HOFFMAN, Marguerite

HOFFMAN

Posted By: Sharon R Becker (email)
Date: 11/11/2014 at 01:49:50

The Globe Gazette
Mason City, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa
Saturday, August 24, 1940, Page 16

THEY STARTED HERE
No. 23 in a Mason City Series of Success Stories

MISS HOFFMAN'S POEMS BRING FAME

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One North Iowan whose name is familiar to lovers of contemporary poetry and whose radio voice also is well known to many midwestern listeners is Miss Marguerite Hoffman, who has made an outstanding mark as a poet in the last few years.

And in Mason City Miss Hoffman is especially well known for her poetry has been printed in the Globe-Gazette, she read[s] selection s over station KGLO, and she has appeared before many clubs and gatherings.

Although Miss Hoffman is a young woman, she is no novice at writing poetry, for she started at the age of 7 and has been turning out verse ever since.

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The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis P. Hoffman, Marguerite was born and reared at Rockford and was educated in the schools there. She early showed an interest in writing, perhaps because of her mother's interest along the same lines, and by the time she was 14 had her first important work published in the Kaleidograph, outstanding poetry magazine published in Dallas, Tex.

Following her high school work, Marguerite attended the Hamilton school of commerce in Mason City for a time and then entered Iowa State Teachers college at Cedar Falls.

While in college many of her poems were printed in campus pubications and one of them, "Red Hats," was accepted by Harper and Brothers of New York to be published in their "New Anthology of College Verses," a four year publication of the finest work turned out in America's higher schools of learning.

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Since that time Miss Hoffman's poetry has appeared in some of the nation's leading magazines and poetry collections.

The North Iowan's subjects are many and varied. She can write a poem at almost any time and on almost anything. As is common with many creative artists, ideas come to her in spurts. For a time she may write considerably - as long as she is in the mood and the ideas keep coming. Then when she tires she leaves her poetry alone.

Ideas are apt to come to her at any time and place. Once, she recalls, she wrote a few lines on a gum wrapper while on her way to a dance.

Nor does her writing concentrate on any one type of poetry. She creates sonnets, lyric poetry, writes some blank verse, composes ballades and tries her hand at all other types. And she has surprising good success with each.

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In fact, she can write good poetry anytime, although as she says, a new angle or idea helps a piece of writing considerably.

A few of the magazines of national importance - many of them critical publications - to which Miss Hoffman has contributed inclued teh former Literary Digest, Kaleidograph, Poetry World, Blue Moon, Bogart, Quest, Verse Craft, Poetry Caravan, the Columbia University Press, Author and Journalist and Cycle, prominent quarterly.

Anthologies - or collections of outsanding verse - which hav carried Hoffman poems include the Davis Anthology of Newspaper Verse, the Kaleidograph anthologies, Paebar's Selected Magazine Verse, Iowa Poets, 1935, , American Woman Poets, Muse, Who's Who Among Prairie Poets, World's Fair Anthology, The Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Poets, Who's who of American Poets, The North American Book of Verse and the 1939 edition of The Poetry Digest Annual Anthology of Verse.

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And a considerable group of newspapers have carried Hoffman poetry, including the New York Sun, the Montreal (Canada) Star, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the Kansas City Star and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the Globe-Gazette.

These fine showings have not gone unrecognized, either. Miss Hoffman has won first prize in a national tree poem contest, third prize in a national contest for her poem "For Sara Teasdale," first prize in a Poetry Society of Iowa contest, and in a prize award for a sonnet printed in the June, 1939, issue of Cycle.

Radio work, in which Miss Hoffman has been currently active, has seen her broadcasting over an NBC network, on KGLO, WHO, WSUI, WMT, WOI, KRNT, KSO, and KFNF. She was the editor of and broadcast a program "Iowa's First Hundred Years in Poetry" in connection with the centennial observance in 1938.

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Now Miss Hoffman and her parents live in Ames, where she is active with her poetry and does radio work. The North Iowan is prominent in the affairs of the National League of American Pen Women, serving as radio chairman, and as secretary of the Iowa branch. She is also a member of the Poetry Society of Iowa and the Iowa Author's club. A member of the Iowa Federation of Women's clubs, she had been fourth district poetry chairman.

Miss Hoffman has made a fine mark in her field, one of which she can be proud. But she is not content to rest on her laurels, for she is already looking for a new world to conquer. And that world is that of prose writing.

So it not at all improbable that North Iowans will soon be reading Hoffman writings that are not poetry but stories. And good ones at that.

Photograph courtesy of Globe-Gazette

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, May of 2014

Cerro Gordo Biographies maintained by Lynn Diemer-Mathews.
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