Biography
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023) and Nebulas (forthcoming 2025), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask and Things to Buy in New Brunswick. She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee, recently adapted into a graphic novel, One More Year. Find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.
Micro-interview
I think the first "poetry" I read was song lyrics. I used to love buying CDs with all the lyrics in the liner notes, and I'd spend hours and hours studying them and rewriting them in my head. Some of my favourite lyricists when I was growing up were the Beatles, Alanis Morisette, Lauryn Hill, and Gord Downie.
When I was in high school, my wonderful English teacher showed me Margaret Atwood's book Power Politics. It's full of very short poems that are deceptively simple and accessible, but that unfold and open up into incredible depth. Like this one:
I'll always remember that poem. It blew my mind! I think that was the first poetry that got me interested in reading and writing seriously.
I always liked to do a little bit of casual writing when I was studying poetry at school. If we were studying Shakespeare, I liked to try writing a sonnet to try to figure it out. Or when I was in college and we read Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina," I wanted to try a sestina, and when I learned about pantoums I wanted to try those too! Today, I still like approaching poems like little puzzles and experiments, and I still love writing imitations of or responses to other poets.
Dylan Thomas once said that “a good poem is a contribution to reality.” I like to think of my job that way! Even if you can make just a tiny little contribution -- if you can say something that's never been said before, or make someone think something they never have before -- you've done your job.
My poem "A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales" is inspired by a real fact about famous 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin. When he was at university he ran something called a "Glutton Club," where they ate unusual animals, including owls! There's something fabulously strange about that biographical detail, isn't there? Darwin's theory of natural selection forever changed the way we see the animal world... but he also set out to devour it!
The six-toed lizard in the poem is a fictional invention, but I like her. She's a monster mashup of reptile DNA and a six-fingered woman with deer eyes. I wanted to make the lizard into a survivor, or a monster that destroys whoever tries to catalogue, conquer, or consume her.
I'd like to learn Marianne Moore's "Poetry," because I think it would be awesome to hear that poem at a dinner party. Or better yet, around a summer campfire!