Maggie Anderson's Style of Writng

Maggie Anderson teaches creative writing and directs the Wick Poetry Program at Kent State University, and through this program, Ms. Anderson is known not only as a writer and a teacher but also as a supporter of emerging poets. Critics have praised Ms. Anderson’s work for being “confident, lyrical and compassionate,” and these qualities stood out in everything she read.

In Anderson’s poems the margins, the spaces between, the possibility of moving back and forth between the public and the private world is beautiful. Ms. Anderson has written, and her poetry often alludes to the creative potential of in-betweenness. Born in New York City to a mother from western Pennsylvania and a father from West Virginia, she has described a childhood of “moving around a lot” but visiting West Virginia every summer. The influence of her rural Appalachian heritage is evident in her work, which often contrasts the common language of popular culture, the exalted language of universities, and the more unschooled language of Appalachian storytelling. These tensions between different worlds, languages, and boundaries help give Maggie Anderson’s poems their powerful impact.

From her latest collection of poetry, Windfall, and from her new work in progress, The Sleep Writer. She has interest in personal and poetic voices, and her poem, “Ontological,” in which she uses the idiom of an Appalachian dialect, in contrast with the philosophical title-of or relating to the nature of being, to add layers of meaning. Introducing “Beyond Even This,” Ms. Anderson expressed her hopefulness in what lies beyond boundaries.

In following the traditions of Appalachian storytelling, Maggie Anderson invests her poetry with a close attention to detail and powerfully specific imagery. Her works thus become vehicles for recording fleeting experiences. Maggie Anderson then started writing about current political events, she explained her reason for writing it, a reason which seems to fit all of her poetry: “This is the least I can do to remember; to remember what happens, to remember what they told us to forget.”