MQR Explores Poetry at Michigan

The most recent issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 2018) opens with Associate Editor Keith Taylor’s “What is Found There: Poetry at Michigan,” commenting on this issue’s special feature. He recounts the Spring 2017 200th anniversary celebration at University of Michigan, which included a day-long conference entitled “Poetry at Michigan.” This was a “continuation of two symposia done over the previous few years: one on Theodore Roethke, and the other focising on Robert Hayden and his work.”

This issue of MQR has now become the even larger discussion of poets and their connections to UofM, including: Donald Hall, “an important professor” at UofM for almost twenty years; an unpublished interview with Seamus Heaney “a regular visitor for almost a quarter of a century, both before and after his Nobel Prize”; Francey Oscherwitz, and undergraduate at the university thirty-five years ago; Hannah Webster, “a recent graduate of the Zell Writing Program,” who “writes about her experience with the Prison Creative Arts Project,” including works from Michigan prison students; and Bob Hicock, not a UofM grad, but who lived in Ann Arbor for some twenty years, has contributed “a provocative essay on the necessary and inevitable changes happening in contemporary American poetry.”