Karen Pape

Anyone close to poetry, its composition, its alleged opacity or its publication, knows that poetry doesn't pay—not in dollars, that is, unless $5 is dollars. Can communion with the muses through an art form be so pure, so perfectly rewarding that nothing else matters but the creation of the thing itself? Can the right words in the right order really provide moments of such sublimity, the incandescence of such that no money—no matter how much—can ever touch?

Karen Pape says yes. This MC Associate Professor of English should know because she's written over 1,500 poems over the years, and has steadily published two to three poems a year in poetry journals, literary reviews and has, most recently, had three poems accepted to the online poetry reviews Interpoetry and 2River Review.

Over the time when she has been "seriously writing," her routine has begun with morning pages—a freewriting production time suggested by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way. But her morning laissez-faire time leads to something much more structured when she is actually writing her poetry. She loves the forms: the sonnet, the villanelle, the terzanelle, even the ancient ghazal, a poetic recitation originating in the 10th century Persia consisting of couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain.

"I love the forms," Pape says. "I find them liberating. I love great art, but I love a great story," she continues.

Pape has also written her share of prose as well, which she does mostly in genre form. She has three historical romances and four contemporary short novels under her belt. She is also gathering her poetry into two manuscripts which she hopes to publish as collections.

As far as influences, Pape enjoys the usual suspects of Victorian literature: Austen, both Brontes, Eliot and Shelley. Her poetic influences—mostly Whitman and Dickinson—are from this side of the Atlantic. However, one of her greatest joys is not found between the pages of a book but in the classroom. "My students are so inspiring," she says, "I learn so much from them." Pape teaches Composition and Rhetoric, British Literature, and, of course, Poetry. "We have a great creative writing program her ... a fabulous group of writers in our English Department," she says. She should know because she, too, was once an English student at Midland College. It's where she got her start at a poet in the early 1980's and where she won awards in the Hilda Simmons Levitt Poetry Contest and had her work first published in MC's literary journal, Tableau.