Meghan O'Rourke Visits TCNJ

[Some Biography]
Meghan O’Rourke has been the culture editor of the online literary magazine Slate for almost five years. She had also been a co-editor of poetry at The Paris Review since 2002. Her writing and poetry have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, the Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, and other publications. Her criticism has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. In 2002, she was the youngest of Columbia Journalism Review’s “Ten Young Editors To Watch” in the category of magazine writing. O’Rourke’s first book of poems, Halflife, was published in April 2007 by W.W. Norton. She currently resides in Brooklyn.


[Her Visit / Some Impressions]
A lover of elision, but also dedicated to a concise voice in her poems, O’Rourke writes subtle lyric poems that reveal something new to the reader upon each visit to her book, Halflife. Certain images recur in her work: in a post-9/11 world, smoke rising into the sky haunts her poems as her poems haunt the reader. Blankets (of comfort or suffocation) preoccupy her "quasi-coming of age" collection of poetry.

David Baker's observation is worth listening to, unlike most praise included on sleeve jackets: "Meghan O’Rourke sings with an exacting yet enchanted voice. The spare lyric poems of her Halflife accrue into a meta-narrative of the city—its latter days of memory, mutilation, and a due portion of compassion. The range of this poet’s work amazes me..."

I very much enjoyed her reading, to listen to poems I've read two or three times over, close-reading several of them. I can trace her stated influences (such as Stevens, Plath, or Williams) but understand that she has her own unique voice. Below is one of my favorite poems for the book. She fielded some difficult questions very well - especially the dense philosophical ones. She read two poems about New Jersey, specifically one about Sandy Hook, where I attended high school all four years of once upon a time ago. As a sidenote, I don't know why such a big deal is made out of how young and successful she is - I was up for a Pulitzer in kindergarten.


WAR LULLABY

Wet daggers of grass
cast shadows over one another
beneath the porch light—

the boy stretched on the lawn,
fighting sleep,
fingers the tournament ring:

inside the house
his mother shouts, blinds
slap in the breeze,

and upstairs the smallest stir
as they sleep, eyelashes like
tiny whips against their cheeks.

The dogs bark, a door slams,
the boys breathe deep,
then shudder—

I have seen them
sleepwalk
out of the arms of mothers.

Her comments add extra insight into the poem: "...But—especially as a young woman—you have to get away from Plath’s influence. Wallace Stevens was a useful counterpoint. Harmonium is reticent where Ariel is declarative. And reading Williams was crucial: his superb sense of line, his energy, his strange swerves. I wouldn’t have written “War Lullaby” if I hadn’t been reading Williams."