I got a response (a super-fast one, at that) from my advisor, Mr. A. Van Jordan, today, and folks, I have assembled the first version of my petition to graduate. I’ll have another look at it tomorrow, just to make sure that after sleeping on it, I don’t freak out about any of the selections.

The intention of the petition is to demonstrate that you have 12-15 pages of completed material, which is difficult for me because I have discovered in the past few years that I never stop revising poems. I really don’t. At any moment, a poem that seemed finished for some length of time is subject to go back on the chopping block. It’s kind of frustrating, actually; when I was younger, I would revise a poem two or three times and then stop, but as I get older, everything’s open for discussion. Even if the poem’s been published, that doesn’t seem to curb the urge.

But tonight’s version of the petition is satisfying– at least for the moment– because I think it shows off some of my good habits and declines to reveal some of my bad ones. Some statistics:

• total poems: 12
• poems in which humans turn into animals: 0
• poems in which animals turn into other animals: 1
• poems in which no metamorphosis occurs but two or more animals are combined: 0
• poems in which people see animals in the sky: 2
• poems about robots: 0
• poems about comic books: 1
• poems about video games: 1
• received forms: 1 (ghazal)
• deeply religious poems: 3
• percentage of all my deeply religious poems represented in this petition: 100
• poems in tercets: 3 (naturally)
• poems in couplets: 2 (naturally)
• prose poems: 2
• poems in the first person singular: 6
• poems I would admit to writing if I were in a crowded bar and someone spontaneously read them aloud: 12

Yeah.