Real Writing
Clemson University English professor Ronald Moran '58's Getting the Body to
Dance Againrecently won the 1994 National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook
Competition sponsored by Pudding House Publications in Ohio. Moran's fourth
poetry collection, the book won out over several hundred entrants, and
reviewers are comparing his portrayal of small-town life with Edgar Lee
Masters' Spoon River Anthology and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio.
Moran credits his writing and teaching careers to his high school French
teacher, J. Claude Bouchard '28, who led him to Colby, and to Colby professor
Richard Cary. Under Cary's influence, he said, "a number of us sighted our
barrels." Moran, who was born in Philadelphia and grew up in New Britain,
Conn., says that when he told Cary he wanted to go "some place warm" to
graduate school in American literature, his mentor steered him to Louisiana
State University, where he received an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D in
American literature.
"He did good by me," said Moran, who thanks Cary for introducing him to
another literary influence, Maine poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the subject of
Moran's Ph.D. dissertation at LSU in 1966.
Moran taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before taking a
position at Clemson in 1975. From 1975 to 1980 he was Clemson's English
department head. Recently, in addition to his department responsibilities, he
has served as associate dean of liberal arts, and he's also been acting head of
the speech and communication studies program since August 1993. He says he's
now looking forward to being released from some of these duties and returning
to the English department.
"I love teaching," Moran said. "I taught creative writing last semester. It
was like an oasis." His busy schedule of late has left him only "finite and
limited time to write," he said, "which leads to finite and limited poems."
One critic has grouped Getting the Body to Dance Again and Moran's
third book, Sudden Fictions (which was published by John Judson '58's
Juniper Press in Wisconsin), with the work of poets writing "virtual
journalism," a description of his poetry that Moran accepts reluctantly.
At the hub of his world is State Route 123, a honky-tonk strip in a milltown
in the Carolinas, where Jonathan, the speaker in a series of short narratives,
observes an extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins and other busy citizens
in their daily comings and goings. Moran argues that rhythmical language and
scrupulous attention to details, place names and credible events "create rich
situations--rich in people, details and incidents"--and that what happens to
the characters in these poems is significant, timely and a lot less ephemeral
than today's newspaper.
When he gives readings, Moran said, "People say, `How can he say those things
about his family!' or `You're writing about my family!'"
The poems are "sudden fictions," of course--Moran and his wife, Jane, have
34-year-old twins and few relatives--but the approximation of real people in a
real world demonstrates that audiences like the narrative, action, personal
experience and colloquial language. In an article he wrote about virtual
journalism in Northeast, Moran predicted that "the climate in American
letters will continue to warm for the VJ poem." Moran says he didn't start
writing until he was 25. He and his wife and a friend were sitting in their
kitchen amused by the type of poems coming out of San Francisco, "so we started
writing little imitations, and I never stopped."
He says he got so interested in the little magazines where he was publishing
that at one point he made a list of more than 200 for the LSU and UNC libraries
to order. Although he's also had work in larger quarterlies--and has written a
book on the poet Louis Simpson and is co-author of an academic study, Four
Poets and the Emotive Imagination--Moran said he's pleased to have made a
career publishing in little magazines and chapbooks.
Whether his poems appear in large quarterlies or little ones "just doesn't
make a great deal of difference," Moran said. "I just feel happy that there's
some audience out there. I like it that these editors like what I'm doing. I
feel honored that they responded so positively to what I've done."
The Forties Class Notes/Table of Contents/The Fifties Class Notes