Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Rubato”  is featured in the Kenyon Review:

1.

For the action: hammers of walnut—nussbaum, “nut tree”;
the pinblock, hard-grained beech;

the keyframe, oak; the keybed, pine;
the knuckles, rosewood. In the belly, to ripen the tone,

maple, mahogany, and ironwood,
also called “hornbeam.” The soundboard

spruce, best ratio of strength to weight, once split
not sawed, strip after narrow strip,

one-ply like the back of a cello, pressed together,
over which the struck strings quiver.

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An interview with faculty member Stacey D’Erasmo appears at Guernica:

The task of every writer is to bend language until it somehow expresses the inexpressible. When music is involved, this work becomes even more daunting. How does one give life to music on the page?

In her fourth novel, Wonderland, Stacey D’Erasmo undertakes this challenge through the character of Anna Brundage, a 44-year-old indie musician embarking on a European comeback tour after seven years away from the spotlight. In prose that is rich, attentive to color, taste, and, of course, sound, Wonderland pulses with ambition and loss. D’Erasmo illuminates the life of a figure still largely unseen in literary fiction—the female rock star.

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Faculty member Marianne Boruch and her poem “Cadaver, Speak” are the focus of the Weekly Poem at PBS.org:

When poet Marianne Boruch took a gross anatomy class at Purdue University, she found she had a favorite cadaver — a female who had been nearly 100 years old — of the four bodies, donated for medical study, that were in the lab.

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Alum and faculty member Martha Rhodes (poetry ’91) speaks about Four Way Books with The New York Times:

The latest in a series of occasional profiles of poetry publishers. These questions were answered by Martha Rhodes, the director of Four Way Books.

What book in the last five years do you wish you had published?

I wish I had published “Metaphysical Dog” by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) for its mastery of structure. I love how it weaves in and out of first person, zooms to the intimate, modulates the intensity through tonal movement throughout.

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Faculty member Michael Parker’s new piece “Ode to Merry Clayton’s Solo on ‘Gimme Shelter'” appears at Oxford American:

“Let me say straightaway that though the song in question, the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” which first introduced me to the voice of a sweet angel named Merry Clayton, is often considered among Stones fanatics a career pinnacle, and is deemed by the sort of pretentious rock journalist who tends to forget what Keith Richards himself said about rock & roll—that it starts from the neck down—to be a fin-de-siècle (italics theirs) anthem, and is sometimes described with adjectives such as “ominous,” “eerie,” “apocalyptic”; I don’t even really consider it a part of the Stones’ oeuvre. Merry Clayton pulls off the unfathomable: She steals a song—not just a song, but one so powerful that it is routinely, rightly or not, credited with pronouncing the death of the flower-power ’60s—from Mick bloody Jagger.”

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