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- Marianne Boruch, Poetry
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- 2024 Schedule
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Marianne Boruch’s work includes eleven books of poems, among them Bestiary Dark, The Anti-Grief, and Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon 2021, 2019, 2014); four essay collections (fromMichigan, Trinity, and Northwestern University Presses); two memoirs, The GlimpseTraveler (Indiana, 2011) and, forthcoming from Copper Canyon, The Figure Going Imaginary,made of notes taken in Gross Human Anatomy (aka the “cadaver lab”) and a Life Drawing classfrom which the poems in Cadaver, Speak were drawn. Her honors include the Kingsley-TuftsAward for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011), plus fellowships/residencies from theGuggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell,Yaddo, two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), the Institute for Advanced Study inBudapest, and two Fulbright Scholarships (University of Edinburgh and University ofCanberra–Australia). Boruch taught at Purdue University for 33 years, where she established theMFA Program in Creative Writing, going rogue and emeritus in 2018. Since 1987, she’s alsobeen on faculty in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. In spring2022, she was the Jennifer Jahrling Forsee Writer-in-Residence at Colby College in Waterville,Maine, where students rewrote the poems in Bestiary Dark into a very strange black-box theaterproduction. She and her husband live in West Lafayette, Indiana, where they raised their son.
Workshop:
Seeing Things
The 18th/early-19th century poet William Blake was pretty offhand about it eventually, thoseangels he saw in a tree when he was nine, and again at fourteen, the ones just standing aroundamong the threshers in a field, and that chat he had with the angel who served as Michelangelo's favorite model for figures in his frescos. Our goal in this workshop is more modest andearthbound: to see things, the odd, everyday stuff—the beloved particulars, I call them—andfreely follow them into poems or short prose pieces, not one’s pre-digested, rigid agenda.Intention isn’t worth a damn.Which is to say, the work of our workshop will concern habits of attention, a “habit of art” asfiction writer Flannery O’Connor called it. Our eye will be on hard image and its wily, rewarding
connection to more reflective, abstract elements in what we write or read, how image makesmeaning through verve and precision and surprise. In addition, to aid and abet this seeingthrough, we’ll be doing a few “imagery workshop” exercises to deepen those habits ofobservation and our patience as well, trusting the images to trigger whatever flashes andfevers—and with any luck, picking up some solace along the way too.Blake also said “I can look into a knot of wood until it frightens me.” Do we want to go there aswell? Sure. Maybe. I hope.
