Faculty - Jennifer Moxley
Address:
Jennifer Moxley
Associate Professor of English
5752 Neville Hall Room 213
Orono, ME 04469
PHONE: (207) 581-3808
EMAIL: jennifer.moxley@umit.maine.edu
Office Hours
Mondays & Wednesdays 2:10-3:00pm, and by appointment.
Primary areas of creative work and study include creative writing; lyric poetry (history & practice); personal narrative (memoir & autobiography); experimental writing; poetry translation; small magazine/press editing and design; 20th c. American poetry. Secondary areas include French Symbolism, Gay and Lesbian literature, and American women’s literature.
Courses I’ve taught:
HONORS 111-112. Civilizations.
I’ve been teaching in the UMaine Honors College since 2001. “Civilizations” is a four semester introductory course where students read many of the foundational literary and philosophical works of our Western culture. In addition to leading a small (12-15 students) preceptorial each week, for the past few years I have also given lectures on the Greek lyric poet Sappho and the Medieval French epic The Song of Roland to the entire incoming class. Visit the Honors College.
ENG 205: Introduction to Creative Writing. In this course students are introduced to different techniques for writing prose, poetry, and personal narrative. We read poems and short stories and do lots of in-class writing and exercises.
ENG 222: Reading Poems. An introductory survey of poetic forms, metrics, movements and magazines. In this class students learn how to be astute readers of poetry, from the Anglo-Saxon “Caedmon’s Hymn” to Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette and everything in between.
ENG 246: American Women’s Literature. A survey of Women’s Literature written in America, from our first published author, Anne Bradstreet, to the present.
ENG 308: Writing Poetry. This is an intensive poetry writing workshop that includes the study of 20th century poetics and focuses, through exercises and writing assignments, on the development of each student’s individual craft. We also read work by contemporary poets who come to UMaine to read in the New Writing Series.
ENG 408: Advanced Poetry Writing. A senior workshop for English students concentrating in creative writing, poetry. Students in the course develop and complete a manuscript of poems that serves as their capstone.
ENG 429: Topics in Literature – The Grail in Medieval Literature and 20th Century Film. A course I developed in which students examine the origins and development of the grail legend from Medieval romances such as Chrétien de Troyes The Story of the Grail and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, all the way to twentieth-century films such as Lancelot du Lac and The Fisher King.
ENG 429: Topics in Literature – The Symbolist Movement in Poetry. A senior seminar I developed on French Symbolism. We studied the essays, poems, and letters of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé (all in translation).
ENG 449: Contemporary American Poetry – “A Girlish Possibility.” A senior seminar I developed on the poetry of Robert Duncan, James Schuyler, and John Wieners. This course took an in-depth look at three post-WWII American poets and the historical context (pre-Stonewall) in which their works emerged.
ENG 508: Graduate Workshop in Poetry. A workshop for M. A. students concentrating in creative writing.
ENG 529: Studies in Literature – The Writer as Translator. A graduate seminar and creative writing workshop I developed focusing on the art of poetic translation. It focused on translation as a way to read and invent, and on crossing linguistic and formal boundaries.
ENG 546: Modern American Literature. A course offered periodically and taught by different professors. When I taught it I focused on eugenics, race, and reproduction in American Modernism.
ENG 580: Topics in Poetry and Poetics – The Symbolist Movement in Poetry. My course on Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé turned up a notch for M. A. students.
Publications
Books
Clampdown. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2009
The Middle Room. Berkeley: Subpress, 2007
The Line. Sausolito: Post-Apollo Press, 2007
Often Capital. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005
The Sense Record. Washington, DC: Edge Books, 2002
Rpt. Cambridge, UK & Australia: Salt Publishing 2003
Imagination Verses. New York: Tender Buttons, 1996; Cambridge, UK & Australia: Salt Publishing 2003
Evidence des Lumières. Grâne, France: Editions Créaphis, 1998 (Trans. of Enlightenment Evidence)
Chapbooks
The Occasion. New York City, NY: Belladonna, 2002
Wrong Life. Cambridge, England: Equipage, 1999Enlightenment Evidence. Cambridge, England: Rem•press, 1996 Ten Still Petals. Providence: private, 1996 The First Division of Labour. Boston: Rosetta Chapbook, 1995
Translation
Sleep’s Powers. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2008. Trans. of Puissances du Sommeil by Jacqueline Risset (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
The Translation Begins. Providence: Burning Deck, 1996 Trans. of La Traduction Commence by Jacqueline Risset (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1971)
Anthologies
American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. Edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John (Norton 2009)
Vanishing Points, New Modernist Poems. Edited by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Salt 2004)
Isn’t It Romantic, 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. Edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Aimee Kelley (Verse, 2004)
“Behind the Orbits” in The Best American Poetry, 2002, edited by Robert Creeley
The Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry. Edited by Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle. Université de Liège: 2000. Review.
12 pages in An Anthology of New (American) Poets. Edited by Lisa Jarnot, Christopher Stroffolino, and Leonard Schwartz. Talisman House, 1998
Links to some of my writing
Poems: “Aeolian Harp” “Fear of an Empty Life” Four poems Three poems
Essays & personal narrative
On editing The Impercipient
“A Personal Reminiscence Chronicling the first documented case of the Waldrop Effect”
Essays & reviews of my work by others (partial)
John Yau on Imagination Verses
Jane Griffiths on Imagination Verses & The Sense Record
Tony Frazer on The Sense Record:
Stephanie Cleveland on The Sense Record:
Cole Swensen on The Sense Record
Arielle Greenberg on The Sense Record
Dale Smith on The Sense Record
Chris Stroffolino & Katy Lederer on Wrong Life
Editing
See the on-line archive of my 90s magazine “The Impercipient”
Poetry editor of The Baffler
Contributing editor of The Poker
Poetry Readings
Here’s a partial list of some of the places I’ve been invited to give poetry readings since I’ve been teaching at the University of Maine:
University of Chicago, Beinecke Library at Yale, Bates College, Georgetown University, Mills College, UC Davis, University of Denver, The Poetry Project in New York City, POG collective Tucson, Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, USC, Northwest Bookfest in Seattle, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, The Poetry Center in San Francisco, UC San Diego, U of Illinois at Chicago, and Brown University .
Here are some links
University of Chicago: Poem Present
Georgetown University, Lannan Poetry Series
Georgetown University, Lannan Poetry Symposium
University of California, San Diego – Department of Literature Newsletter
University of Denver, Department of English – News and Events