Murray Moulding is an American poet and longtime teacher of creative writing whose work moves through haiku, compressed lyric, comic dislocation, memory, aging, landscape, and the associative logic of ordinary speech. He studied philosophy at Cornell University and later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, carrying that literary training into decades of teaching in Illinois, Montana, Oregon, and Colorado.
The Motor Pool
The Motor Pool: Haiku and Scribbles gathers Moulding’s short poems into a form suited to his quick shifts of tone. A haiku can begin with an ordinary object, historical name, public phrase, or domestic detail and end with a comic turn that changes the scale of the scene. The brevity gives each displacement unusual force.
Joseph Hutchison presented poems from The Motor Pool in 2015 and described the volume as Moulding’s fifth book of poems. The selection shows a poet comfortable with compression, absurd juxtaposition, and the small shock produced when a familiar phrase is made to behave strangely.
Now and Then
Now and Then: Poems, published in 2022, turns toward aging, memory, and the slippage between present experience and remembered life. The poems often resemble compact prose blocks while retaining the pressure of line, rhythm, and associative movement. Places and moments overlap; one recollection can tilt into another before the first has fully settled.
This movement gives memory a formal role. The poem follows the mind’s changes of direction, allowing humor and disorientation to enter the same small space.
Earthlings at Low Tide
Earthlings at Low Tide, published in 2023, continues Moulding’s later work in poetry. The book was described by its publisher as his eighth volume, extending a body of writing shaped by decades of poetry, fiction, teaching, and literary community.
The later books show how Moulding’s comic instincts coexist with subjects such as age, mortality, place, and the instability of memory. A joke can open a serious pressure point, while a serious observation can suddenly acquire an absurd edge.
Short forms and comic pressure
Moulding’s short poems often rely on abrupt turns, deadpan phrasing, and collisions between registers. Public language, private memory, weather, objects, history, and stray fragments of speech can occupy the same compressed frame. The result depends on timing: the poem lets an apparently stable statement shift under the reader’s feet.
Readers interested in that compact comic pressure can also continue to Elaine Equi, whose short forms and deadpan turns create a distinct but closely relevant route through contemporary American lyric.
Teaching and Colorado literary life
Moulding taught creative writing for decades at colleges in several states, including work in Colorado. His career joins the practice of writing with the slower work of workshops, readings, local literary communities, and sustained attention to other writers’ drafts. That teaching history places his books inside a life built around both composition and literary exchange.
Within American poetry, Moulding offers a useful path into short forms, comic timing, associative memory, and the independent literary cultures that support long writing lives.
Where to read Murray Moulding
Joseph Hutchison presents a selection from The Motor Pool together with a biographical note. The Cornell Class of 1961 record documents Moulding’s education, teaching, publishing, and editorial work. A later review of Now and Then discusses the book’s associative treatment of memory, while Indigo provides bibliographic and biographical information for Earthlings at Low Tide.