Visiting poet inspires students at creative writing workshop

Chris Venter, a senior English major, didn’t know what to expect when he went into an hour-long tutorial with prize-winning poet Lynn McMahon, who visited campus recently as the Aetna Visiting Writer in Residence.

But by the time he came out, he had learned something about his own poems.

“Some of the stuff she liked, I had done unintentionally,” he said. “Now that I see it, it sort of helps me to strategize how to play it up.”

Venter was one of 10 creative writing students who had the opportunity to work one-on-one with McMahon during her week-long visit, which was presented by the Creative Writing Program and the Aetna Chair in Writing. McMahon, who has won the Best American Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, gave a public reading of her own work, discussed and read poetry with students in English 210, and conducted intensive tutorials with student poets.

Venter, who usually writes short stories, submitted five of his poems for McMahon to read before she arrived on campus, including “Five Times,” a circuit poem whose lines can be read through to the next line or from mid-sentence back to the line’s beginning, as the first three lines show:

five times. He scrubs his hands

to kill pentagram germs. His life goal is

not easily achieved. Microscopic holocaust is

“She liked it a lot. Another one, she said, ‘You really need to work on that.’ I knew that,” said Venter. “She suggested that I needed an explosion in each line, a ‘bubble of interest’ I believe she called it.”