Morton Marcus (1936 - 2009)
Born in New York City in 1936, Morton attended the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop and completed his M.A. at Stanford University. He moved his family to Santa Cruz, California, when he took a teaching position at Cabrillo College in 1968. Morton taught English, literature and film at Cabrillo College for thirty years, until his retirement in l998.
Morton published eleven volumes of his own poetry and a novel. His poetry books include The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, Pages from a Scrapbook of Immigrants, When People Could Fly, Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems, Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988–2001, Pursuing the Dream Bone, and The Dark Figure in the Doorway.
He had more than 500 poems published in literary journals and his work was selected to appear in over 90 anthologies in the United States, Europe and Australia.
Striking Through The Masks: A Literary Memoir (Capitola Book Company, 2008) tells the story of his growth from embattled youth to uneasy adulthood, conjuring up the last half of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the new millennium, while recounting his own struggle to find self-awareness and wisdom. This memoir contains a virtual who’s-who of Santa Cruz, American, and international literary figures such as James Houston, George Hitchcock, Joseph Stroud, Czeslaw Milosz, Vasko Popa, Leonard Gardner, Ray Carver, Charles Simic, Robert Bly, Al Young, William Everson and many more.
In 2009, Mort published The Star Wizard's Legacy, translations of the poet Vasko Popa. His final book of poetry is The Dark Figure in the Doorway: Last Poems. For a full list of Morton’s works, click here.
Morton's trilogy of interviews on the craft of poetry appeared in the March/April 2001 issue of The Bloomsbury Review, the 2002 issue of Red Wheelbarrow and in the 25th anniversary issue of Caesura (2004).
Morton read his poetry and conducted poetry workshops in dozens of universities throughout the country, among them Columbia University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Oregon, and several University of California campuses. He was also poet-in-residence at several State University of New York campuses, the University of Arkansas's Graduate Writing Program, Providence College and the Prague Summer Program in the Czech Republic.
His sixteen-part history of film, Movie Milestones, has been shown on many cable television stations, and was for years the main visual source of film history at the AFTRS, the Australian National Film School. He was the longtime co-host of KUSP radio's The Poetry Show and the co-host of the film review television show Cinema Scene, shown in the San Francisco Bay Area. He led film discussion groups at Santa Cruz's Nickelodeon Theater twice a month, and curated film series at various museums and took part in several panels on literature and film at the John Steinbeck Center.
Morton Marcus was the l999 Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year and received the Gail Rich Award in 2007 for his cultural contributions to Santa Cruz County.
In February, 2011, The Writer's Association Annual National Conference in Washington DC paid tribute to Morton with a special session which incuded nationally known prose poets and Marcus’s most recent publisher presenting his work and celebrating his legacy.
Awards
Gail Rich Award, 2007