An interview with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee recently published a prose chapbook called What I Meant to Ask. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Animal in the Room, is forthcoming from Coach House Books in Spring 2023.  She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee. She currently lives somewhere between North Vancouver BC and Fredericton NB. You can find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I majored in English and French literature in college, and I always enjoyed reading poetry. But I didn't seriously consider writing it myself until long after I graduated... I don't remember any particular thing that got me started. Then, like now, my instinct to write poems simply came from wanting to write something I might want to read. I guess I started to write exactly when I felt like I could write something I'd be interested in reading.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

The poets that I'm most aware of as major influences are the English Renaissance poets I studied in college, especially Shakespeare, Donne, Wyatt, Sidney, and Herbert. That was the first poetry I read seriously, and studied seriously, and loved seriously. I feel very nerdy admitting this! But I think those 16th- and 17th-century guys are always really with me, because they were the first thing I ever read that showed me how poetry works on the human body, how poems could work like little rooms or little machines.

Louise Glück is definitely one of my most important influences, because of what she's taught me about the lyric mode, its geometry and possibilities that I want to spend my life exploring. I have learned a lot from John Ashbery and Claudia Rankine, too, especially from the fascinating things they do with each poem's audience and speaker, the "you" and "I" inside each poem.

In some ways I feel like all my work is about influence. In one way or another, most of my poems are conversations or ekphrastics or "afters" -- my secret imaginary communications with what I've read. It's one of my favorite ways to write.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem after you began publishing a chapbook, or through working on your forthcoming full-length collection?

Yes, a huge difference! Three years ago, I was very poem-focused. I wanted to make each poem a perfect unit that could stand alone -- or that should stand alone. And that's still true! It's still one of the things I love most about reading and writing poetry! I'm still that poem-focused person, as a reader and a writer. I love that you can come to a poem and experience it like a perfect little world, or like a room you can come into and out of, shutting the world out.

However, writing The Animal in the Room really did change my practice. It was my first sequence of poems that was written intentionally as a sequence. But now that I've written that way once, I've never really stopped.

That's how I'm writing nowadays. I like my little projects -- little groups of poems that are in dialogue with each other. My new work since I moved back to Canada in 2021 is all sequences: two new chapbooks and a new full-length manuscript in progress. I even went back and revised all of my older poems (all the stuff I wrote before and during my MFA) into three chapbooks, then added new poems to mould them into cohesive sequences. (That's actually where my chapbook What I Meant to Ask came from!)

Has co-creating and working on a comic strip affected the ways in which you approach working on poems? Has one anything to do with the other?

Oh, boy! This is something that I could really talk your ear off about, because in my other-other life, I'm a composition specialist... and I did my MA research about how writing comics impacts your skills and knowledge in other kinds of writing!

My interest in this area of composition pedagogy came from my personal experience writing comics -- from what I already knew about what comics can teach us as writers in many different media and forms.

So the short answer is... YES! I think comics writing has influenced me hugely as a poet. Comics teaches you to think constantly about how text and image work together dynamically. Comics also (perhaps more than any other medium!) depends on the reader and cartoonist working collaboratively to make meaning happen. For these reasons, I love thinking about poems as comics.

(tl;dr: This is one of my favourite soapbox topics! Poets should read comics theory! You will learn a lot!)

Comics has also taught me about how to work collaboratively with other artists. Scriptwriting requires efficient translation between technical description and stylistic narration -- and between image and text. These are very useful skills for poets, in my opinion, because our whole job is to figure out how to make the un-word-able or un-worded into words somehow.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Yes. Mentorship has been absolutely crucial to my work. I've been blessed with wonderful teachers and mentors throughout my life. My college advisor David Sofield introduced me to a particular canon of modern writers -- Bishop, Frost, Merrill, Walcott, Wilbur -- poets who were in conversation with the centuries-old poetry I was studying at that time. I thought he was teaching me how to read poetry, but he was also teaching me how to write it, even though I didn't know it at the time.

The novelist Richard Bausch was the person who convinced me to do an MFA and professionalize my practice. Most importantly, he was the first person to call me a writer to my face and tell me I was good enough to actually throw myself into this. That changed my life. And it's a good reminder to me about what mentorship actually looks like. It's really not so much about teaching someone a technique, or telling them to move this line or that comma. Real mentorship can also be reading someone's work like a colleague, like it's something that deserves to be taken seriously in the world. That's what it can look like.

I've had amazing opportunities in graduate school to study with some of the best poets and poetry teachers you can find anywhere: Victoria Chang, Martin Nakell, Carolyn Forché, and especially Anna Leahy, who directs the creative writing program at Chapman University. They've each been crucial to my work at crucial times, showing me what I need to be reading and thinking about to do what I am trying to do! And now I'm doing my PhD at the University of New Brunswick, I'm working under the mentorship of amazing poet-educators like Sue Sinclair and Triny Finlay. I can't say enough good stuff about how inspiring the literary community is here in Fredericton. I love what I'm writing right now, and I feel like this community is a huge part of that.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Since 2017, I've been obsessed by Rainie Oet, who writes these perfect poems about triangles, porcupines, and lyric personas. Everyone should go get obsessed with her, too.

I also just had the opportunity to hear Christine Wu read a poem called "ANCESTRY.COM HAS NOTHING ON ME" at UNB's Poetry Weekend. It's a poem about family, history, and multivocality, and so she used the voice recorder on her phone to produce multiple voices as she read. It was a seamless, thought-provoking performance, and I've been thinking about it ever since!