![\"Thorpe](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/thorpeMoeckel.jpg\" "\\"thorpeMoeckel\\"")
<\/a>Thorpe Moeckel, a teacher at Hollins since 2005, received tenure this spring. The much-published poet and essayist received a poetry fellowship last December from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was among forty-two poets (from a pool of 1,000 applicants) chosen to receive the $25,000 award. Moeckel\u2019s most recent book is Venison: a poem<\/em>. Other collections include Odd Botany<\/em>, winner of the 2000 Gerald Cable Award, and Making a Map of the River<\/em>. Chapbooks include Meltlines<\/em> and The Guessing Land<\/em>. He was a Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he received an M.F.A. in creative writing. The following poem first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly. <\/em>Moeckel and his wife and daughter run a small farm outside of Buchanan, Virginia.<\/p>\n\nTerra Sutra<\/h2>\n
Goat crap, sheep dung, chicken poop,
\nshards of limestone, creek rock,
\nboard scrap, bark peel \u2013 watch your step;
\nhere leaf and wood chip, grass clip,<\/p>\ncat fur, fish scale, bone splinter, guts
\nof carcass and stove; I mean ash, mean
\ngood grub, lots of tasks; rust, shingle grit,
\nurine and tears, whisper, laughter, chat \u2013<\/p>\nall the traffic: dog puke, cockcrow, bleat
\nand whinny, spilled oats, other grains,
\nseeds, shoots, dust and mud, grease, blood,
\nslow rolls of the near and distant ridges,<\/p>\nthe there and the here in there, spells
\nand meanderings, losses, gains, shavings
\nfrom planer, chisel, file; bluebird feather,
\nhawk scream, bug, grub, sinew, cured ham<\/p>\ndrip, dunnage of countless bales: how
\ntrust a life less messy, less loved by spill,
\nall the varieties of sun, shade, rain \u2013 for
\nfrom such ground now comes good hay.<\/p>\n\u2014Thorpe Moeckel<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recent recipient of NEA fellowship Thorpe Moeckel, a teacher at Hollins since 2005, received tenure this spring. The much-published poet and essayist received a poetry fellowship last December from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was among forty-two poets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_loop","tag-spring-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3688,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/3688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}