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male narrator: NIU English professor and poet, Amy Newman, thinks of herself first as a teacher,
and has already been honored with the University’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award.
Her career, however, didn’t start that way. In the mid 1980’s Newman was working in
New York as a stylist for television commercials when she found something that would change
her career path. Amy Newman: There were old New Yorker magazines
on the table, so I opened one up, it fell open to a Stanley Plumly poem and the moment
that I read it I could sort of feel all of difficult and unhappy landscapes of my present
experience fall away and I remembered that I used to love to read poetry so I thought
I guess I have to go back to a university and study poetry again.
narrator: In her 15 years at NIU, Newman’s poetry has won critical praise, national prizes,
and international attention. She has written three books of poetry, and an additional 200
poems, some of which have appeared in prestigious anthologies and have been translated into
foreign languages. When Newman’s father asked her to write a poem about her mother,
who had recently passed away, she began thinking about how to express grief. The result is
one of her most personal books, entitled Fall. Amy Newman: The idea of the fall which is
something that a lot of people mention when they talk about grief occurred to me, and
went to the dictionary just to look up the word, sort of as a part of my research, and
I was astounded to see that the word has 72 definitions. I just read the definitions through
and they seemed to be telling me a story. So I took each definition and tried to write
a poem in response to it. Dr. Mark Van Wienen: Amy’s book, Fall, exemplifies
her work as a poet in that she’s a poet of ideas. She’s a poet who in this book
explores all of the dimensions of a particular word of the English language and all the ways
that that word and the exploration of it moves. Dr. Phil Eubanks: Well Amy is unusual because
she is not only a poet, she is also a literary scholar. She publishes widely- critical essays.
So when she teaches, she brings to her teaching all of the background and knowledge that other
PhDs in literary periods bring to the task.