn’t Let Us Lose”. His reflections on his childhood and his heritage directly inspired me to write two pieces that I am proud of, “Stories” and “Mi Pipo” (the latter of which has been taken on its own life). With musical accompaniment, I performed “Mi Pipo” at a Miami Poetry Club poet showcase at Ironside to close the show and received a very warm reception; it was then featured–embedded on a bed of tobacco leaves–in an art exhibition at Studio Hue 53. I was thinking about what object I might conceive Blanco’s work as, and I thought about the elegant gold necklace I wore as a child with its azabache charm–a charm given to many Cuban children to ward off the evil eye. Sometimes, it is shaped like a fist–a little black fist with great power.

I've got Professor McGrath’s Nouns and Verbs currently suffocating in yet another new bag (another, new hope of becoming an orderly, organized individual). So far it has revealed a force of technical mastery–he’s a careful chooser of words (Harold Bloom said, in a lecture, that diction, not imagery or comparison was of supreme importance to poetry; if this is true, then Professor McGrath succeeds on this account) He is also a focused weaver of images, conversations, musings. He has these smart little poems that explore language or subjects in the abstract layered against more emotional, ambitious pieces–all culminating in a texture evocative of a patterned patchwork quilt or, perhaps, better yet, a punk leather jacket covered with variform patches. I’m still trying to find my fit in it, but something about it feels comfortable to me so far. I hope to read his longer pieces in the near future. I’ve stockpiled hundreds of books, mostly from thrift stores and used bookstores, that I continuously pull out at random, pack into various bags, lugging around more weight than I need to. I’ve considered why I do this, and it’s probably some unglamorous compulsion, but it’s also because I consider what is in those books to be a precious resource worth stockpiling, and keeping close, and also because I feel they are an extension of myself and of my thinking. I carry them with me as a form of self-defense, as tools in my belt, and as symbiotic enhancement.

I've read poetry workbooks, and I've "read" poetry workbooks. Mary Oliver's. How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, The Ode Less Travelled; I was intrigued when I noticed Richard Blanco's review on my copy of In the Palm of Your Hand–I pick up copies whenever I see them used somewhere, and I like to give those out to other emerging poets in need. With these, I have, imperfectly, acquired some grasp of the technicals of verse: meter, our various rhythm making devices and repetitions, voiced and unvoiced phonemes, etc. I still feel clumsy about all this when I find what kind of scalpelled craftsmanship went into the construction of Robert Frost’s poems, or when I try to keep a meter, but I hope to improve under the right guidance.

I do, talk, engage in poetry like other people do football or their Bible. I stay up late on weeknights when I shouldn’t, when my furnace becomes hot and I get going on my typewriter, or with another writer or reader discussing projects or texts.

My Career In Teaching

And I go to work the next day, and, lucky as I am, I am able to do the same thing with young people. There is a catharsis in the process of critical education, of co-learning, of problem-posing and problem-solving together, and of dialoguing together in that constructed space, the classroom. At work, I’m often Ishmael as I go through the motions of the day to day, losing myself to thought, I admit it. But, I hone in like monomaniacal Ahab when it comes to my interests, and any of my students could testify to this (if they knew who Ahab was). Fires have burned in me as we’ve revealed the Crucible, revealed Romeo and Juliet, revealed Frost poems and Tupac poems. These moments of passion and vulnerability exhausted me mentally, exhausted me spiritually, changed me, and remade me. But this is what teaching is to me.

The classroom is where we chart where this Pequod country of ours is heading, where we consider who’s complicit, and what's to be done. Are we okay? Has the journal prompt forrayed us into a group therapy session? Let it stand! And let's have a good time doing it!

I've been a high school English teacher for the better part of 5 years now. The classroom remade me as a writer and reader. My teaching mentor, Domingo “Monty” Montenegro, was an insane old Cuban who “runs on Cuban coffee and testosterone,” who preaches close reading, who likes “Dr. Johnson” as he courteously yet familiarly calls Samuel Johnson, who likes F.R. Levis, Harold Bloom and lots of other old school liberal humanist conceptions of literature, and who breathes literature. I remember sharing a break with the man, watching an old BBC production of the importance of being Earnest while eating empanadas and having a roiling good time.

This sort of thing was par the course with Monty. He made me write him something the day he interviewed me. I wrote about teaching from the perspective of a former student, considering what my needs once were, which were met, and which were not. I love him dearly. I write of him here as a totem of the feelings and development he instilled and inspired in me, and as a totem of good blessings. I cherish my mentors like they are my family. One of my students said to me, “I wear your influence like I wear my skin.” I understand him perfectly.

Teachers worth their salt understand that we live in darkening times. Too many of our students have suffered because of the failures of No Child Left Behind, the teach-to-test reduction of reading to rote, robotic information extraction. The reading of whole books demands sustained focus, but it pays dividends in deepening our capacity for critical, abstract thought. The cheap swapping of books for excerpts is playing out like an Orweillian nightmare, precluding the possibility for thought by robbing our children of language. It is a closing of the mental commons. And no, it is not helped by “TikTok brain”.

Our students have suffered mental injury, and the process of healing, of therapy, is painful, but not all suffering is futile. This cheating of our students, of our future, will be our undoing, and one way or another, we will all have to heed the words of Bobby Kennedy, who quoted Aeschylus on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

There is a courage in remaining at one’s post as a lightkeeper in the face of deepening fog. It is really all we wickies and lovers of wisdom can do.

Education

I studied English Literature at FIU. So much of my time in the English program at FIU revolutionized my thinking in a Copernican way, and I cherished my time in the program. I even found myself becoming treasurer of Sigma Tau Delta (which was strange, considering I’m terrible at math).

I'm thrilled by the idea of joining Dr. Nathaniel Cadle, whose friendship I’ve enjoyed the pleasure of since graduating, for a fourth, fifth, etc. course on American literature. He gave me my introduction to Henry James (who some might call bloodless, but whose beautifully written stories have screwed me to my seat in suspense). He guided us through the emergence of American modernist literature via the synthesis of romantic and realist novels. Together, we traced the American psyche of the 19th and early 20th century–the emerging readership of the middle class, their fantasies of heroic violence and conquest reflected back to them, stoking the fires of expansion from the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to wider American neo-colonialism at the time of the Spanish war. Following that thread to the current day, I've heard of fascism that it occurs when imperialism comes home to roost in the core–in light of this, I consider Dr. Cadle's work to be incredibly relevant at this time. He very generously offered to write one of my letters of recommendation–an offer I have happily accepted (it’s been 6 years since he met with me to make the case that I enter a graduate program–I took my time with it, but here we are). My education in this area of study was further solidified by Dr. Mark Kelly's course in early American literature. He centered Kingston, Jamaica, as the epicenter of the new world, decentering the more conventional focus on the North East. We excavated historical documents and unearthed, until recently, cast-aside and marginalized narratives. They painted a fascinating picture of multiracial, democratic pirate ships where queerness and personal liberties flourished in contrast to the “civil society” of the day, and the near emergence of a pirate republic in the Caribbean (something of a proto-U.S.A.). We explored the legal power of dehumanizing words like “pirate” and “terrorist,” exemplified by texts ranging from a Cotton Mather sermon to condemned pirates at the gallows, to Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence, to texts from the Civil War concerning the legal fiction and recognition of the CSA. We pulled at the seams of the complex heritage of this contradictory nation–so many of these shatterpoints remain amazingly unsettled, jagged, and sharp to this day. There is much digging and sifting yet to be done.

2024: A Retrospective

This past year saw me write more prolifically than I have in my entire life. I have written enough poetry to publish multiple volumes, and I've been wrestling with how, where, and what to submit or publish—whether to work with a local co-publisher or self-publish, print zines, or just vandalize walls with poetry.

I'm shocked by it all, really. I decided in August that I was ready to leave my little poet hermit alcove and make out for the sea, the local poetry scene, to find out what’s what. Unsure about whether I was ready to submit work for publishing, I started with making a poetry Instagram and posting my work. Early on, I posted a review of a book I had found by the Biscayne Poet, Oscar Fuentes, and, just like that, he generously invited me to take to the stage at Sweat Records for his “Tango and Poetry” event. This was my first live performance, and Oscar has continued to be a friend and mentor to me ever since.

I kept up writing and performing, attending workshops and open mic nights hosted by the Miami Poetry Club, becoming close friends with the club’s director, the industrious Micah Johnson, who is a talented poet in her own right. I even got to speak with the executive directors of O, Miami Poetry and the Miami Book Fair (the latter of which strongly encouraged me to join your program while Campbell McGrath was still a part of it).

Last week, I made my first submission for publishing consideration to the Florida Anthology being put together by one of your alums, Scott Cunningham.

I look forward to joining Poet Laureate Ada Limón for an activation in the Everglades at the end of the month. Slowly, I have found my bearings, my people, and my voice.

People Poems

One Saturday in September, I brought one of my typewriters to a farmer’s market. I set up a tent, a table, and a big spray painted cardboard sign that said “FREE POETRY.” Since that day, I've written personalized, spontaneous poems, what I call "people poems," for something like 200 to 300 people all over Miami. I wrote at Books & Books as part of Banned Books week. I wrote for huge lines of people, for hours on end, at the Miami Book Fair It even, organically, evolved into something of an enterprise. I was discovered at the park by the owner of a talent agency that provides live entertainment to events in Miami. She asked if I would be interested in being hired to work private events.

Since that morning, I have been paid to write for people on an exclusive private beach (twice), at an opulent Miami Art Week party in the design district (Cuba Gooding Jr. was in attendance), at a swanky salon’s Christmas party on Miami Beach. I wrote at a Miami Arts and Business Council event at the Intercontinental, and just last week, I returned to the hotel to write at the Beacon Council’s meeting, where I even crossed paths with mayor Levine-Cava. Other poets have apprenticed under me, going on to spread their own poetry into the world.

Two weeks ago I designed and launched a website, and I continue to write free poetry at the farmer’s market.

I probably would have cringed about it two years ago, with the kind of self-promotion involved, with this turning art into a sideshow attraction, the sheer hipsterdom of it. But, I'm trying not to take myself too seriously. If I'm exploiting or cheapening anything, it's myself, and I like that in a way—being a cheap thing, like a coffee from 7-Eleven. It’s an integral part of my culture. I come from immigrant people. I'm trailer park people, blue-collar, TV, football-watching people. I’m Hialeah Gardens-living, Everglades-visiting, lost in America people–and proud of it, make no mistake.

But I've brought poetry to regular people, one by one, without discrimination, and sometimes the magnitude of what they bring to me feels impossible to hold. There was the time the parents of a little girl undergoing leukemia treatment asked me to write her a poem. They looked at me as if I were a medicine man. I wrote it and cried when they left. Later, I found out they loved it and cried too. Or the woman who could hardly speak about her father fighting for his life in the hospital, who needed him to keep fighting for the family, for her. I wrote her a poem. Or the woman whose mother had just passed away and who was out of tears, asking for something happy to celebrate her mother’s beautiful life. I wrote her a poem. These moments are impossible to walk around with. They’re impossible to forget.

I have found this thing—this way of connecting with people. The typewriter might seem gimmicky, and maybe it is. But what it really is, what my people poetry really is, with the way people open up to me, vulnerably, about their most prescient problems and cares, is something akin to a spiritual reading, a confession, a therapy session. Now, I’m no therapist, priest, or babalawo, but I feel I’ve found something good that I can do for people—and it does something for me, too. It’s gratifying, even if it’s overwhelming.

Leonard Cohen spoke of finding a wavelength, and that’s what my people poetry feels like. It’s holding hands, finding that note or timber. It is listening to and seeing–it is a piercing gaze felt hot from near and afar. People come to me and jokingly repeat the phrase “you’re a poet and don’t even know it,” but this is far far from a joke to me. We can all be poets, I want them to know it. I want them to talk, to share, to write. Let’s get everyone to remember. Let’s break bread, make communion. Let’s get talking.

Aspirations Within the Program

I am intent on joining FIU’s MFA Creative Writing program because of what it will allow me to accomplish while I am in it. While in the program, I look forward to honing my craft under the guidance of renowned poets like Campbell McGrath and Denise Duhamel–Virgils to guide me across terrains of form and genre. I want to know the landscape and limits of poetry, from sonnets and ballads to aphorisms, confession, and song. I mean to develop the dynamism to write across the spectrum–from fiction and creative non-fiction to playwriting–all of it. I want to know and be known by living writers whom I hold deep reverence for.

I am interested in transcending the limits of my monolingualism, using this MFA as a springboard to improve my Spanish through the medium and work of poetry, as I have heard Sandra Cisneros has done, having moved to Mexico, bravely dropping her ego, bravely making herself into a baby again.

I want to be worked over by writers different from me, to find commonality with them, to find what we can do for eachother.

I have seen what a close-knit group the MFA students make, and how they support each other. I would consider it very special to become part of such a thing, to support and be supported by other writers, to challenge each other and foster growth. Together, we could turn our attention and our generative powers outwards, bridging the gap between the university and the community–planting seeds, grafting trees, and linking vines, finding ways to serve, to make ourselves available as a resource, to act as stewards of Miami poetry and storytelling. I wish to be considered for a teaching assistantship and want to continue in my capacity as an educator within the classroom, but I also mean to act as an educator beyond it.

I am interested in learning about what it takes to publish and be published, to break moulds, recontextualizing our poems as works of art in varying physical capacities and stagings. I want to experiment and play–lead groups in making random zines, in writing poetry on typewriters, in learning how to read poetry and make it approachable, as it should be.

I am interested in tapping into the language of this place, validating it in verse, and welcoming all voices into the fold from every part of this city–not just the beaches, not just Coral Gables or Miami Shores, but Hialeah,

Miami Gardens, Kendall, Sweetwater, Brownsville, Opa Locka, and Overtown. Every corner of this place deserves its due–to be lovingly rendered in poetry.

I am interested in discovering what Miami has been as a place of poetry and literature: acknowledging and honoring what has come before and using it as a compass towards the new.

I want to foster new spaces for poets of this place.

I want to contribute to centering our city as the place where America is spoken, the place where serious poets and writers go to do serious work and grow.

I want to contribute to a university where diversity and inclusivity are more than bureaucratic buzzwords–where I actually feel comfortable being me.

My Plans Beyond the Program

I am intent on joining FIU’s MFA Creative Writing program because of what it will allow me to accomplish beyond the program.

I can only speculate about where I would want to end up, whether I would want to go on to a PhD program after finishing the MFA, whether I would use my MFA as entry into teaching at the college and university level (though I believe I would). I know for sure that I want to find a platform for my writing. I want to be published, and I believe the program could help me to connect with an audience and navigate the mystery of the publishing world. I would like to explore the different organizations and industries that the program could put me into contact with.

I have seen alumni do great things: Lissette Mendez, the executive director of the Miami Book Fair, who, as I mentioned earlier, gave the program, and the idea of me joining it, an emphatic endorsement.

I think about Dennis Lehane, who wrote Shutter Island (an easy reference to explain the chops of the program to regular people, I find).

I think of Scott Cunningham and what he has accomplished through his O, Miami poetry non-profit in amplifying the reach and impact of poetry in this city, and how his work in the community is a model I would like to emulate.

And then, there is Richard Blanco, whose writing is different from mine in many ways, to be sure, but whose poetic impact I intend to spend my life chasing.

And I can’t forget the latest alumni of the program, whose work I was lucky enough to encounter at the recent Latino Poetry Showcase: Travis Cohen (whose advice I sought for this statement, but seriously failed to follow), Ellie Gomero, and Natalia Martinez–inspiring poets, all.

The paths of those who have gone through the program appear as a beautiful sprawl of accomplishment upon the great cosmic record, and I hope it is my own space amongst those writers that I hear calling to me.

Closing Thoughts

I want to write something big someday. I’m always incensed by the expectation to write something more palatable, bite-sized—to reduce what I have to say into a soundbite. This is asking me to efface myself and my meaning. It feels like someone walking up to an artist, staring at a painting, and asking, “can you point to me where the main idea is? What’s the focus here? What’s the point?” I don’t want to contribute to reducing my discourse, my own language. I contain meaning that refuses to be reduced. Life contains meaning that refuses to be simplified. My medium is my message. My body is also my soul.

Emily Dickinson wrote well the necessity of how to convey meaning in poetry, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies… / …The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind —”.

I am not only repelled by reduction, I am drawn to enlargement, to the sprawls, the multi-volume works of deep ambition. I think about Stephen Vincent Benét’s “John Brown’s Body”, Dante, Homer, Browning, and Whitman. I think of William Carlos Williams, whose imagist precision, compounded, yielded something as sprawling as “Paterson”.

I want to write many small things, too. I want to continue to write poems that aren’t about America or God, but little explorations of language. I have many red wheelbarrows left in me. I have a lifetime of my own love, and my own history, to build from. I want to continue to gift people poems, specially made, just for them. I want to write that which changes me as I write it, something for which I will never be the same. I explore myself on the page, looking for myself, and I intend to keep looking.

As far as I am concerned, I have already achieved success as a poet. I write poetry for myself and others, even being compensated for it. I am blessed by a whole mess of friends and supporters who have encouraged me every step of the way, who are proud of what I have done, who hold me down, who have lavished me with their love and confidence–promising visibly anxious me that I will be a part of your program come the Fall. And if they’re wrong, I know I’ll be okay, because they’ve given me everything I need.

This personal statement may raise eyebrows. It is unwieldy. But that’s me. I write a fatty tuna and a marbled steak. I do. I also don’t have any idea how to end things in a way that feels satisfactory (something I hope to remedy as part of your program), so I will cheekily leave off with an ending from a poet who did master this skill, the man who first took rubbed my cold hand to pulse and warmth:

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend:

if you pardon, we will mend:

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearned luck

Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long;

Else the Puck a liar call;

So, good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.”

(PUCK, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).