MPR’s Dan Gunderson reports on Mark Vinz, a well-known Minnesota poet, retiring from the classroom.
Mark Vinz began teaching and writing poetry at Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1968. In the intervening 40 years, he's published hundreds of poems and won numerous awards for his writing.
DAN GUNDERSON: Mark Vinz recalls hating poetry when he was growing up. Misbehave in school and memorizing poetry was the punishment. But by the time he finished college, Vinz wanted to be a writer. He joined the Morehead State University English department in 1968. After living in the mountains of New Mexico, the Red River Valley was a difficult place to be poetic.
MARK VINZ: I came here in the Red River Valley was just this void, this flat-- I hadn't discovered the beauties of the prairie. And, I look back at some of those early poems, and they were just poems about being unhappy here, about sullen Viking gods squatting on the prairie and things like that.
DAN GUNDERSON: Several years and hundreds of poems later, Mark Vinz says he made peace with the place he's now pleased to call home.
MARK VINZ: This is my home. I know this place now. This place is a part of me, and I'm a part of it. And I understand it. And I'm writing as an insider rather than as an outsider. And that's a remarkable discovery to make.
DAN GUNDERSON: Mark Vinz writes poetry about love and death, but he also writes about snowstorms, hitting a deer on the highway, and rhubarb.
MARK VINZ:
[? "One ?] of my neighbors chops it like a weed, while others offer me grocery bags full.
And even if I lost my taste for it years ago,
[? It's ?] still the surest sign of summer and always seem to be.
Pots of rhubarb cooking on my grandmother's wood stove,
The endless Mason jars of sauce,
[? Thick ?] crusted pies and huge clumps of it growing wherever I'd roam.
It's tough, she'd say, like me and free for the [? taking." ?]
Poetry is a way of seeing. It's a way of discovering. It's learning how to see. It's learning how to hear. It's learning how to appreciate those things we take for granted. There are all kinds of things to write about, but certainly, an important voice in poetry is it celebrates the every day and learning how to see the every day.
I think poetry, finally, is about being human. It's about what we have in common. It's about the things we have to face, the things that we all go through, falling in love, fear of death, those human emotions that we all share.
DAN GUNDERSON: Mark Vinz is author or editor of more than 15 poetry collections. He's recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. His awards include three Minnesota book awards and a poet laureate title in North Dakota. Mark Vinz will step away from the classroom this spring after 40 years, but the kid who hated poetry doubts he will ever stop writing.
MARK VINZ: After a few years, it became something that I realized I couldn't not do. People would say, why do you write? And I could never say why I did. I could only say, I can't imagine my life without doing it. There would just be something incredibly absent.
DAN GUNDERSON: Minnesota State University has published a small collection of poems in honor of Mark Vinz. This evening, he will share his poetry and sign books at a farewell reading at the University. Reporting from Moorhead, Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio news.
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