George Mason University

• You may not register for the first three semester hours of thesis until your MFA Reading List has been approved by your committee.
• You may not register for your final three semester hours of thesis until you have passed your MFA exam.
• It is in your interest to begin your MFA Reading List early, so that it can help shape your reading and course work. Your list will be reviewed and approved by the members of your thesis committee, so you need to have formed the committee before you can get the list approved. Prior to the formation of your thesis committee, however, any member of the MFA poetry faculty will be happy to discuss the exam process or advise you on drafts of a list.
• Your thesis committee consists of the Thesis Director and two other members of the faculty. At least one member of your committee must be on the poetry MFA faculty, and at least one must be from outside the poetry MFA faculty. You are strongly encouraged to discuss your list with all members of your committee, since they will compose and evaluate your exam.
  

The MFA Reading List :

• Your MFA Reading List should consist of 20 poets.
  
• You may submit your list for approval any time after the completion of 12 semester hours of coursework in the Mason MFA Program, and you must submit a list for approval before the completion of 36 semester hours.
  
• Lists should be headed:
  • [your name]?MFA Exam Reading List?Anticipated exam date: [semester, year]
    
• Lists should group poets in two columns:
  • "Major" and "Minor.
• Within each column, poets should be listed by full name and in chronological order, with birth (and death) dates after each name.
• Lists should conclude with signature lines:
  • Thesis Director:                            Date:         
  • Committee Member:                      Date:         
  • Committee Member:                      Date:         
    
• At least 10 of the poets must be writers we are willing to consider "major" in the context of the exam. A "major poet" is defined as a writer of enduring interest and demonstrated influence, a poet who has a significant body of work and about whom there is a substantial body of secondary literature.
  • The categories "major" and "minor" are necessarily ambiguous. There can be no doubt that Sappho, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Yeats, Rilke, Williams, H.D., Moore, and Eliot are "major" by our definition. Amy Lowell, in the other hand, was certainly influential among her contemporaries but does not, today, appear to have a great deal of "enduring interest." In 1750 or 1850, John Donne was considered a poet of limited interest and of little influence beyond his time; by 1950 he was a poet of "enduring interest and demonstrated influence" about whom there was an immense "secondary literature."
  • Your list will, of course, reflect your own tastes and contain poets who have been important to you as a writer. But the importance of the poet to you is not relevant to the major/minor criteria. "Kahlil Gibran was the first poet I ever read and has been a major inspiration to me, therefore Gibran is a major poet?"
  • One good way to compose your list is to begin with the poets you would like to include and then do a little research in standard library references such as Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Who were the important influences on those poets? And who were the poets they rejected? For example, if you begin with William Carlos Williams, you will find that John Keats was an important early influence. You will certainly want to include Walt Whitman, and you need to learn about the Symbolists, Imagists and Objectivists. You will find W Carlos W had important connections to Spanish poetry. Among Williams' fellow-travelers you will find H.D., Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore; among the poets he couldn't abide, T.S. Eliot and the poets of the New Criticism; among the poets he influenced, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg.
• With very rare exceptions, all poets on your list must have published at least two books.
  
• If you include poets in translation, you are expected to have considered multiple translations (where available) and/or to have made some effort to appreciate the poetry in its original language. You are urged to have no more than 1/5 of your list be writers in translation. If a list is weighted heavily toward work in translation, a student should be prepared for exam questions about the art of translation and the difference among translations of a given poet.
  
• At least five of the poets on your list must have written their work before the Twentieth Century. At least two poets must be before the Nineteenth Century, meaning poets who died prior to 1800 or who wrote all of their poems before 1800. You are encouraged in this category to include as many poets writing in English as possible.
  
• Poets on the list may not be current Mason faculty.
  
• Reading lists are expected to include both men and women and to reflect aesthetic diversity; other kinds of diversity are encouraged.
  
• When you submit your list for approval, include a typed 250-500 word prose rationale for it, discussing the reason for your choices and the various lines of influence and affiliation you see among the writers. Every poet on the list nee not fit into a seamless scheme. Several lines of interest, as well as affiliation and influence, will form a typical reading list. In many cases, a couple of names will not fit into any scheme at all.
  

Preparing for Your MFA Exam:

• You are expected to have read "all" of the work by the poets on your list. That means all the poetry as well as significant or representative work in other genres (such as fiction, drama, autobiography, literary criticism, etc.) You should read criticism of the poets on your list, and where available, biography.
  
• A "masterlist" of questions from past MFA exams is available in the English department main office. You are welcome-indeed encouraged-to read this list and/or copy it. There is no guarantee that any questions on the masterlist will appear on your exam, but most exams consist of questions from the masterlist and some new questions. Each exam is different and is composed by the MFA candidate's thesis committee for the student. The main usefulness of the masterlist for you is to acquaint you with the kinds of questions you may encounter and the kinds of thinking and writing that may be called for. When you consult the masterlist, notice that the contents are divided into four big categories: (1) Subjects and Themes, Periods and Traditions: (2) Formal Elements and Conventions; (3) Influence, Affiliation, "movements," Comparison and Contrast; (4) Relation of the List to the Students Own Writing & More Playful or Imaginative Questions. Although each exam comes together according to its own internal logic (and the logic of the reading list upon which it is based), most exams offer one or more questions in each category.
  
• You should make practice exams for yourself based upon questions from the masterlist, giving yourself an hour to answer each question.
  
• 4.) All students are encouraged to take Poetry Planet to read for the exam. As well, you are encouraged to form informal study groups.
  
• Our best exams have come from students who have compiled detailed study notebooks on the poets on their lists. If you are precise in your note-taking, giving full citation for books and journal articles and reviews, and careful in distinguishing your ideas from those of the critics and poets you are reading, these notebooks will be useful to you not only for the exam, but forever as you teach, read, and think about poetry.
  

Scheduling Your MFA Exam:

• MFA Poetry students take the exam the summer after their second year and must have formed their MFA exam and thesis committee of three professors (at least one member must NOT be an MFA faculty poet) by March 1 and must schedule the exam with the graduate programs manager by April 1. Once a date is agreed upon, send a "letter of intent" -either a typed letter or an e-mail message-to the director of the MFA Program (Bill Miller), the graduate programs manager, and to your committee. Indicate (1) the date and time for your exam, (2) whether or not you plan to bring books or Xerox copies of poems, (3) whether you wish to take the exam longhand or on a computer, and (4) if you wish to use a computer, the program you prefer-Apple, DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95…. Most exams are taken in faculty offices.
  
  • The graduate program manager will coordinate each exam, finding an office for each student to take his or her exam, collecting the exam when each student is finished, and sending the exams to the committee members according to plans worked out in advance. 
     
  • Students may shift their exam date during the summer only with the consent of the committee and if the graduate program manager can accommodate the change.  
    
  • Students taking the exam in May must have their reading lists set by March 15 and cannot change their lists after that date. Students taking the exam after June 1 must have their lists set by April 1 and cannot change the list after that date.
    
  • These dates are a must so that the committee can write the exam and have it ready in time. Each year's exam period will run from May 1 to the Friday before classes resume for the fall semester.
    
  • The MFA committee will read and evaluate the exam by the end of the second week of classes in the fall.
    
• On the day of the exam, if you are working in longhand-the kind of paper and pen with which you feel comfortable. Exam booklets are fine, but are not required. We do strongly recommend the use of a computer.
  

The MFA Exam:

• The MFA Exam is a four-hour written exam on your MFA Reading List. The exam itself is three sections, with a choice of questions in each, and you are asked to write on one question in each section.
  
• "Major" poets on your list are not necessarily emphasized on your exam. That is, we do not have a policy of asking more questions about your "majors" or of giving such questions more weight. We are interested in your whole list and your whole exam, your list as a whole and your exam as a whole. We make every effort to write the exam so that you will have an opportunity to respond using any of the poets on your list.
  
• Most questions on an exam allow you to choose the works you will discuss-that is, most will not require you to write about specific poems. But there are exceptions. For example, you may be asked to discuss particular major works (e.g., The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, The Waste Land, Tender Buttons) or standard anthology pieces ("The Bishop Orders His Tomb," The Steeple Jack," "Daddy"). For most questions, you will have a choice of poets upon which to write.
  
• You cannot base your answer on the same poet in more than one question.
  
• The exam is normally written by the thesis director, in consultation with the whole committee, and is usually graded by the two committee members, with the director as the tie-breaker.
  
• If you think it will be helpful, you may bring anthologies and/or separate volumes of poems with you to the exam. (Some students choose to assemble their own anthologies.) Needless to say, such materials may not include notes or glosses (other than those printed in the books). If you bring any such resources to the exam, please also bring a list of the materials and plan to leave the materials with your exam until the exam has been read by your committee.
  
• In taking the exam, it is important to pace yourself. The most common cause of failure is failure to finish, or producing a third answer that is too short and slight to be acceptable. You need to answer the questions asked and not just offer everything you can remember about the poet or poem about which you are writing.
  
• If you fail the exam, you may schedule a second attempt at the exam for the following semester. A second failure means no degree.
  
• The exams are graded Pass or Fail. On rare occasions, a mark of Pass With Honors will be recorded. Your thesis director will notify you of the committee's decision.
  

The whole exam process is an opportunity to learn and to demonstrate what you know. Yes, four hours is a long time and people approach the job with varying degrees of confidence and savior-faire, but we hope you will take pleasure in the kinds of synthesis and writing the exam invites. We hope it will be (as Wallace Stevens says in "Of Modern Poetry") the finding of satisfaction.