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 (from Michigan, Trinity, and Northwestern University Presses); two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (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 class from which the poems in Cadaver, Speak were drawn. Her honors include the Kingsley-Tufts Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011), plus fellowships/residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, two national parks (Denali and Isle Royale), the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, and two Fulbright Scholarships (University of Edinburgh and University of Canberra–Australia). Boruch taught at Purdue University for 33 years, where she established the MFA Program in Creative Writing, going rogue and emeritus in 2018. Since 1987, she’s also been on faculty in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. In spring 2022, 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 theater production. 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, those angels he saw in a tree when he was nine, and again at fourteen, the ones just standing around among 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 and earthbound: to see things, the odd, everyday stuff—the beloved particulars, I call them—and freely 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” as fiction 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 makes meaning through verve and precision and surprise. In addition, to aid and abet this seeing through, we’ll be doing a few “imagery workshop” exercises to deepen those habits of observation and our patience as well, trusting the images to trigger whatever flashes and fevers—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 as well? Sure. Maybe. I hope.
