what.this.thing.is

Here is for a lot of things. Here is the point from which I axis.

Here you will find notes on pedagogy, poetry, and poetics; updates and news regarding current publications and events; the occasional micro-review of things I’m reading; and general musings about other things I’m thinking through, typically as inspired/derived from texts I discover on the Internets.

My interests as an artist and academic include genre theory and material conceptions of language, especially as related to my ever-present obsessions in procedure and constraint, appropriation/collage, hybridity, and eco-poetics/composition. I’m especially interested in these areas as they relate to the teaching of writing and the ways in which students learn to adapt to (and even innovate through) new writing experiences.

Many thoughts begin here at the blog and go off to be better articulated elsewhere, particularly in poem and in my classroom(s)… here is for beginnings.

gig/degree.things

In the fall of 2013 I’ll begin my doctoral work in composition and rhetoric through the University of Pittsburgh’s program in Critical and Cultural Studies (which is housed in the English department). I currently work at Washington College as the Assistant Director of the Writing Center and as an instructor in the departments of English and Education. I began that work in 2010 after completing a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (concentration in Poetry) at George Mason University. My BA is from Muhlenberg College (’04) where I studied (big surprise) English and Creative Writing, and where I was a peer tutor at the Writing Center. Please visit my curriculum.vitae for more things.

major.project.things

Individual and visual poems have been featured or are forthcoming in journals such as DIAGRAM, Marginalia, The Offending Adam, Word For/Word, and Fringe Magazine. A review has been published at Gently Read Literature, and I hope to publish more reviews in the future.

Here Now, Myriads, the manuscript born from my MFA thesis (now much revised), cites and makes use (of the language of) Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect of Central Park, Boston’s park system, and many many other recreational spaces in the United States. Some poems from this manuscript can be found around the Internets. The manuscript has received some finalist nods but is still in search of a permanent, printed home.

Two new poetry projects are in the works: one is a manipulated erasure of Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land, and another investigates horizons and perception, tentatively called Horizon Glass.

contact.thing

moriahlpurdy AT gmail DOTCOM