Marshall Woodward, Poet
In residence, February 2-23, 2025
About the Artist
Marshall Woodward is pursuing his MFA at the University of Houston where he is an Inprint Fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He is co-director of Space City Medievalism, a project eliciting creative responses to medieval poetry supported by a Medieval Academy of America Centennial grants. He leads community workshops for adults at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and middle-grade students at the Cy Twombly Gallery.
As a geologist, poet, and medievalist, Marshall’s work is centered on earth and its materials. What unites his interdisciplinary approach to poetry is apocalypse – the many ends of the world we face: the geopolitical and the environmental. Bloedel Reserve’s creative residency program sparked his interest because it offers a chance to consider many spiritual approaches at the end (and beginning) of the world, both in solitude and the community that the reserve has nourished for decades.
Marshall is the author of LAVA!, a long poem dealing in geology, grammar and the erotic. Its language is ground in soils, clays and marble statues, asking how the world passes and how we might take it back. In its broken lines are a declined Roman empire, the French Pyrenees and the carved rocks of the old world that found their way to New York’s Met Cloisters. It is lunar and terrestrial, subaltern and very much on the surface.
Learn more about Marshall here.
