INTERVIEW:New York's gossipy media world can be a hostile environment for an unashamedly intellectual poet, but Meghan O'Rourke, who appears tonight at the Poetry Now Festival, has proven up to the task, writes Mark Doten
MEGHAN O'ROURKE'S debut book of poetry, Halflife, was published last year to considerable acclaim, including a rave in the New York Times.
The book, she estimates, will have "2,000 readers, at best - it doesn't have 2,000 readers yet." Last year she also wrote a piece for Slate, headlined "The Croc Epidemic: How a Heinous Synthetic Shoe Conquered the World". This article - fourth most read in Slate for 2007 - was viewed two million times. This is the sort of piece, she admits, that will have a "long tail" - it has no doubt received many thousands of additional views since then.
This inversion of classic assumptions - what is truly lasting is not a printed work of literature, but rather an online riff on a pop culture phenomenon - is the sort of oddity that O'Rourke, who is reading at the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Poetry Now international poetry festival this evening, takes in her stride.
Writing both journalism and poetry, and working as an editor at two very different publications (Slate and the Paris Review), she is a woman who is accustomed to contradictions.
"My work as an editor comes out of my dilettantish interest in the world," she says. "It's very funny to hop back and forth between the Paris Review and Slate. Slate is one of the country's premier online magazines, it's very fast, there's no paper. You're constantly checking the news, getting your CNN alerts. Whereas the Paris Review is a quarterly. And not only is it a quarterly, but what I'm responsible for is the poetry, which is," she pauses, "not about current events."
In her own writing, the shifts between journalism and poetry involve a similar whiplash. "I did a piece for Oprah At Home that I think paid as much as my book of poetry, and probably took three hours to write. So there's sometimes this kind of free-market cognitive dissonance. Every once in a while you want to throw up your hands and write The Devil Wears Prada."
This dearth of chicklit bestsellers aside, O'Rourke's career has been, by almost any metric, charmed. After she finished her undergraduate degree at Yale, there was an internship at the New Yorker in the summer of 1997, which led to an editorial assistant position, then an editorship.
She left the New Yorker to join Slate as culture editor in 2002, and, in 2005 - while continuing at Slate - she was named poetry editor of the Paris Review. In 2007 she helped create a new blog on Slate about women and politics. Her poetry and reviews have been published by the New York Times, the LA Times, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic.
Such early success - O'Rourke is 32 - comes at a price. She has her own "tag" on Gawker, the Manhattan media gossip website - a search for her name there brings up 26 different postings. It is not, generally speaking, a pleasant thing to be a young literary success story talked about on Gawker, unless one has a very thick skin.
US writers of varying degrees of talent and success - Jonathan Safran Foer, Benjamin Kunkel, Tao Lin, Marisha Pessl - are routinely eviscerated on Gawker in a few barbed paragraphs, only to be (presto!) brought back to life the next week or month and assailed again for some new crime of precocity.
For O'Rourke, the most vicious cut came in a 2007 post by now-departed editor, Emily Gould, titled, simply, "Why People Hate Meghan O'Rourke".
The reasons documented therein: O'Rourke's occasional use of personal anecdotes in her journalism; her marriage that year to New Yorker staff writer James Surowiecki and, of course, her achievements. Or, as Gould described the last named, her "ambition",
"privilege", and "unabashed intellectualism" - along with "a New York-specific way of ostentatiously combining the three". Gould added, for good measure, "Oh, and did we mention she's also an attractive young woman?"
New York, as people have often observed, can be a small town, at least when it comes to literature. The main players here are all divided by only a degree or two of separation: Gawker people go to Slate parties; Slate people go to Gawker parties; O'Rourke's former intern was working at Gawker when the post appeared; and so on.
Though perhaps she should have seen it coming, the post even now seems to puzzle O'Rourke. "What I hadn't anticipated is that when you publish a book you become a public figure in a new way. I think as a journalist I had felt like a public figure, and didn't think it would be that different to publish poems."
While Gould's takedown ended with a tentative defence of O'Rourke against her detractors (detractors, it must be said, who would for the most part not have existed if it hadn't been for Gawker), many of the comments on the post were not so kind. A fact of internet culture, O'Rourke says, is that there are people with axes to grind.
"It's weird to see yourself reflected in other people's eyes with certain assumptions. About privilege, for instance. Well, you don't actually know anything about my background, you don't know what my family is like, you don't know what it took or didn't take for me to go to Yale or get my job. Which isn't to say," she adds dryly, "that I'm not an evil bitch."
The grinding of axes, as journalists, politicians and celebrities of all stripes have discovered, is an unavoidable fact of life.
This strange phantom swarm of commenters could very well be addressed by two lines from Halflife: "Do ghosts have neuroses?/ What is the point of the haunting they do?"
So then, what is the point? Why so much vitriol? "I tried to take something out of it," she says. "It made me try to step back and look at my life in a broader context. What are assumptions I make about people? What lines in the sand am I drawing that I shouldn't be? And that's actually a really useful enterprise as an editor and a curator of literary culture."
Another lesson: "You don't read comment threads that are about you."
This attempt to make the best of things, to "take something out of it", is typical of O'Rourke. "One thing I like about Slate," she says, "is that it keeps me from lapsing into any too simplistic a notion of what literary culture might be. I've published pieces about Thomas Hardy's love poetry, or Sylvia Plath - not just pieces I've written, but ones that I've commissioned - and those pieces do really well."
At Slate, the readers of the literary pieces tend to be "sticky" - they come back again and again. To see a serious discussion of poetry in the comment sections of poetry columns, O'Rourke says, is quite moving. "You have a sense of people being curious and open to new kinds of experience, new kinds of debate, new kinds of discourse. It challenges you as an editor to realise that a lot of your assumptions about who your readers are are wrong, and not capacious enough."
Not only are the readers interesting, but she genuinely enjoys her coworkers. At Slate, they go on an annual retreat, most recently at an old resort in the Catskills that looks, she says, like the hotel in The Shining.
"There's a million different dining rooms, where they serve poached eggs. The floral carpets probably date to 1952." And how did she and her Slate cronies pass their time? "Lots of speed Scrabble and margaritas - what you would expect at a nerdy literary retreat."
The themes of Halflife are a world away from speed Scrabble and CNN alerts and sticky readers. Here, the present is less important than the workings of memory. And while her forays into the past at times have a heroic cast - "I'm planning to rescue the legends," she writes - there is also a deep ambivalence about her project. "Ask memory to be your burning stake," she says in another poem.
"Memory to me seems to be the great tragic and redemptive characteristic of consciousness," O'Rourke says. "If we're going to be blessed and doomed with consciousness, and consciousness of mortality, and consciousness of limitations, then memory is what makes consciousness much larger than what we're experiencing at any one moment."
Which is why, she says, the experiences of children are engaged with at such length in her book. "Memories of childhood and adolescence had to be a big part of it. You're alive in the moment, but you're also this strange composite of memories of selves that you were before. That line that you quoted, it's both the stake at which you burn, but also 'This is what my stake is - I stake myself on this.' "
And what of her own childhood? How did it prepare her for her current endeavours, online and otherwise? "Actually, I was a bit of a Luddite," she says. "I grew up as a bookworm, we didn't have a television. I was the only child in my second-grade class who voted not to have computers. I didn't want computer time - I just wanted to read."