By Emma Reilly
Editor-in-Chief
This year, the Rose O’Neill Literary House invited Meredith Davies Hadaway M’96 back to campus to serve as Washington College’s 2023 Sophie Kerr poet-in-residence. Hadaway’s residency comes nearly a decade after her retirement from WC; she served as vice president for communications and marketing and as a professor of English and creative writing.
Hadaway’s poetry is characterized by raw emotion, evocative descriptions of natural landscapes, and masterful sensory descriptions. She is author of three collections: At The Narrows (2015), The River is a Reason (2011), and Fishing Secrets of the Dead (2005). At The Narrows was awarded the Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing the year of its release.
In Hadaway’s work, “moments of humor make history more immediate; beauty is a balm and provides solace,” according to Associate Professor of English and Director of the Lit House Dr. James Allen Hall.
A reading and poetry-writing workshop run by Hadaway, titled “On Location: Poetry and the Power of Place,” took place in the Lit House on Tuesday, March 7. Students, faculty, and community members all attended.
Hadaway began the event by reading a selection of her poems, including “Rupture,” “In Green Ink,” and “Synonyms for Faith.” She also read a poem about stink bugs, which she said is “an homage to [her] spiritual home, the Lit House.”
After the reading, Hadaway lectured on ecopoetry and its ties to location. She opened this discussion with a quote from writer Wendell Berry: “if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
“Location is a process as well as a place,” Hadaway said. “Rootedness is important to our being.”
Location is one of the six main characteristics of ecopoetry that Hadaway shared with attendees. According to the poet, connection, dialogue, humility, skepticism toward hyperrationality, and vanishing are the other pillars of the genre that creatives should consider when experimenting with poetry.
In ecopoetry, there are “no hierarchies,” Hadaway said. “I think these characteristics have new urgency in today’s world.”
After her lecture, Hadaway encouraged her audience to both familiarize and defamiliarize themselves with a real place while constructing their own poems.
The poet guided her audience through a generative workshop, inviting participants to share what they wrote at the end of the session. Freshmen Mel Tuerk and Melinda Kern, senior Regina Del Pilar, Professor of English Dr. Richard Gillin, and others shared their poems.
“I really liked the workshop,” Del Pilar said. “I’ve taken Intro to Poetry with [Hadaway] before, but this was the first time I’ve ever heard her poetry — and hearing poetry is such a viscerally different experience than reading it…it was really neat that she asked people to come up and read what they wrote at the end.”
According to Hadaway, poetry can heal; it can restore wholeness.
In addition to being a poet, she is also a harpist who spent time playing music in hospice settings for therapeutic purposes. Entrainment, or the synchronization of energies, was a concept she learned while playing the harp for patients that also translated to her written work.
“Look for the place where you can feel the Earth’s heartbeat and entrain to that,” Hadaway said to her workshoppers. “If we all did that, maybe we could make the world whole.”
Photo by Emma Reilly Photo Caption: Meredith Hadaway, in addition to serving as poet-in-residence, typically teaches courses in ecopoetry.