Maryann Corbett : part one

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry in 2005, after thirty years away from the craft, and is now the author of two chapbooks, five full-length books of poetry, and a forthcoming book. Her work has won or has been shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Prize, the Hollis Summers Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the Morton Marr Prize, the Richard Wilbur Award, and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and has appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic as well as an assortment of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, and on the Poetry Foundation website.

Photo credit: Mims Photography, St. Paul, MN

How did you first engage with poetry?

I’m not sure how early “first” is, or what exactly “engage” means, so I’m going to interpret those words broadly. I grew up in an era in which poems still appeared in magazines, and I recall that I aped one such poem—rhymed and in tetrameter—somewhere in the early grades and was praised to the skies. My eighth-grade teacher—I think she must have been working on a master’s at the time—exposed us to scansion, the names of the feet and meters, and a lot of Frost and Hopkins, among many other anthology standards.  High school AP English courses probably sealed my decision to study English later on.

I’m not sure why my teenage poems were in free verse, but I hope they’ve all been destroyed. (To be clear, I like to read free verse, but writing it doesn’t come naturally to me.)

Apart from one college-era poem (in iambic pentameter) I then left the writing of poetry alone for decades, earning the usual BA, MA, and PhD, specializing in medieval literature and linguistics, and aiming to be a scholar rather than a writer. 

But a scholarly career was not in the cards, and for about thirty-five years I worked for the the Revisor’s Office, helping to draft bills and create and edit indexes. Because that office was very strictly nonpartisan, I had to avoid saying anything in public that could be interpreted as favoring a political stance. I stayed quiet for a long time.

I think I’ll leave the story of ceasing to be quiet for one of your other questions.