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An interview with Meghan O’Rourke (poetry, ’05) appears in The Kenyon Review:
. . . to read Meghan’s poem, “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter,” click here.
What was your original impetus for writing “Mistaken Self-Portrait as Mother of an Unmade Daughter”?
I knew I wanted to write a series of poems exploring a big question—the question of what it is to be a person, with an individual consciousness—from the perspective of wanting a child. It’s a very strange thing to bring a being into the world that has no choice in the matter. The longing for a child is rooted in so many discrete physical cravings—for the soft chubby hands of a baby on yours, for the nestling of small, warm, downy head, or for giggling high voices in the other room—but it’s a big existential longing, too. I was interested in writing about what to me are the major, metaphysical, raw questions involved in having children and being pregnant in particular—questions that I think are sometimes minimized in a culture that sentimentalizes child-bearing as a state where you wear white clothes and drink herbal tea and feel dreamy all the time.
. . . to finish reading this interview, click here.
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Poet Meghan O’Rourke (poetry, ’05)
MEGHAN O’ROURKE, a poet and essayist, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sun In Days. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, she teaches in the writing programs at NYU and Princeton.
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