Dates and Times
01 May 2019
12:30 - 13:30
Event for
Location
Organiser
New & Media Research Centre and Centre for Creative & Cultural Research
Speakers
Emeritus Professor Marianne Boruch
Event about:
PUBLIC SEMINAR: News vs. Poems, Prose into Poetry
Professor Marianne Boruch, Fulbright Senior Scholar in UC’s International Poetry Studies Institute, will present an informal talk about how a more journalistic take on actual events – personal or worldly – can morph into poems, how straightforward 'facts' and 'evidence' sometimes find their life on the page in a very different guise.
Additional Information
I will focus on what was a deep surprise to me, my first prolonged attempt at this mysterious negotiation a few years ago in the so-called “Cadaver lab,” an experience supported by a Faculty Fellowship in the Study of a Second Discipline at Purdue University where I’ve taught for 32 years. I will track bits from the journal I kept during that semester I spent with medical students in their first course, Gross Human Anatomy, and how I later drew from that prose reportage to write the long 32-sectioned title poem of my eighth collection, Cadaver, Speak.
My project in Canberra is to observe the stunningly strange wildlife of Australia, with an eye to write a bestiary, of sorts, a series of poems eventually using the images I see. So I am taking notes too from the great world, hoping to launch poems.
Biography
Marianne Boruch is delighted to be a Fulbright Senior Scholar in UC’s International Poetry Studies Institute. Her work includes 10 poetry collections, the latest Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing and forthcoming, The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon, 2016, 2019), three books of essays, most recently The Little Death of Self (Michigan, “Poets on Poetry Series,” 2017), and a memoir about hitchhiking in the early 70s, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Edinburgh Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Nation, New England Review, and elsewhere. Among her honors are the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon, 2011), fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Yaddo, McDowell, and an earlier Fulbright professorship at the University of Edinburgh. She’s been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and at two American national parks, Denali and Isle Royale. Boruch taught at Purdue University for 32 years, was the founder of the MFA program in the English Department there, becoming a Professor Emeritus last May. She continues on faculty in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she has taught since 1988.
UC acknowledges the Ngunnawal people, traditional custodians of the lands where Bruce campus is situated. We wish to acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of Canberra and the region. We also acknowledge all other First Nations Peoples on whose lands we gather.