Maurice Manning

Maurice Manning Poems

Maurice Manning Biography

Maurice Manning (born 1966 in Danville, Kentucky) is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published three collections of poetry (with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He teaches at Transylvania University in Kentucky. Maurice Manning attended Earlham College and the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. In the fall of 2004 he began teaching in the Indiana University M.F.A. Program. formerly a professor at DePauw University, He is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and in January 2012 he was hired by Transylvania University, a small liberal arts college in Lexington, Kentucky. He lives on a 20-acre farm in Washington County, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Washington Square, Green Mountains Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wind, Hunger Mountains, Black Warrior Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His collection The Common Man was one of the two finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has held a fellowship to the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown and was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.)

The Best Poem Of Maurice Manning

The Fog Town School Of Thought

They should have taught us birds and trees
in school, they should have taught us beauty
and weaving bees and had a class
on listening and standing alone—
the children should have studied light
reflected from a spider web,
we should have learned the branches of streams
spread out like fingers or the veins
of a leaf—we should have learned the sky
is the tallest steeple, we should have known
a hill is a voice inside the sky—
O, we should have had our school
on top and stayed until the night
for the fog to bloom in the hollows and rise
like cotton spinning off a wheel—
we should have learned a dream—a child's
and even still a man's—is made
from fog and love, my word, you'd think
with the book in front of us we should
have learned how Fog Town got its name.

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