10 Questions for Marianne Boruch
Are they pigeons? Fifth floor, other side of
this giant window I know by heart their
comings/goings, their stayings-put on the still
—from “The Pigeons,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wouldn’t call them poems really but as I walked home from St. Eugene’s School in the late 50s and early 60s at 3:00 and, earlier, home for lunch and back, I would sometimes make up things, often rhyming since that was the trademark element of a poem for kids. I started to write them down in 8th grade—maybe. It’s all a fog now . . .
It wasn’t until my early 20’s, pre-grad school, living in Chicago and working as a substitute teacher that I finally wrote a simple poem about eating eggs for breakfast. And for some reason, that knocked me out—and in. Suddenly: wow, this really IS a poem! An honest-to-god poem! It was thrilling. And I can’t even say why but it felt authentic and weirdly profound. And best of all, simply itself, standing alone, looking back at me as a kind of equal, not an attempt at self-pity or therapy or just xeroxing my guts. I wasn’t trying to EXPRESS anything. I was merely discovering something about the world, however small.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
So many great spirits! When in high school, definitely Carl Sandburg—a fellow Illinoian now out of favor but we shared a city and a landscape. I did the e.e. cummings thing then too; I loved his playfulness and see now why he was best friends with Marianne Moore, also an inventor. I was always addicted to poetry and trying to write it but in my 20s, it opened up for me—the Moderns (Stevens, Frost, Yeats, Moore, the good Doctor Williams most especially), the matter/anti-matter of the 19th century–Dickinson and Whitman, and then Hopkins. All at once it was Elizabeth Bishop, Zbigniew Herbert, Simic, James Tate, so many others. Closer to my own generation, I happily discovered the very mysterious Laura Jensen (a huge influence), and the early work of Louise Gluck, Gerald Stern and too many to count. Also an oddball little book of short prose called The Language of Cats by Spencer Holst who Allen Ginsberg called “a stand-up tragic.” I love that double whammy and often aspire to it.
More prose: The companion novels by Evan Connell I found early (a lot of my reading being glad accidents)—Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. Recently I finally picked up Stoner by John Williams, a Mother’s Day gift from my son a few years back. Precise, austere, so beautifully written and probably the saddest book in the world. I usually dislike academic novels, but wow, this one! The highest praise: I forgot I was reading.
What other professions have you worked in?
Besides writing? Of course, I taught both undergrads and grad student writers for more than forty years—always gratefully amazed I had such a job when so many fine writers weren’t so lucky . . .
I can’t up the ante on the other jobs I’ve had and call them professions really, but my earliest, in high school, was at Kresge’s, the precursor of Kmart. I was stocking the underwear aisle or something when old Kresge died, and I was completely what?! when every worker in the place cheered as someone got a ladder and took down the “Our Founder” portrait on store’s back wall. Thus one learns about the world, I guess. In college I filmed student teachers—all nervous wrecks—presenting lesson plans to empty rooms of imaginary students, a curious rehearsal before not-a-soul. Between college and grad school, I was a substitute teacher in the Chicago Public Schools—a job mentioned earlier—a heart-stopping business, full of funny, sweet moments, only occasionally life-threatening. In grad school besides being a TA, I picked shade tobacco in that former farmland stretch between Amherst and Northampton among remarkably hard-working older immigrants from Poland much like my grandparents on my father’s side, the sound of that language I never learned like a familiar cloud around my head. But my best, most favorite job before I began to teach in earnest was Searcher of Lost Books in one of the greatest libraries on the planet, Regenstein, at the University of Chicago. OMG. THAT was perfect in about 100 ways.
What did you want to be when you were young?
An archaeologist, what else? So fascinating. I devoured books on the ancient world all through grade school. A favorite was Gods, Graves, and Scholars—about the discovery of Troy. Whenever I mention this book to actual archeologists, they pretty much shake their heads, amused. I guess it’s their version of pop psychology, those endless stab-in-the-dark self-help books.
This conversation happened again last year because dumb luck befell me via an artist-in-residence position in Budapest, at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study, for two months my focus on Aquincum, the first century Roman city buried under modern-day Buda and Pest. (Who knew? !!) Only a fourth of that ancient site has been excavated. It was a dream for me. The long poem I wrote there—“In the Winter Ruins”—came out last January in American Poetry Review. It turned out to be a harrowing, mind-altering experience, both the “research” and the writing itself. I am so grateful to CEU and also to APR editor Elizabeth Scanlon for giving that strange poem a chance to see light.
What inspired you to write these pieces in MR?
The natural world really means to me, full stop. My most recent poetry collection, Bestiary Dark, begins with the astonishing wildlife of Australia, much of it doomed, which I observed on my Fulbright there. Returning to Indiana, I saw that owl in the woods, so the poem is literal and felt life and death from the start. That creature, laid out on the trail, stopped me cold. It hollowed me out. The poem—like many—began with shock and an abrupt emptiness. And the what-is-there-to-say? Then it became a matter of patience, seemingly without much help from me.
The other poem, the one about those poor pigeons in a massive snow storm is also a kind of life study. In 2022, I was invited to be a writer-in-residence at Colby College in Maine (a semester position funded every year by the generous Jennifer Jahrling Forese), and we were given a stunning apartment high above the Kennebec River in Waterville, the building an old rehabbed cotton mill which made cloth for the Union Army’s uniforms, the place later morphed into the Hathaway Shirt Factory well into the 20th century. We looked straight down to the river, over the heads of those pigeons lined up on the window sill, protected a bit. Storms were incredible from that height. The birds astounded and moved me. But the image kept growing—acquired a history and a future. That’s what metaphorical thinking can aid and abet. It always feels like a gift.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
We’re all a rich unpredictable archive of people and places. I’ve been fortunate. Places are context and release—my checklist: Mainly the Midwest (Chicago and my grandparents’ small downstate town, Tuscola in childhood, and now, for years, Indiana). New England (Amherst, MA, and Maine, its Farmington and the previously mentioned Waterville). Edinburgh and Australia (also mentioned earlier) where I was given Fulbrights to write my brains out. The deep woods and tundra of two national parks, Isle Royale and Denali where I was awarded artist-in-residencies. Italy—two beloved spots: Rome, thanks to the American Academy, and Bellagio, thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation. But mostly I’ve stayed put, in West Lafayette, Indiana for decades now.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I prize my husband’s thoughts about my stuff. He has a terrific ear, is unafraid to tell me what sucks. (My word, not his—he’s more graceful.) Not being a poet but the most curious and well-read person I know, he’s crucial, my first-responder, especially good about clarity. Before I went rogue and emeritus from Purdue, I often found myself telling students—what you want is mystery, not confusion. I suspect they got quite sick of that reminder. But I try to take my own advice; my husband helps me enormously with that.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I do work in other literary forms: the essay, the memoir, and now a crazy leap into small stories about an old obnoxious woman who just came at me, into my head completely uninvited one morning during Lockdown. She cracked me up, big time. I had no choice! Such fun to write those in such a dark scary time.
Beyond that, I do small unremarkable watercolors, pen and ink under a color wash. And have made a stab at the hybrid poem, words and drawings hopefully coming together to make a third thing somehow.
Once I took cello lessons as an adult. My son is an accomplished cellist among other things, and I had cello-envy. But every time I practiced, our manly cat Plankton would complain bitterly, and stalk out of the room. I took that as a sign.
What are you working on currently?
My 12th book of poems in which these two MR poems will be a part—if the book is published. (Let’s face it: always a crap shoot.) Plus those bizarre Mrs. Thompson stories though that collection is nearly finished. Will it ever be taken by a press? That’s an even bigger crap shoot!
What are you reading right now?
An odd little book I picked up at an estate sale last week, published in 1925, Speaking of Operations by one Irvin S. Cobb, that continues to be
Respectfully Dedicated to Two Classes:
Those who have already been operated on
Those who have not yet been operated on
I’m halfway through and no one has gone under the knife yet but that polite educated wry eye of the 1920s before the ’29 crash is in full force. A real cultural find!
Meanwhile, my husband and I have nearly finished listening to a book on tape, a superb novel, Someone, by Alice McDermott. We listen to such treasures on long car trips.
MARIANNE BORUCH’s work includes her eleventh book of poems, Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon); four essay collections, most recently Sing By the Burying Ground (Northwestern University Press); and two memoirs, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press) and The Figure Going Imaginary (Copper Canyon). Her recognition includes the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, fellowships/residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, Fulbright Scholarships, and most recently an artist residency in Budapest at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University. Her work appears in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, APR, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. Boruch went rogue and emeritus in 2018 after teaching at Purdue for thirty-three years and establishing its MFA program.
