Meg Kearney : part one

Meg Kearney is author of the poetry collections All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize, which appeared on Small Press Distribution’s poetry bestseller list from April through September 2021; The Ice Storm, a heroic crown of sonnets (2020), is now in its third printing; Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England LL Winship Award and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year; and An Unkindness of Ravens (2001). Meg has also published three novels in verse for teens. Her picture book, Trouper (2013), was illustrated by E.B. Lewis and received the Kentucky Bluegrass Award and the Missouri Show Me Reader’s Award. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” Former Associate Director of the National Book Foundation in New York, Meg is founding director of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts. For more information: www.megkearney.com.

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes, in such that when I was writing poems in my early 20s, I wrote solely in free verse—formal poetry seemed old-fashioned, something only dead white men wrote. Then, when I was 25, I heard Molly Peacock give a lecture on the “freedom” of form, and how formal structures can provide a sort of safe space to explore difficult or otherwise slippery material. This was a revelation to me, which came at a time when I began reading more widely and my perspective evolved; I realized, for example, that the poets of the Harlem Renaissance employed sonnets as a form of resistance, and that many contemporary poets from various backgrounds were also writing formal verse when the poems called for that sort of structure. Then I went to grad school and took a course with William Matthews on prosody, and have been playing with form in my work on and off ever since.