Maureen O'Leary : part five

How does a poem begin?

For me, a poem begins with me sitting down with my poetry notebook and a pencil and barely looking at the page, just writing what shimmer to the surface right then. Sometimes I will begin with a concept or an idea or a line that I’ve been tossing around. When I am drafting something surprising always arrives. Often I will read the poem over days or months later to revise and I will be astonished by what I have written. Sometimes I will barely remember the lines at all, and sometimes I will hardly be able to read the writing and I will have to guess at what I meant to say. Poetry is me not saying what I am supposed to say but instead choosing only the truth. 

Maureen O'Leary : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

The poets that inspire me the most in this moment are Dexter L. Booth, Jericho Brown, Alina Stefanescu, Vanessa Angelica Villareal, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Aria Aber. These poets change the shape of my brain when I spend time with their work. I understand from them more about the possibilities of what poems can accomplish. There are upcoming young poets I’ve had the privilege to teach that make me know this too. I am in awe of the student poets I’ve worked with. They teach me more than I ever taught them and that’s the truth.

Maureen O'Leary : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

It’s difficult to be faced with the strength of my own feelings sometimes. There are poems I’ve written that I cannot read aloud without weeping and it’s not because they are sad necessarily. We go through our days at work and in the world with filters on. We can’t walk around with our clearest, most distilled emotions in our awareness all of the time. We would go mad. We would annoy people. After I have revised and polished a poem to angle the light in just the truest way, however, that piece can be difficult for me to face. It can be painful for me to read aloud. There are poems of mine coming out in various publications this year that are pretty funny but I can’t read them without getting upset because they are exploring feelings that are really intense for me. That’s the difficult thing about writing poetry. It would be easier to go through life ignoring these intense feelings and thoughts, but poetry forces you to look into the sun.

Maureen O'Leary : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was four or five years old and announced that I wanted to be a poet my dad ran out that day to buy me notebooks, paper, a folder, and pencils. My parents were serious about supporting my poetry from the jump. I was really lucky. I won a prize for a poem I wrote about sheep in first grade. I didn’t know anything about sheep but everyone really liked that poem. It was a people pleaser for sure. Most of my poems haven’t been read by anyone but me yet whenever a magazine or anthology editor picks a piece of mine for publishing I always get that same good feeling that someone liked my sheep.  

Maureen O'Leary : part one

Maureen O’Leary lives in California. Her recent and upcoming work appears in Coffin Bell Journal, The Black Fork Review, Bandit Fiction, The Horror Zine, Archive of the Odd, Train Poetry Journal, Live Nude Poems, The Esopus Reader, Hush Lit, Passengers Journal, Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Black Spot Books' anthology Under Her Skin, and Sycamore Review. She is a graduate of Ashland MFA.

What are you working on?

In my novel revision, short stories and poetry I’m trying to get to the bottom of an idea I have that we are all ghosts haunting the people and places holding our unfinished business. For example, I am the ghost haunting the people who are living in the house where I grew up. I’m obsessed right now with unfinished business and longing and wishing things were different than they were. The writing keeps coming out poem-shaped.