Darrell
Bourque
Darrell Bourque is currently the Friends of the Humanities/Board of Regents Endowed Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. At UL he has directed the Freshman English Program, the Creative Writing Program, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. He was the recipient of the University Foundation Outstanding Teacher Award in 1996 and the Distinguished Professor Award in 1997. He has served as president of the National Association for Humanities Education and is presently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Interdisciplinary Humanities.
BRIEF CURRICULUM
VITAE
Darrell Bourque's dissertation is a collection of poems entitled Carbon Rites. He has directed the Deep South Writers Conference, has given readings ranging from the local Children's Community School to a series of New York City readings including Poet's House and the Small Press Center in Manhattan. He has also conducted workshops in other Louisiana universities, for the Acadiana chapter of the National Writing Project, for community organizations, and in local schools. He has recently served as project director for Significant Voices, a reading series in Lafayette featuring Louisiana African-American writers, and he is currently serving on the State Task Force on Literature and Literacy. His poems have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly, New Mexico Humanities Review, National Forum, Mid-American Review, Revista/Review Interamericana, ConnecticutReview (forthcoming), Louisiana Literature, and Louisiana English Journal where he is the featured poet in the Spring 1999 issue. His work also appears in Ann B. Dobie's Uncommonplace (LSU Press, 1998). His first book of poems Plainsongs (1994) is in its second printing. In 1998 Louisiana Literature of Southeastern Louisiana University published The Doors Between Us as the inaugural issue of an annual chapbook series. In 1999 the University Art Museum issued Where Land Meets Sky featuring paintings and drawings by Elemore Morgan, Jr. and poems by Darrell Bourque [reprinted from Plainsongs]. His most recent publication, Burnt Water Suite, was published by Wings Press, San Antonio, in 1999.
ON
TEACHING AND/OR WRITING
My writing workshops usually have a strong reading
component which is largely student directed. Often, sessions begin with a
round-robin of “my favorite poem this week” poems. Texts for the class are
usually student selected books of poems from a list of twenty-five to thirty
titles or authors that I suggest. In recent years my poetry workshops have been
exercise-and-form based. I want writers to be responsive to the possibilities
of the poem, which I think I can variously direct through a series of
exercises, and I want them also to go to forms, study traditional forms,
explore possibilities for the adapting of forms to individual purposes and
intents. I want them to see traditional forms as points of departure for contemporary
and individualized expression.
For me poems are correspondences. The
correspondence arranges itself in memory charts; in discourses with other
poets, painters, musicians, and makers; in documentations of experience in
variance and at variance with itself; and finally, in conversations with the
physical world I live in. I find myself believing a line from Job: “...speak to
the earth and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto
thee.” Poems are, for me, declarations negotiated by imagination faithful to
language.
Read
Darrell Bourque's Poetry
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to UL-Lafayette Creative Writing Anthology
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Last updated: May 1, 2001.