Elizabeth McLagan was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1947. She graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in history and soon after began writing poetry. Teachers have included Richard Hugo and Stanley Plumley, as well as Christopher Howell and Nance Van Winckel at Eastern Washington University where she received an MFA degree in 2002. She was a founding editor of CALYX in 1976 and in 1980 published A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon (Georgian Press, Portland).
Poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Third Coast, 32 Poems, Iron Horse Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Southeast Review, and on the web site Verse Daily. She was a 2001 IntroJournals Award recipient, and in 2006 was the winner of the Frances Locke Memorial Award from The Bitter Oleander Press. Her first volume of poetry, Visitation in the Form of a Blue Feather, is seeking a publisher, and a second volume is underway. The mother of a grown son, she teachers composition and creative writing at Portland Community College.
PBR: Would you tell us about your early influences, the people and experiences which brought you to be the poet that you are today?
EM: I think I grew up more with the absence of external influences, and the developing of my inner life was something very private, and as I've said, subversive. I can't point to a single moment where I decided I wanted to be a writer; that seemed unthinkable. But I did write poems and little stories from a young age. I do believe most of my "sublime" experiences grew out of being alone and wandering, for example, around the old pheasant farm where I lived with my family from the time I was eight until I became an adult. It certainly wasn't much of a place. When we first moved there (my father developed it into an industrial park) there were many shacks, pens, and sheds scattered around the fields. I appropriated one for a cabin. I climbed the pheasant pens and lay down in the overhanging chicken wire and looked down until my body felt like it was floating, flying. I climbed trees, wandered around in the empty fields (the pheasants were long gone) and stared at a green forested ridge in the west -- filled with poison oak, I should add. I believe that one summer I never was able to visit any friends. So, ultimately, yes, hours of solitude in nature (such as it was) shaped me. I treasured my independence, I savored it. So this in its way allowed me to be comfortable with periods of silence and solitude, even -at times- to prefer it.
The following poem was selected from her feature:
Drowned Jacket
When hands stopped their fluttering
and feet became the silence over the roofs
of houses, the body filled with the things of the day:
that shadowed corridor between two buildings
stained with graffitti and sour wine, the odor
of old clothes, an hour in the raw sun
and just harvested water. Your overcoat of dust.
Whether the wind surfaced from a hole at the end
of things, we dropped anchor, we abbreviated
our claims to the morning, though we were one
person only or two who burned against
the single beat of a drum. There was that place
under firs where hope was felt, the stone seat
and the path leading backwards out of the woods
downhill. The clothes shrugged themselves on,
they wrapped their shoulders in harsh pigments,
a shower of dust in the plenty of wrinkles,
and shadows lengthened on the sidewalks
between sleeping houses whose rooms
were filled with the blue shine of emptiness.
