UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 11, Page 7                       
November 12, 1992                                      
Poems by graduate student receive national recognition 
                                                       
     ...And on a rock hill he sits,                          
     with chin on fin,                                       
     a scaly beast, reptilian to the core;                   
     his massive girth is green                              
     and far from slim,                                      
     and blocks the craggy hole that is the door....         
                                                             
     This verse is not an excerpt from a long lost Shakespearean
sonnet recently dug out of an ancient archive in England Instead, it
is the product of the imagination of Matt Danish.            
     Danish, a graduate student at the University, was recently named
first prize winner in the 1992 Lyric College Poetry Contest, for his
Shakespearean sonnet entitled "The Cave."                    
     Danish first learned about the contest through Poets Market, 
which contains listings of various contests around the world. The item
that caught Danish's eye was sponsored by Lyric, one of the oldest
magazines in North America committed solely to traditional types of
poetry. For the contest, a poem had to be an original piece of
unpublished work, in traditional form, of 36 lines or less.  
     Danish submitted more than one poem, and this past summer, he
received a letter notifying him that his was selected over 900 other
entries.                                                     
     This is the first time any of Danish's works has been published
off campus. He previously had a few poems appear in the Caesura, the
University literary magazine. He received $200 and a few copies of the
Lyric.                                                       
     An avid reader of Renaissance poetry, Danish began writing poetry
a year ago.                                                  
     He signed up for a poetry workshop, conducted by Dennis Jackson,
professor of English. This workshop allowed Danish to share his poetry
with other students as well as having it critiqued. Danish said he
feels that by sharing his poetry with others he is able to express
himself better, since he tends to be shy.                    
     Besides spending time weightlifting and reading such famous poets
as e.e. cummings, Keats and Shakespeare, Danish enjoys creating
"pattern poems." He explained that these consist of "words that talk
about an object and actually are the object."                
     The words are typed in such a way that they create a pattern or a
picture. This is very challenging because the poet must not only make
the poem understandable but also visually satisfying.        
     Danish's pattern poems include those whose words form the shape
of the Statue of Liberty, a horse and a car. Danish said pattern poems
are hard to read, especially since there is no use of capitalization,
spacing between words or punctuation.                        
     Danish is currently working towards his high school teaching 
certification in the Department of English. He said he hopes 
eventually to share his imagination with the public through poetry
books. For now, another one of Danish's poems can be seen in the fall
1992 issue of Verve, a California-based magazine.            
                                        -Lisa Wiseman