Freesia McKee: Poetry helps us focus and witness

Poetry can touch everyone’s lives, according to Freesia McKee, Wisconsin’s Own Library’s poet-in-residence at Ripon College for the fall semester of 2022-2023.

The poet-in-residence program is sponsored by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs of Wisconsin. The group’s collection of books by Wisconsin authors, Wisconsin’s Own Library, has been housed at Ripon College since 2007.

“Poetry has a unique ability to tell the truth,” McKee says. “It allows us to slow down and spend time with one thought and one subject, to stop and notice what we can’t usually notice. Also, poetry can help us become good writers in any discipline or job. In annual reports, business proposals, lab reports, there is a lot more creativity in those genres than one might think.”

McKee came to love the written word and the power of communication early. She grew up on the south side of Milwaukee and loved reading and libraries. She first stepped foot on the Ripon College campus as a high school forensics competitor.

“I remember walking up the main lawn long, long ago,” she says. While studying for a bachelor’s degree in gender and women’s studies at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, she took a poetry class. “I felt a depth of focus I hadn’t felt before,” she says. “I was interested in activism and social change. There is a lot of room to talk about social justice topics in poetry. Also, being a poet is a great way to find community. In all of the places I’ve been, there are poets to meet.”

She earned an MFA in poetry from Florida International University, worked in the nonprofit sector in Milwaukee, then began teaching writing in 2017. She has taught at several colleges, in public workshops and online courses.

Her work has been published in numerous venues and received honors such as the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank literary journal and the Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets.

At Ripon, she taught the course Eco-Poetry: Artistic and Ecological Connections through the English and environmental studies departments. “Eco-poetry is the intersection between culture, social justice and environment,” she says. “We’re existing in multiple crises right now — environmental crises, pandemic crises, social justice crises. Eco-poetry is a way to bring light to what’s going on.”

She says her writing focuses on the influence of personal and collective histories on how we experience place and being in community. Her work at Ripon often included daily walks through the Ceresco Prairie Conservancy and being outdoors. “Being in the place shaped our eco-poetry class,” she says.

Now that her semester is complete, she has joined her partner in Illinois, will teach Introduction to Creative Writing and Fiction at Western Illinois University during the spring semester, and continue writing.

“As a poet, I’m inspired by points of tension, questions that cannot be answered, and the dynamics of apathy and disconnection,” she says. “As a teacher, I’m inspired by several of my own former teachers who weren’t afraid of pedagogical experimentation and naming social justice issues in the classroom. As a human, I’m inspired by artists, activists, birds, seeds and trees.

“Poetry helps us cope, witness and survive. It’s art. It’s necessary.”

JAYE ALDERSON COLLEGE EDITOR