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Local teachers inspired poet
By Ralph Mohr, Columnist
Friday, March 14, 2008 10:03 AM PDT
Michael McGriff will tell you himself that he was “a fairly mediocre high school student” at Marshfield High School. However, he had “two very cool English teachers there: Janet Gehlert and Dick Sebesta. They treated literature as something to be enjoyed rather than as a text to be dismantled and figured out.”
McGriff, however, had no real interest in poetry until he took John Noland’s creative writing class at Southwestern Oregon Community College. He said, “I assumed that poetry was a high, snooty art form whose secret codes and meanings were only available to scholars and professors. What I discovered in John’s classroom was that poetry is as varied an art as those who make it.
 Michael McGriff
“John got us to believe that Western literature would dwindle into oblivion unless we added our voices to it. I owe my discovery of poetry, and my love of reading and writing, to John Noland’s class.”
McGriff feels that the atmosphere at Southwestern was the ideal place to become interested in writing. In Noland’s creative writing class he met “high school dropouts, returning students, kids working on their transfer degrees, loggers, a minister, an ex-prostitute, a few folks on permanent disability from the state, a mishmash of local eccentrics and a broad range of dedicated adult students.” Some of these will be found in McGriff’s poetry. In the same way, McGriff’s subject matter comes from the Bay Area.
“Coos Bay and the blue-collar household I grew up in influence everything I write about. I’m obsessed with rural American life, the working class and the complicated land politics of the American West. My goal as a writer is never to idealize the people and places I write about.”
McGriff is currently completing a book-length poem called “Landscape with Origins” at Stanford University. He is also working on co-translating the complete poetic works of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. In October the University of Pittsburgh Press will publish his book of poetry “Dismantling the Hills.” The translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s book of poetry, “The Sorrow Gondola,” is forthcoming from Green Integer Books.
McGriff lives in San Francisco and is finishing his final year as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University. When asked what he will be doing next year, he replied that Stanford has just offered him a Jones Lectureship, a two-year teaching position. “It looks like I’ll be teaching undergraduate creative writing courses!” |
