Cory Brown

Biography

I grew up in a small town on the plains of western Oklahoma--winters cold and dry but relatively short; springs heavenly and exciting with all their new green growth and the frequent eruptions of tornadic thunderheads; summers hot and dry but filled with long evenings lit up by sunsets right out of some over-zealous child's coloring book; and autumns once past the heat of summer long and mild--every season lots and lots of sun, plenty of literally breath-taking winds, and of course the enormous skies, which can make you feel either liberated or oppressed depending on whether you're just passing through or are a multi-generational native. But even if you're the latter, as I am, and have been away for many years, as I have, you can sometimes during visits find yourself uplifted by those skies, able to separate your aesthetic and emotional relationship to them from how estranged you feel from the culture there.

As soon as my oldest sibling could manage it, my father set her up with pigs to feed, so being the youngest of five I grew up with lots of 'chores,' pigs when young, cattle as I got older. By comparison, academic life and intellectualism in general is a dream to me--I couldn't believe it when I first went to college and witnessed people sitting around all day talking to each other about ideas, and without having to worry about doing chores! I still can't believe it, and I still wake up some mornings filled with dread left over from a dream in which I'd neglected the animals that day or the day before, had left the ice unbroken in the trough or the gate open, or hadn't fed them for days on end.

I took a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Oklahoma State University in '79 and then worked odd jobs for a while--dishwasher, waiter, liquor store manager, secretary--before returning to school to study more literature, philosophy, and creative writing. But that took a while too, before providing a settled life, a year in this graduate school, another in that. Then I came to Ithaca and fell in love with the place--so many trees!--and particularly the M.F.A. program I was in at Cornell, deliriously happy to be studying with poets Archie Ammons and Bob Morgan. After taking my degree in '82 I taught at Cornell for two more years and then roamed around the Northeast, teaching here and there--Hudson Valley community colleges, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute--before coming back to Ithaca to take a position in the Writing Program here and to settle down with my family. I'm proud to have been a part of our faculty in the 90s that molded from the clay of our Program a bona fide Department, and to now offer a B.A. as interesting and varied in its offerings as ours is.

I've discovered over the years that my ultimate goal in teaching is to instill in my students an intellectual generosity, I would like to think mostly by modeling that generosity myself, to be less interested in espousing knowledge per se than to encourage the adoption of a particular attitude toward knowledge, expansive and open-armed. I teach a variety of courses at Ithaca College: a freshman composition class on the philosophy and science of sex and love; personal essay; poetry writing; creative writing theory (Poetics); a senior seminar workshop on the practice, history, and theory of traditional poetry forms; and two honors seminars, one on the philosophy of sex and love and the other on the pursuit of happiness.

My most recent collection of poems is from Water Street Press, entitled Poems 1986-1998. My first collection, A Warm Trend, won a national manuscript competition from Swallow’s Tale Press. Over the past ten years my poems have appeared in, among other journals, Bomb, The Chattahoochee Review, West Branch, Northwest Review, and Postmodern Culture; and more recently The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Pedestal, Rosebud, and Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. I have also recently published two essays on philosophy and literary theory, one scholarly ("Notes on the Role of the Arts...") and the other meditative and humorous ("On Thinking").

Areas

• poetry writing
• essay writing
• literary and creative writing theory

Degrees

• B.A. English and Philosophy, Oklahoma State University, 1979
• M.F.A. Poetry, Cornell University, 1984

Some Publications

 Recent poems:

• Rosebud Magazine (spring '07)
• The Antigonish Review (spring '07)
• Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry (spring '08)
• The Fiddlehead (spring '08)

 Some Poems Online:

• The Pedestal Magazine (Feb. '07)
• in Postmodern Culture: May 96 and Jan 96.

 Recent prose:

• "Notes on the Role of the Arts in a Technocratic Culture: An Argument for a Poetry and Literature of Political Integrity" appeared in a recent issue of The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society. I presented it at two conferences, The 2nd International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society, in Hyderabad, India; and the 22nd Annual Meeting of the International Association for Science, Technology and Society, in Baltimore. [For free access to this essay, go to "Documents" in the sidebar and download it from "Sample Prose."]
• "On Thinking," a playful philosophical meditation, in a recent issue of Diner. [This essay is also available in the "Documents" section of the sidebar, under "Sample Prose."]