PUBLISHED BOOKS
Morton Marcus was born in New York City in 1936 and has lived in California since 1961. He has published ten books of poems: Origins (Kayak, 1969; 3rd ed., 1974); Where the Oceans Cover Us (Capra, 1972); The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems (Capra, 1972; 2nd ed., Capitola Book Company, 1992); The Armies Encamped In The Fields Beyond The Unfinished Avenues: Prose Poems (Jazz Press, 1977; 2nd ed., Brown Bear Reprints, 1988 ); Big Winds, Glass Mornings, Shadows Cast by Stars: Poems 1972-1980 (Jazz Press, 1981; 2nd ed., Brown Bear Reprints, 1988); and Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants: A Journey In Poems (Coffee House Press, 1988). In 1997, Hanging Loose Press published When People Could Fly, his experiments uniting prose and poetry, and in 2002 White Pine Press brought out Moments Without Names: New & Selected Prose Poems, which included 65 new prose poems. Also in 2002 Creative Arts published his first volume of "lined" poems since 1988, Shouting Down The Silence: Verse Poems 1988-2001. Marcus has also written a novel, The Brezhnev Memo (Dell, 1980) and his theatre piece, The Eight Ecstasies of Yaeko Iwasaki: A Legend In Poetry, Dance, and Music, had two highly successful engagements on the West Coast in Autumn 1984 and Winter 1985. His newest book of poetry, Pursung The Dream Bone, was published in April, 2007.
PUBLISHED POEMS IN PERIODICALS
Marcus has published more than 400 poems in literary journals across the country, including Poetry (Chicago), TriQuarterly, The Nation, Ploughshares, Chelsea, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, The Chicago Review, Kayak, Choice, The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Ironwood, The Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Northwest, The Quarterly Review of Literature, Fiction, The World (St. Marks Poetry Project), The Denver Quarterly, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and Hanging Loose. Four times his work has been selected to appear in prize poem annuals (The Borestone Mountain Awards of 1967 and 1975, and the 1985 and 1987 Anthology of Magazine Verse).
PUBLISHED POEMS IN ANTHOLOGIES
Marcus' poems have appeared in more than 80 anthologies, from Paul Carroll's Young American Poets (Follet, 1967) through A Geography of Poets (Bantam, 1979) to the recent A Curious Architecture: New British & American Prose Poems (Stride, England, 1996), The Party Train (New Rivers, 1996), the most comprehensive collection of prose poems in the history of North American letters, American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century ( Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996), New To North America: Writing by Immigrants and Their Children (Burning Bush, l998), The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (Heyday Books, l999), which contains five of his poems, the recent The Best of The Prose Poem (White Pine Press, 2000), Truth & Lies (Henry Holt, 2001), The Body Eclectic (Henry Holt, 2002) and No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press, 2003), which contains ten of his prose poems. In 1975 Dryad magazine devoted its thirteenth issue to his work, and one of his poems was chosen to appear in TQ20 , an anthology of the best writing to appear in the TriQuarterly Review for the past twenty years (1985). Several of his innovative prose pieces have been broadcast on National Public Radio's "The Sound of Writing."
READINGS AND LECTURES
Marcus has read his poems at universities throughout the nation, including Columbia, Notre Dame, The State University of Iowa, Ohio State University, The University of Oregon, The University of Washington, Lewis and Clark College, The University of Wisconsin (several campuses) Gustavus Adolphus College, The State University of New York (several campuses), Providence College, Ther University of Arkansas, and the Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Irvine and Santa Cruz campuses of the University of California. In 1989 he was invited to do a reading tour of Australia, and has given workshops in poetry, the prose poem and the short stories of Raymond Carver in numerous high schools, junior colleges and universities.
IMPORTANT ARTICLES ABOUT
"Vasko Popa & Morton Marcus," by Aleksandar Nejgebauer, Filoloskog pregleda, I-IV, 1969, pp. 109-123 (Belgrade). An examination of the influences of Vasko Popa on Origins.
"Morton Marcus, Origins," by Vern Rutsala, Minnesota Review, Winter 1970, pp. 262-265. Review of Origins.
"3 Kayak Poets," by Gail Barnett, Dryad, #10, 1970, pp. 62-66. Review of Origins.
"The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems," by James D. Houston, Rolling Stone, Issue #126, January 18, 1973. Review of Santa Cruz Mountain Poems.
"The Mystic Twang," by Andrei Codrescu, SHOCKS 3 & 4, March, 1974, pp. 71-84 (San Fran.). Comprehensive look at Origins, Where The Oceans Cover Us, The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, and the ms. Celestial Acrobats, Terrestrial Clowns (later renamed Big Winds, Glass Mornings, Shadows Cast By Stars).
"The Poetry of Morton Marcus," by Michael Hefernan, Dryad #13 (The Morton Marcus Issue), 1975, unpaged. Washington, DC, A Detailed Examination of the first three books.
"Morton Marcus' Big Winds, Glass Mornings,Shadows Cast by Stars: Poems 1972-1980," by Robert Peters in The Great American Poetry Bake-Off, second series (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1982), pp. 161-164. An insightful, positive review reprinted from Kayak Magazine in this collection of Peters' reviews.
"Morton Marcus and the Ethical Lyric," by Jerome Mazzaro, The Cream City Review, Vol. 12, Number 2, Summer 1988, pp. 30-42. Review of the first five books in light of the social and moral impetuses which inform them..
"Morton Marcus's Family Portrait," by Tom Maderos, The Sun, November 17, 1988, p. 28. Strong review of Pages From A Scrapbook of Immigrants.
"When People Could Fly," by Peter Johnson, The Prose Poem: An International Journal #7, 1998, Book Reviews, pp. 109-114. An appreciation of Marcus’s prose poems presented as a review.
"When People Could Fly: Believing In Every Possibility," by Elliot Roberts, Caesura, pp. 10-12, Spring, 2000. Insightful review of book’s main concerns.
"In Praise of The Prose Poem: An Interview With Morton Marcus," by Ray Gonzalez,
The Bloomsbury Review, March/April 2001. A major discussion of the author’s
ideas and literary practices.
"An Interview with Morton Marcus," by Ken Weisner, Red Wheelbarrow,
Spring 2002. A long interview on such topics as Mort’s writing procedures
for The Santa Cruz Mountain Poems, masculinity in poetry, getting past writer’s
block, and his comments on six poems from his new books, including "The
Request," "My Encounter with the Eternal Mystery," "Monsters,"
and "Suffering."
"Imagination & The Shape-shifting Beast: An Interview With Morton Marcus"
by Robert Sward, Caesura 25, 2004, pp. 48-56. Another long interview that focuses
on the writing process, the place of the imagination, and the importance of
"human-heartedness," empathy, compassion, poignancy, and naming things
in writing and life.
"Morton Marcus." A biography in Contemporary Authors, Vol. 218 (Gale:
Farmington Hills, Michigan, 2004), pp. 52-71. A long, very complete sketch biography
focusing on the development of Marcus as a writer.
OTHER LITERARY ACTIVITIES
Active in the Poetry in the Schools program on both coasts, he was Monterey- and Santa Cruz- county director of the program from 1973-1975. He spent winter 1975 at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire as a MacDowell Fellow, and in 1980 he was elected to the American chapter of PEN International.
Marcus has given many short poetry workshops across the U.S. and has been poet-in-residence at the State University of New York at Buffalo (Jan. 1974), the State University of New York at Alfred (Feb. 1976), Mt. Hood Community College, Oregon (Nov. 1992), and the University of Arkansas (Oct. 1997).In the fall of l998, he was Visiting Poet at Providence College,RhodeIsland, a position he repeated in the fall of 2001 at Fullerton College in Los Angeles, and in past years he has served as a judge for many poetry contests, including the state poetry awards for Delaware and Oregon.
On the permanent staff of the Foothill Writers Conference since 1986, Marcus' memoir of the short story writer Raymond Carver appeared in Remembering Ray (Capra, 1993) and has been reprinted in several journals. A similar memoir of the poet William Everson (Brother Antoninus) has been reprinted in four different literary journals. Marcus is currently president of the King Fisher Flats Foundation, the non-profit organization committed to preserving and promulgating the work of William Everson.
In l999, Marcus was elected the sixteenth Santa Cruz County Artist of The Year by The Santa Cruz County Arts Commission, only the third poet to be honored by the Commission, the other two being Bill Everson and Adrienne Rich. That same year he was named contributing editor to The Prose Poem: An International Journal.
OTHER PROFESSIONAL PURSUITS
A film historian and critic as well as a poet, Marcus taught Film and Literature at Cabrillo College in Aptos (California) until his retirement in l998. In 1989, he was invited to gives a series of lectures at the Australian National Film School in Sydney, a project that was planned to coincide with his poetry tour of Australia that year. His sixteen-part TV history of film has been the prime visual source of film history at the school ever since, and has been shown on a number of cable TV channels in California. His film reviews, profiles of contemporary authors and book reviews appeared regularly in the METRO newspaper chain from 1985-1998. In 1999, he curated a festival of Ernst Lubitsch films at Santa Cruz's McPherson Museum of Art & History. In addition, he has lectured several times on film at the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California.
Marcus has been a longtime co-host of a weekly poetry show on KUSP radio, and for the last three years has been co-host of a bi-weekly TV film review program on the AT&T Broadband cable channel called CinemaScene, which is shown in San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Cruz County.
His biography is in The International Who's Who In Poetry (England) and Contemporary Authors (Vol. #105), Gail Pubs.,Detroit, 1982.