Blog Archives - Marianne Murphy Zarzana

MSU Mankato's MFA Program in Huffington Post

4/20/2011

This week the Huffngton Post has a story on "The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs (2011-2012)."

The Creative Writing Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato is mentioned favorably in the article, and the kudos are well-deserved. I earned my MFA in Creative Writing there and had a tremendous experience. The creative writing grad faculty are all excellent teachers who model how to balance the teaching and writing life--never easy but worth the effort.

More Than Writing Conference at Minnesota State University, Mankato on Fri. & Sat.

4/19/2011

The graduate students in the Creative Writing Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato are hosting the "More Than Writing" Conference this Friday afternoon, April 22, and all day Saturday, April 23. There is no registration fee or admission. It is free, and the public is encouraged to attend. Click on the conference name above to read the schedule--a great line-up of outstanding writers and interesting topics.

I will be reading on an SMSU panel with writers Susan McLean, Jerry Schaefer, and Christopher McPherson Oveson on Sat., April 23 at 2:30 p.m. We'd love to have you join us.

Poetry Foundation Newsletter

4/18/2011

Check out Poetry Foundation Newsletter--a great source for what's going on in the poetry world. Sign up to receive it by email. A good way to stay plugged in.

Young Writers Converge at SMSU

4/17/2011

Today I attended one of my favorite SMSU events of the year: the 7th Annual Creative Writing Contest Award Ceremony and Reception, sponsored by SMSU and the Southwest/West Central Service Cooperative.

Young Adult writer Rebecca Fjelland Davis, author of Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged and her new YA novel Chasing AllieCat, gave an inspiring, energizing keynote talk about our need for stories and about how to grow as a writer.

The top 3 winners from grades 3-12 in each category--Fiction, Non-fiction, and Poetry--received a medal and a copy of the Creating Spaces anthology with their published work. The top writers in 11-12th grade received $2,000 scholarships to SMSU. Parents, grandparents, siblings and teachers all applauded the young writers. SMSU creative writing students served as first-tier judges, and SMSU English Department faculty serve as the final judges.

Each year the quantity and quality of the writing grows, and the turnout at the award ceremony increases. In a culture where we often lament that reading by children and teens is declining, this event speaks volumes otherwise. These young writers have much to say, and they're not holding back.

Poetry for Everyday Life - Getting to the Heart of It

4/16/2011

David Brooks wrote an interesting article, "Poetry for Everyday Life," in the New York Times this past week. Here's an excerpt:

"To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

"Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

"Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.”

Here's a response to the article:
To the Editor:
David Brooks’s column is a strong piece of advocacy for the arts in education. “Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think,” he writes, paraphrasing James Geary. “They are at the very heart of it.”

And this is what educators know about the importance of the standing, speaking, moving, memorizing, hearing and seeing in an arts curriculum: they are not frills, they are at the heart of learning. They are the nation’s hope for a strong, confident and competitive future.

In our panic over how badly we’ve used our resources, how shortsighted we’ve been, how deeply we’ve gone into debt, we could cut out our hearts.

BILL IRWIN
New York, April 12, 2011
The writer is the actor, performance artist and clown.

What do you think of the role and importance of metaphor in language? The importance of supporting a strong arts curriculum? At dinner tonight, a friend who is an art history professor told us that the outstanding music program at the elementary school in her small hometown in Pennsylvania is being cut. A sad story, and one we hear all too often. After dinner, we went to a terrific musical comedy, "Lucky Stiff," at SMSU. All those singers and actors on stage have had lots of opportunities to develop their talent starting in elementary school and continuing in high school. What happens to talent that is not nurtured? Makes me think of a Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred," rife with vivid metaphors:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

New Today: The Blogroll

4/15/2011

Today I finally figured out how to add a blogroll to Fly-over Country so visitors can link to other writing-related blogs. The Blogroll is in the column on the right side of this page under Archives. I'll be adding more blogs to the list as I discover them, so email me your favorite writing blogs.

Thanks...Thanks...Thanks...

4/14/2011

Many thanks to all the students, faculty, staff, friends and community members who came to my poetry reading at SMSU today as part of the 5th Annual Fine Arts Celebration. I love writing, sitting alone at my desk, finding out where the words will take me. But I also need this juicy part--sharing those words in public, trying to be a good spigot, letting the poems flow through me, and hearing what comes back, completing the loop.

After the reading, the audience had great questions. I crave that give-and-take, the wider conversation about writing, the process, where poems come from, how a poet knows when a poem is "done," how often we write, which poets and writers have inspired and influenced our work.

I like to read other poets' work at my readings to honor them and share their work with my audience, a practice I picked up from poets such as Robert Bly and Bill Holm. Today I read "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" by Rainer Maria Rilke,(you can read it here) and two Beth Ann Fennelly poems, "The Myth of Translation" from "The Impossibility of Language" (you can read it here) and "Cow Tipping" by Fennelly (you can read it here).

Much more to come in the next few weeks with the SMSU 5th Annual Fine Arts Celebration. Big thanks to Dr. Jan Loft, Chair of the Art, Music, Speech Communication and Theatre Department, for all her hard work organizing this month-long feast of the arts. Check out the online schedule. Join us. Feed your soul.

SMSU 5th Annual Fine Arts Celebration - Week 3

4/13/2011

On Monday, April 18, SMSU students in British Literature Survey II with Dr. Jim Zarzana will present a reading of 19th and early 20th Century British poets in the William Whipple Gallery, BA 291, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Come to hear famous and well-loved classic poems such as "The Tyger" by William Blake and "The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth.

On Wednesday, April 20, English Professor Dr. Elizabeth Blair will read from her essays on her adventures in finding many of Minnesota's 42 species of wild orchids in northern Minnesota wetlands. Her reading will be in the William Whipple Gallery, BA 291, from 3-4 p.m.

On Thursday, April 21, SMSU creative writing students will host a reading and reception to celebrate this year's issue of Perceptions, SMSU's literary and arts publication, in the William Whipple Gallery from 4-6 p.m.,

For more information on the SMSU Fine Arts Celebration, which runs through to the end of April, check the website schedule.

David Ferry Awarded 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

4/12/2011

Here's a press release sent by the Poetry Foundation today. If you're not already familiar with Ferry's work, it's easy to find online. One of my favorites is "The Soldier."

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce that poet David Ferry has won the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Presented annually to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. Established in 1986, the prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. The prize will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Wednesday, May 11; the next Children’s Poet Laureate will also be announced at the ceremony.

In making the announcement, Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, noted the quiet power in Ferry’s verse.

“David Ferry is probably best known as a translator—and his achievements in that regard are extraordinary—but I think in the end it will be his poems that last,” said Wiman. “In a time when most poetry relies on intense surface energy, Ferry’s effects are muted and subterranean—but then, in their cumulative effect, seismic. For 50 years he has practiced poetry as if it truly matters to our lives and to our souls—and now his poems have that rare power to wake us up to both.”

Ferry has authored, edited, or translated more than a dozen books. His collections of poetry and translations include On the Way to the Island (1960); A Letter, and Some Photographs (1981); Strangers: A Book of Poems (1984); Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993); and Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (1999). Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations will be published in fall 2012.

The emeritus Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College, Ferry is currently serving as a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University. Over the course of his long career Ferry has received many awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

“Now in its 26th year, the Lilly Prize celebrates at once our finest living poets and Ruth Lilly, poetry’s greatest benefactor,” said Poetry Foundation president John Barr. “This year’s winner, David Ferry, continues that grand tradition.”

Previous recipients of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize are Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Hayden Carruth, David Wagoner, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, A.R. Ammons, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, C.K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, Lucille Clifton, Gary Snyder, Fanny Howe, and Eleanor Ross Taylor.

SMSU 5th Annual Fine Arts Celebration

4/11/2011

SMSU is hosting its 5th Annual Fine Arts Celebration this month. Click on the name in bold for the full schedule. Here are the readings for this week:

English Professor Dr. Susan McLean will be giving a poetry reading in the William Whipple Art Gallery, BA 291 (next to the SMSU Library) on Wednesday, April 13 from 3:30-4:30 p.m.

Assistant Professor of English Marianne Murphy Zarzana (moi) will be giving a reading of poems and essays in the Whipple Art Gallery on Thursday, April 14 from 1:30-2:30 p.m.

Please join us!