Rebecca Irene : part one

Rebecca Irene's poems are published or forthcoming in Parentheses Journal, RHINO, Carve, Spillway, and elsewhere. She was named the 2020 Monson Arts: MWPA Poetry Fellow. Poetry Editor for The Maine Review, Rebecca holds an MFA from VCFA, and lives in Portland, Maine. Find her online at www.rebeccairene.com or tweeting @cicadacomplex.

How did you first engage with poetry?

My grandmother & mother are poets, so my earliest memories of poetry are intertwined with the cadence of their voices reciting William Blake, A.A Milne, & Edna St. Vincent Millay. I must have been three or four. I started writing poems when I was seven. Of course, also because my grandmother & mother were poets, I decided in my teens that I would be anything but. I wrote plays & fiction before returning to my first love: poetry; a journey that spanned two decades, a near-deadly storm at sea, & irony cackling in the corner like a madwoman.