In the Manner of the Marquis Literary Magazine
In 1947 two students at Lafayette College decided to start running a literary magazine
The Magazine has gone through many changes over the course of the last seventy years.
For the past few years ever since I became a co-editor for Lafayette’s literary magazine I have been interested in looking into these magazines from the perspective of history at the college. One of the main reasons I was accepted into my position as co-editor was because of my hopes to create a digital archive where past issues would be available for students to read and learn from but also as a method of finding a way forward for The Marquis Literary Magazine through the lens of the past.
This in recent years has brought me to my senior year and my plans to complete a year long thesis. My plans for my thesis consists of writing a large number of poems, at least seventy as I hope to write one for each year the magazine was published but likely more to account for the fact that multiple issues of the magazine were published some years.
This website is looking at eight poems- one for each decade the magazine has run in!
 |  |  |  |  |
|---|
About the Project
The Inspiration for this project has been the book Poems in the Manner of by David Lehman. In his introduction Lehman states "[he] had in mind the shibboleth that in the writing of poetry, to have a distinctive “voice” is everything. There is a counterview, demonstrated by Fernando Pessoa, inventor of “heteronyms,” that the poet should adopt as many names, personae, masks—call them what you will—as suits his or her personality." This brought him to write a book with the inspiration of world-renowned poets, the ones on the cover for example.
My plan is to write in the manner of those who have come before me at this school. There are pieces complaining about school life and pieces contemplating on life's true meaning. I spent time deconstructing the poems into they're meanings and then writing a modern version.