Abigail Hebert

On Wednesday evening, students, faculty and community members gathered on the third floor of Massachusetts Hall to hear poet, nonfiction writer, professor of creative writing at Yale University and editor of the Yale Review Meghan O’Rourke share her poetry and excerpts from her upcoming memoir, “Partum.” Her most recent book, “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness,” was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Assistant Professor of English Jordan Kisner introduced the speaker by sharing a personal anecdote about how she first got to know O’Rourke’s work.

“I was on the subway. I was in Manhattan, and I was reading a borrowed copy of the New Yorker. I had stolen it from my boyfriend, who was a subscriber at the time, and there was this essay that I flipped to kind of randomly. There was a very beautiful photo of a woman on a horse that caught my eye. I started reading the essay, and it was this extraordinarily lovely personal essay about the writer losing her mother,” Kisner said. “I remember I got off the subway … and I called my mother and I said ‘I just read the most amazing thing.’”

O’Rourke’s visit to Bowdoin on Wednesday was not her first stint in Maine. She lived in Cape Porpoise for several years as a child. Her mother was a pastry chef at a local diner, while her father, who worked as a commercial fisherman, would sometimes give illegally trapped lobsters to O’Rourke to smuggle out in her sweatshirt because the harbor police would not question a young child. This time, her visit to Maine was strictly aboveboard.

O’Rourke began by reading “Unforced Error,” a poem from her collection “Sun in Days.” She explained the context behind the poem.

“[‘Unforced Error’ is] about the idea of life as a condition in which you make all sorts of unforced errors. That [idea comes] from sports terminology, where you didn’t have to make the mistake, but you did,” O’Rourke said. “I started writing [‘Sun in Days’] when I got seriously ill with Lyme disease that went untreated for about 10 or 15 years. When I was at my sickest, my brain really stopped working, and all I could do was write one line a day…. There’s a line-by-line thinking that was very much rooted in images.”

The second poem O’Rourke shared was the unreleased piece “Borges and Bidart and de Beauvoir and I.” As a reference to Frank Bidart’s poem “Borges and I,” which is in turn a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Borges and I,” O’Rourke describes her poem as incorporating both a feminist and prosaic sensibility.

“[I’m] really interested in playing with what happens if you lean into prosaicness in poetry, if you try to bring prose into poetry, if you try to resist image and you bring the more philosophical into it,” O’Rourke said. “This poem is explicitly about the kind of writing I try to do, which is, ‘How do you write about the thing that resists a language for it and resists oversimplified narratives?’”

O’Rourke also read an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, “Partum,” which means “having been born” in Latin. She described “Partum” as more of a monologue than a traditional memoir, with a focus on being a less reflective book.

O’Rourke meditated on the background of her memoir.

“[‘Partum’ is] about the year my son was born and my father got sick with cancer,” O’Rourke said.

Following her prose reading, O’Rourke shifted gears back to poetry, sharing four more of her poems: “Erasers,” “The Bird,” “Changing Table” and “Did You Use Your Time?” The poems were respectively about motherhood, recalling a bird dying in front of her bird-obsessed toddlers, the passage of time and juxtaposing the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings with the innocence of her sons.

O’Rourke finished by taking questions from the audience, where she explained how she draws inspiration from the world around her.

“As a writer, you have this slightly vampiric [outlook where] everything can be turned into something,” O’Rourke said.