University of Idaho Student's Poem to Run in the New Yorker
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September 01, 2010 9:00 AM
Raise your hand if you've ever taken a creative writing class. Keep your hand raised if you ever wrote a poem while in class that ended up being published in the New Yorker. Everyone's hands should have gone down now except for that of one very talented University of Idaho MFA poetry student, Ciara Shuttleworth.
Robert Wrigley recently asked his MFA poetry students to study sestinas, which, according to Wikipedia, are highly structured poem(s) consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. Sounds complicated, but Ms. Shuttleworth and probably Eminem can do it.
Wrigley assigned his class to read a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that consisted of only six words repeated in different patterns. After the class moved on to another poem, Shuttleworth wrote her own sestina, which also uses six words repeated seven times each. She revised her poem, sent it into the New Yorker, and the editors accepted it for publication this fall.
I am curious to read it, so I'll look out for it and let everybody know when it turns up in the magazine.
• Benjamin Percy recently announced on Twitter that Iowa State's MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment just hired Rick Bass as affiliate faculty. Percy, who also teaches at Iowa State, reported, He'll visit each year, serve as thesis advisor, and host students in Yaak.
Also in the Roundup: The Tattered Cover in the news, how to read New West's book page on your Kindle, and the new issue of Alaska Quarterly Review features some western writers.
