In 1976, he was hired to teach creative writing at Indiana State University in Evansville. In 1978, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed him to quit his job and live in Italy where Amy studied singing at the University of Perugia. Returning to California in 1979, he was hired as a visiting writer at the University of California at Irvine. Mark and Amy's oldest daughter was born in Mission Viejo in 1980. That same year, Jarman took a position teaching creative writing at Murray State University in Kentucky. Two years later the couple's second daughter was born in Murray. In 1983, he left Murray State to teach at Vanderbilt University, where he has been since. Amy joined the voice faculty at the Blair School of Music in 1986. Since 2007, Jarman has been Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt and was Director of Creative Writing until 2013. Jarman's early poetry reflects the influence of living by the Pacific and the North Sea at important times in his life, along with growing up in a strongly religious family. As he has matured, his poetry has remained invested in family experience, a sense of place, and the presence of God in everyday life. Though he is associated with the New Formalism, his poetry has always ranged widely in form and style, from narrative to lyric, free to metrical verse, verse to prose poetry.