One Week

“One Week,” a poem from faculty member A. Van Jordan’s new book The Cineaste (2013, W.W. Norton) is today’s featured poem at Poetry Daily.

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Buster Keaton’s every move strikes
without the sting of pity, just the sweat
of arms swinging hammers and nailing
planks of wood; he builds a scene to astonish
all in awe. There’s nothing more physical
than a man in love, but jealousy
renders me still: The story opens
with him marrying my ex. At first,
I simply want to warn him, but they seem
so happy … Simply put, he appears
to have it all: A young bride, a home
as a wedding gift, and a plot of land.
What else am I to do but foil his plans?  …[Keep Reading]…

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Maurice Manning’s “Provincial Thought”

Lisa Russ Spaar discusses faculty member Maurice Manning’s poem “Provincial Thought,” online at Poetry Daily.

In his essay “Tales Within Tales Within Tales” (1981), novelist John Barth writes that “we tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them,” and that “to cease to narrate, as the capital example of Scheherazade reminds us, is to die.” Luckily most of us don’t have to spin tales with the life-or-death urgency of Scheherazade, but it is true that some people are better at telling stories than the rest of us. Why do we heed certain voices, hanging on every breath, while the logorrhea of others makes us want to put the phone down on the desk and do our taxes, or suddenly remember a pressing reason—a shrink appointment, an elapsed parking meter—to absent the premises?

“Don’t sit at the piano,” Charles Wright has been known to say, “unless you can play.” Maurice Manning, Wright’s fellow Appalachian poet and kindred pilgrim spirit in the realms of faith and doubt, can play. By this, I mean that he can write. And he can tell a story. In the decade-plus-change since W. S. Merwin selected hisLawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001) for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Manning, a native Kentuckian, has, with a rare and credible humility, humor, and enviable formal mojo, authored three subsequent collections, each arrestingly fresh in its tellings. A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Lone Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c., for instance, is a series of persona poems in the voice of the eponymous figure—as myth, as man, as “ground”; Bucolics is a kind of vernacular breviary of untitled psalm/poems addressed to someone the narrator calls “Boss.” The Common Man is full of the stories that we house and that house us. …[Keep Reading]…

Maurice’s new book of poems, The Gone and the Going Away will be released April 23 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  The essay quoted above appears in Lisa Russ Spaar’s The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013, Drunken Boat Media).

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140 Characters

“140 Characters,” “A new short story in honor of the professor who told me a short story should never, ever have more than 3,” by faculty member Liam Callanan, is online at New Haven Review.

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The old nun, Agnes, who keeps to herself.

The old nun’s friend, Frieda, because even old nuns who keep to themselves keep at least one friend and that’s who Frieda is, and why not, because she, too, is an old nun but also a former one, and was happy to drive over this fine summer evening and help Agnes root around the front yard looking for Joseph, who’s not a nun but a saint, or the plastic replica of one, buried upside down somewhere here in front of the convent, the two old women are sure of it, because the building is for sale and tradition holds that this is what you do: hire realtor, plant sign, bury Joseph, hello buyer.

Suzanne, who doesn’t go to church anymore—Sundays are for open houses—but happily retweets the odd biblical passage she comes across and keeps a trunkful of St. Josephs rattling around in her car to give to clients: hey, you never know….

Her clients, the nuns, specifically Mary Pat and Mary Grace, two of the three women remaining at the old convent in the inner city, who are wondering when Agnes, the third, is going to come back from that walk she claimed she was taking, what that highpitched sound is, whether their hearing aid batteries need replacing, who will pay for that, and if they really should ask Hector to bury the statue of St. Joseph in the yard, because they haven’t yet.  Read more

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Straight Through the Heart

“Straight Through the Heart,” an essay by faculty member Dean Bakopoulos, appears in the New York Times Book Review.

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As each semester begins at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts school nestled in the Iowa prairie, I get numerous e-mails from students pleading for a spot in my fiction workshop. The wait list is long, and as much as I’d love to take credit for the course’s popularity, I’m learning it’s less about the teacher and more about the way fiction writers approach the teaching of literature.

Many of these students aren’t English majors — in our dynamic department, majors tend to geek out on theory and critical reading courses from the start. And unlike most M.F.A. students I’ve taught, these undergraduates tend not to consider writing a career choice. They never ask for my agent’s e-mail.

Instead, each semester, I meet students who might be afraid of traditional English courses, but are drawn by the oddly warm and fuzzy phrase “creative writing.” In most academic work, we teach students to discuss other people’s ideas, before they attempt to formulate their own. We withhold the challenge of creation. But in creative writing, we read a few books and then we’re off. By semester’s end, a seeming mystery, I have a roomful of young people in love with reading stories and telling their own. Almost all of them write better sentences and cleaner paragraphs too.

I realized that what I’m really instructing them in is reading as a process of seduction. Consider how one falls in love: by fixating on certain attributes of the beloved. The way he looks in his brown cords. The way she flips her hair from her face. The flecks in her eyes, the twitch in his smile. We do not yet know the whole person, but we are lured by primal responses to a few details. We get to the classic final lines of “The Great Gatsby” or see Lily Briscoe finishing her painting in “To the Lighthouse,” and we want to go back to Page 1 and start again, to know the novel more deeply. …[Keep Reading]…

Dean is the author of the novel My American Unhappiness (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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Brooks Haxton and Maurice Manning to be Honored by the Fellowship of Southern Writers

Two members of the Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty will be honored by the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the seventeenth biennial Celebration of Southern Literature to be held April 18-20 at the Tivoli Theater in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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Maurice Manning will be inducted as the newest member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.  The  Fellowship recognizes distinction in writing by election to membership.  The Gone and the Going Away (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2013) is Manning’s fifth book of poetry. His previous book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2011. He is a recent Guggenheim fellow and teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in addition to the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  Previous Warren Wilson MFA faculty members elected to the FSW include Betty Adcock, Rodney Jones, Dave Smith, and Ellen Bryant Voigt.

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Brooks Haxton will receive the 2013 Hanes Award for Poetry.  Born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1950, Haxton is the son of the novelist Ellen Douglas and the composer Kenneth Haxton.  He is the author of ten books of poetry and translations, the most recent of which is They Lift Their Wings to Cry (Knopf, 2008).  He teaches at Syracuse University and has been a member of the Warren Wilson faculty since 1990. “We are pleased to present Brooks Haxton with the 2013 Hanes Award for Poetry,” said Alan Wier, FSW Chancellor. “Giving awards to and recognizing distinction in literary writing is central to the Fellowship’s purpose.” Previous winners of the Hanes Award include Warren Wilson MFA faculty members Betty Adcock, Rodney Jones, Maurice Manning, and Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Founded in 1987, the Fellowship of Southern Writers is a not-for-profit organization that recognizes and encourages excellence in Southern literature. For more information about the Celebration of Southern Literature, visit  http://southernlitalliance.org/ or call 1-800-267-4232.

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Essay by C. Dale Young

Faculty member C. Dale Young’s essay “The Veil of Accessibility: Examining Poems by Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch in Light of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness“ appears in The American Poetry Review.

The earliest memories I have involve reading.  In fact, when I go back, when I return to the past, so much of what I can recollect in the farthest reaches are books and the experience of reading books.  Sometimes the memories alone conjure up not just the act of reading and the works themselves but even the feel of the paper, the smell of the bindings, the dusty yellowed halo pulsing away as the book’s leaves are slammed shut.  If part of being human is the act of telling and listening to stories, then what does one make of the act of reading, an act that is both story telling and listening?  The brain must construct story even as the eyes capture the words the writer has left us.  The human brain will construct story from almost anything.  Painters have long been aware of this, the fact that if only a few icons or images are presented on a canvas the viewer will construct a narrative.

And yet, despite the fact that as far back as I can remember I recollect books and the stories in those books, my engagement and desire to make stories, to write, all seem to stem from a very specific moment in time: the Eleventh Grade.  In the dark and at times horrific period of my life also known as my Junior Year of high school, I had a teacher named Kathy Doody.  Yes, this unfortunately named teacher, Miss Doody, was the most laissez fare teacher I had ever had.  She was thin but not anorexic.  She wore her hair up in the way a librarian might but never would for fear of looking stereotypically like a librarian. Read more

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The Other Place

“The Other Place,” an essay by faculty member Megan Staffel, appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Cerise Press.

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When I went to graduate school in the seventies, there was a benign, laissez-faire attitude in the culture. The sixties were over. The Vietnam war had been brought to a close, and by the end of the seventies, a farmer from Georgia who was not only a pacifist, but a forward-looking thinker, occupied the White House. For a progressive, there was not much in the public life of the nation to inspire outrage. Carter instituted energy saving initiatives that made everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, in 1978, acknowledge that fossil fuels were limited and conservation was necessary. The speed limit was set at 55; thermostats were lowered to 68. We liked peanuts because that was what our president grew on his farm, and at least in my circles, we also liked small cars, down-filled vests to wear in our cooler houses, and meals featuring tofu. I was twenty-six and married, and just before I sent in my applications for graduate school, I hesitated: maybe I should dedicate my life to the soybean?

Read more

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Interview with David Shields

Faculty member David Shields was recently interviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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David is the author of How Literature Saved My Life (2013, Knopf).  Read more at the LA Review of Books’ website.

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The Hide-and-Seek Muse

Lisa Russ Spaar’s The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (2013, Drunken Boat Media) collects over fifty of her micro-essays written for the Chronicle of Higher Education Arts & Academe and Brainstorm blogs between 2010 and 2012.

Among those poets whose work is represented and commented upon are nine Warren Wilson MFA faculty: Debra Allbery, David Baker, Michael Collier, Mark Jarman, Laura Kasischke, Heather McHugh, Maurice Manning, Carl Phillips,and Mary Szybist, as well as two alumni: Randall Couch and Meghan O’Rourke.

The book will be available on March 1.

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Reading Announcement

Faculty member Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012, Harper), will read Thursday, February 28th at the University of Iowa, where she is the Jonathan Goldsmith Visiting Author.  The reading is free, and will take place at 8 p.m. in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library.

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For more information, please visit the University website.

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