Maggie Anderson was born in New York City in 1948 to a mother from western Pennsylvania and a father from West Virginia. Throughout her childhood, her family maintained their connection to the Appalachian “mountain culture” through songs, an interest in the natural world, and visits to family in West Virginia every summer. Anderson moved to West Virginia when she was thirteen years old.

Anderson’s poetry is strongly influenced by the Appalachian landscape and language. She writes; “my work as an artist, as a poet, has to do with language. And language for those of us from this region is a very complicated business.” In her writing, Anderson examines the separation between the exalted language of universities and the more familial dialect of her home. She confronts people’s perceptions by embracing her culture. Her mentor Gwendolyn Brooks, first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize notes: “Maggie Anderson writes a serious, surmising poetry, a poetry knowledgeable of image and music, pieces of energy on a taut string, and shining sanity.”

The author of four books of poetry, Anderson is also a professor and director of the Wick Poetry Program at Kent State University in Ohio where she edits a chapbook poetry series and a first book series through the Kent State University Press. Windfall, Anderson’s latest book, is a selection of poetry from her three previous collections as well as new work. As poet Yusef Komunyakaa notes: “Windfall possesses a huge, spellbinding, honed acuity and aesthetic certainty. Always cutting to the quick of modern flux, her poems elevate the natural brilliance of small things in our lives, urban and pastoral, or at the heart of a shifting emotional landscape.”

Poems

Interview

Five Questions for Maggie Anderson

(Interview by Maria Villafranca)

Q1. What inspires you?

A1. I am inspired by the play of words -- by language -- by other poets, by world events, by eating dinner, by travel, by friends, in fact, it seems, by nearly anything. I am engaged most fully by the places where the idiosyncrasies of personal language, metaphor, and voice intersect with the constraints and challenges of the public world. I like the margins, the spaces between, the possibility of moving back and forth between the public and the private world.

Q2. How have language distinctions / dialect played an important role in your life and writing?

A2. I learned to speak two languages growing up -- the language my West Virginian-born parents wanted me to learn growing up in New York City -- the language of books, art, privilege -- and the language we spoke when we went back to West Virginia in the summers, the language of home. In my poetry, I have tried to use both of those languages. I am interested in how the rhythms and metaphors of West Virginia mountain speech can interact with more learned language -- like the Ohio poet, James Wright who used his knowledge of the Latin poets to write about "the river down home." W.E.B. Du Bois writing of race, speaks of a life of "two-ness." There is something of this at work when an attempt is made to move from one class to another as well. I learned to speak and, later, to write in the dialect of my family's aspirations for me, and I knew also that this was not their language. That tension has helped to make my poems.

Q3. Who are you favorite authors?

A3. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, James Still, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Muriel Rukeyser, Lorine Niedecker, and James Wright, among many others.

Q4. You've written about the tradition of storytelling in the Appalachian area. Do you think of your poetry as telling stories in similar ways?

A4. The tradition of storytelling in the Appalachian mountain culture is strong and vital to this day and it influences my writing, as well as that of most of my contemporaries from this region. The impulse to narrative in poetry is ancient. It is a particularly public gesture I think, to write a story in verse. In contemporary poetry, of course, narrative itself is questioned, so any "story" becomes a story about the story as well as the story itself. In the southern mountains, it is still possible to tell a story about a bear, or a flood, or a union strike as a means of passing on information. When this information is passed on in poetry or in a ballad song, it becomes a communal witness, without irony. I imagine that some of my poems tell stories in this way.

Q5. What will you be reading from for your visit to Rutgers?

A5. I will be reading mostly from work-in-progress, my new book, tentatively titled, The Sleep Writer. Many of these poems concern global political events and how these intersect with private dream states. I like to read a variety of poems to introduce an audience to the world I write from, so I will read some poems that emphasize mountain culture and the intersection between it and what is called "the outside world." My more recent poems make that intersection larger and more common: the crevice between waking and sleeping; or between thought and dream, between trust and terror.

Biography

Maggie Anderson is the author of four collections of poetry: Windfall: New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, Cold Comfort, and Years That Answer. She is the editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems by former West Virginia poet laureate Louise McNeill, and co-editor of Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and A Gathering of Poets, an anthology of poems commemorating the 20th anniversary of the shootings of anti-war student protesters at Kent State in 1970. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches creative writing at Kent State University where she directs the Wick Poetry Program and edits the Wick Poetry Series through the Kent State University Press.