Maurice Manning
Inside Manning’s barn on his 20-acre farm in Washington County, Kentucky.
From an early age, Maurice Manning developed a habit of being in the woods and sensing his own participation in the natural world. Manning’s family has deep roots in Kentucky. Many of them were storytellers, and stories of their adventures echoed in his mind during his own excursions. These stories provided Manning with a deep connection to the past, and a distrust of disposable products and throwaway ideas.
In the early 1990s, while Manning studied for a Masters degree in English at the University of Kentucky, he made connections with writers of similar sensibility, including Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason, and James Still. Still was a model for Manning as he negotiated his relationship with poetry and place: he lived in a remote cabin in Hindman, Kentucky, yet was “a citizen of the world.”
Today, Manning holds that ideal in mind as he divides his life between his 20-acre farm in Washington County, Kentucky, and his teaching job at Transylvania University in Lexington.
“Whenever I’m working on a poem, I’m first and foremost thinking about rhythm,” Manning says, and the rhythm of working with the soil, doing farm chores, and walking up and down hills teases out what’s in his mind. Three of his most recent books— The Common Man (a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry), The Gone and the Going Away, and One Man’s Dark— are based on Manning’s farm and its surrounding geography.
Listen to what Maurice Manning’s barn taught him about writing poetry.
The rhythm of working with the soil, doing farm chores, and walking up and down hills teases out what’s in Manning’s mind and finds its way into his poems.