Rusty Morrison

Morrison's work has been included in an anthology for the literary study of disability, titled Beauty is a Verb. Morrison’s poems have also appearedin literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Lana Turner, New American Writing, Pleiades, Verse, and VOLT. Her critical writings and creative nonfictions have been published in journals including Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Verse, and in the anthology One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe (Sarabande 2010).

Indeed, the remarkable correctness of language in The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story is its most incredible feature. Each individual line is condensed to a nearly symmetrical assemblage. Each poem is similarly made up of these constellated lines. Their stability is inherent, though each leads into the emptiness of mystery. Repeated descriptions (frilled edges, cursive letters, an open window, a stage) which flicker through the whole offer a slim patterning. None of these poems stands as well in isolation. The extraordinarily delicate exposure of Morrison’s voice provides a ground on which to read the world. The True Keeps Calm Biding its Story is its own namesake: a small quiet patience within infinitely larger concentric universes of quiet patience.

In Rusty Morrison’s the true keeps calm biding its story, a sense of community, or even of communication between the poet and the reader, might easily be the last thing on a reader’s mind. Morrison’s collection dramatically foregrounds form—each poem consists of three stanzas of three unpunctuated lines, each line is right-justified, and each line ends with the word ‘stop’, ‘please’, or ‘advise.’ ... A hope here, that repetition that might clear off the trappings of material existence, lead us beyond this world and to some other place. Or maybe, as Robert Fink has written, in a study of Minimalist music, “We repeated ourselves into this culture. We might be able to repeat ourselves out.”

Because her disability has greatly affected Morrison's life, it is no surprise that her affliction has worked its way into her poetics. Morrison believes her poetry functions as translations. In essence, she feels that her work–––in a seemingly therapeutic manner–––translates bodily pain (the language of the body) into spoken and written language. In the anthology Beauty is a Verb, Morrison writes, "As a poet, I have experienced directly the ways that a formal constraint can hone the clarity, intensity, and inspired power of a writing project. In similar ways, a physical constraint, such as illness, can engender surprising perceptual attunement in the body" (Morrison 325).

Rusty Morrison (born July 12, 1956) is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, Redlands, California; University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; Boise State University, Boise, Idaho; Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, Oregon, and Milikin University, Decatur, Illinois. In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing in Richmond, California and continue to work as co-publishers. She contracted Hepatitis C in her twenties but, like most people diagnosed with this disease, did not experience symptoms for several years. Since then, a focus on issues relating to disability has developed as an area of interest in her writing.