Kiley A. McLaughlin '11

Somerville native Kiley A. McLaughlin ’11 has spent the majority of her life in the Boston area. The familiarity that naturally arose from spending so much time locally has inspired her poetry. “When you are out of your own space,” she says, “you look at things differently, so I think that’s why a lot of my poems are about when I’m not here. When you’re home you take things for granted, and when you’re away your senses are heightened.” That heightened awareness has resulted in a poetic style characterized by breathless but precise detail and evocative portraits of moments in urban life. One of her poems, entitled “Brooklyn,” reads: “An expanse. A dulled scrawl of doors. Bricks beginning over cinderblocks slouch into crust. / Everything separating us from the ground.”

McLaughlin’s poetic career developed almost incidentally. She wrote throughout high school but only for herself, sharing her poetry only with her sister. Poetry is her means of externalizing emotions to which she could not otherwise give a voice. “If I could express the things I’m trying to express through poems in any other way,” she says, “then I wouldn’t have to write poems.” She is still reticent about her writing, but has published her work in Tuesday Magazine and will also appear in the upcoming edition of The Gamut, the College’s student poetry magazine.

After years of keeping her work secret, McLaughlin applied for a poetry writing workshop at Harvard as a sophomore. The class proved to be a catalyst for later developments. She initially declared a concentration in social anthropology, but during her junior fall switched to English in order to apply to write a creative thesis. She was accepted, and in March began a process of poetic transformation under the guidance of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. The end result was a compilation of approximately 40 poems entitled “Dust,” dealing with themes of mortality and impermanence.

The first thing that changed was McLaughlin’s form: Graham encouraged her to write in long, extended sentences, capturing and capitalizing on the ‘breathlessness’ that characterizes McLaughlin’s work. She also developed a poetic format similar to that of a glossary. The format allows her to explore the multiple meanings of common words and challenge the definition of poetry itself. Another piece of hers, “Glossary of Literary Terms,” reads: “dormant / 1. to be kept for later, as a prize 2. to be kept from the telephone 3. to be kept from the honky-tonks 4. to be kept from the windows on this side of the house 5. to be kept en mass, in a stadium of resistance 6. to be kept lying asleep or as if asleep 7. to be inoperative, in abeyance, but within throwing range 8. to be kept, and kept.”

This fall, McLaughlin applied to and was accepted to the poetry program at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “At the beginning of this year, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” she says. “I couldn’t see myself applying to a job. I really wanted to keep writing and see where it was going to take me.” After completing the program, McLaughlin hopes to either teach at a university or start a literature newsletter or magazine. Either way, poetry has become her primary focus, and her future plans revolve around her desire to continue to write.

Her innovation and unique poetic vision bode well for future endeavors. Joanna Klink, a member of the creative writing faculty and a reader of McLaughlin’s thesis, says that “her poems are visually intense, by turns haunted and beautiful. They are attentive to injustice and helplessness, to small unexpected pleasures, to degrees of dusk, to color—the way it, like all human things, hovers between meanings.”

—Staff writer Catherine A. Morris can be reached at morris6@fas.harvard.edu.