Frostburg Center for Creative Writing

The poetry workshop will help students translate feelings, ideas, and memories-the raw material of poetry-into well-crafted poems. We'll talk about the power of precise, imagistic language, consider how a poem's shape on the page can communicate its meaning, and pay attention to the many ways sound play happens in poetry. Along the way, we'll use found material to jumpstart the writing process, think about poems as maps and treasure chests, and discover revision strategies that help us more accurately express what we want to say.

Work Sample:
Skin is an Organ

The thinnest skin is the eyelid,
just six-tenths of a millimeter,
the slightest brushstroke hint

of a winter sky. Back skin is
five times as thick, a pie crust
refusing to rise. Who doesn't love

the word sebaceous, how it
whispers through your lips?
Or loquacious, its fraternal twin?

In junior high I knew a girl who
smiled during idle preteen chatter.
Her term paper on bravery

was just 10 words: Bravery,
she wrote, is turning in a paper that's
one sentence long. She got an F

from the teacher, but an A
in my book. I - with my half-dozen
nights at the library, a dime

in my coat pocket to call my father
at closing time - admired her.
When she saw her grade, she tucked

the paper in her notebook and lifted
her chin the way people do when they
wear confidence like a second skin.

Erin Murphy is the author of Science of Desire (Word Press, 2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her second poetry collection, Too Much of this World, won the 2004 Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Mammoth Books. Her awards include the National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her poems have appeared in dozens of journals and in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005). She received her B.A. in English and Philosophy from Washington College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.

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