Boruch lends insight through her poetry

Poet offers humor and advice to students

In his introductory comments to poet Marianne Boruch's reading, Longman Professor of English and Creative Writing David Young said the poet has a "careful, thoughtful, complete, dedication" to her craft. Through her poetry, Young added, Boruch shows great attention to the world and its tremendous qualities.

Both these statements were evident during Boruch's reading Wednesday night. Soft-spoken and seemingly shy, Boruch's humor and warmth shone through in her accessible, clear work.

Boruch began the evening with two newly written, unpublished pieces: "Near Halloween" and "Double, Double." In "Near Halloween," Boruch writes about a scarecrow put up in a family's yard, in support of a big college football game. She conjures up not just images of the scarecrow but autumn images as well: fallen leaves, raw air and anticipation of winter's emptiness. "Double, Double" is a motherly piece about Boruch's son becoming a teenager.

For the aspiring writers in the audience, Boruch gave some key advice. "Writers need to be haunted," she said gravely. Boruch explained that writers should always be searching for arresting images: images that become etched into the mind. Using the scarecrow as an example, Boruch told the audience how she saw it one day in a neighbor's yard and it took on a life of its own, ultimately becoming the basis for the poem.

Boruch continued with some older works, the two most interesting being "The Kingdom," about an old woman on the El in Chicago and "Luxor Baths" about a Chicago bathhouse and the camaraderie it creates between its female clients on ladies nights. A particularly nice detail was a description of the oak-leaf scented water that soaked into the pores of the women sitting in the sauna.

Boruch continued with works from her newest collection A Stick that Breaks and Breaks. On sabbatical last year from Purdue University, she traveled with her family to Hawaii for the year. Unlike many people, Boruch felt that Hawaii was not paradise. She seemed to be disappointed to be in such an artificial environment. Writes Boruch: "I never had a vision / about the place. I never thought: this / is the beginning of the world / ... so much of beauty is the same. You've seen / the postcards."

Another from the Hawaii series followed: "Lament." It was a humorous piece about going to a Honolulu grocery store and seeing a dead octopus laid out on ice. Boruch intertwined the humorous with the melancholy: "But what if I claimed / the body? What if I took it and kept / walking, crossing the dismal / parking lot, its weight against me, dear / tangle of arms in its / paper shroud ... and gave it to the darkness."

The octopus, like the scarecrow, is one of Boruch's haunted images. Fourteen poems later, Marianne Boruch had left the listeners with many of these powerful pictures.