Marc Hudson
Marc Hudson lives in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He is recently retired from Wabash College where he taught medieval studies and creative writing. His books of poetry are Afterlight (U. of Mass. Press, 1983), Journal for an Injured Son (Lockhart Press, 1985, 1992), and The Disappearing Poet Blues (Bucknell UP, 2002). His translation of Beowulf was published by Wordsworth Editions, Ltd. of the U.K. in 2007. His poems have recently appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Silk Road Review, Poet Lore, and Christianity and Literature. His essays, reviews, and natural history articles have appeared in Audubon, The Sewanee Review, Environmental Action, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere.
• • • • •
What’s stacked up on your nightstand?
The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset, a series of four novels set in medieval Norway, with characters so vividly presented the setting seems contemporary; Linda Lear’s excellent biography of Rachel Carson; Haruki Murakami’s noirish After Dark; and A Packet for Ezra Pound by W.B. Yeats, the 1929 Cuala Press edition, this simply for communing with the elder poet as he rusticates in Rapallo.
Tell us about your favorite bookstore.
Hands down, it is Von’s Books in West Lafayette, Indiana down the road from Purdue. Upstairs, it is crammed with new books, with an especially strong collection of contemporary poetry, but deep collections in almost every subject. Downstairs are the used books: this, an orderly jumble, the tall, crammed shelves spilling over into stacks upon stacks and boxes of books, some aisles being all but impassable. The staff consists entirely of near-sighted Borgesian bibliophiles with eidetic memories. Heaven on Earth.
Who’s your muse? Who or what inspires you?
The cosmos, more or less, and everything in it. More particularly and randomly: Iceland, coffee, Helen Mundy Hudson, Old English poetry, Antonio Machado, my children, gardening, sunflowers, Sugar Creek (our local stream), swimming, our situation as amphibious beings, etc.