By Payton Williams
Managing Editor
@YourSoVanya
Poetry’s great power, to me, derives from the almost mystical way in which it transforms the
deeply personal into something universal.
Jill Hawkins is a poet who understands this power very well.
During a conversation in the soft light of a coffee shop in Duncan, Oklahoma, Hawkins’ face
lights up with excitement as she describes what she believes is a key reason she chooses to write poetry.
“As a kid, I had a lot of bad dreams,” Hawkins said. “I was very emotional, and I always write
from that emotional perspective, and I’m hoping that when I do that, other people won’t feel so alone, like you’re connectable with them.”
At a podium in the Cameron Center for Emerging Technologies conference room on Nov.
1, Hawkins reads poetry that feels pulled straight from the minutiae of memory.
She starts with a poem recalling the fraught recollections of the eighties, another about the
impact the recent death of her father has had on her family, and another outlining the smaller
details of tagging a calf.
Hawkins’ poems feel as much about place as they do about her.
A large portion of her poetry she refers to as “Cowboy Poetry,” poems that reflect her
experience living and working on a ranch in Southwest Oklahoma, raising cattle.
Hawkins said her poetry is unique in the way it captures a sense of place.
“I suppose if you’re not exposed to large quantities of land and trees,” Hawkins said, “and
your summer experiences weren’t swimming in the lakes, you’re not gonna write
about those things, and those are big elements in our life here.”
Hawkins also described the act of writing as a sort of compulsion for her, rather than
as something she necessarily expects to do for a living.
“I’ll get physically sick if I don’t write for awhile.” Hawkins said. “That junk has got to come out of my head and free up some files, so it’s not an option for me, I’ll write if you pay me, don’t pay me, doesn’t matter.”
Hawkins said that she has been writing since she was four or five years old, and that her love
of poetry and literature largely derived from her father, who worked as an English professor at
the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO) in Chickasha, Oklahoma.
“We actually lived on a college campus, and so, who would usually be your neighbor, we had a
library, and so I read all the classics.”
While Hawkins had a love for poetry all her life, it wasn’t until she started working on her
terminal degree at the Oklahoma City University Red Earth MFA program that she began to explore modern poetry and began to find her own poetic voice.
Hawkins said, during her MFA training, a mentor asked her to name five of her favorite poets, and listed among them, herself.
“Everyone just stopped, and there were three new poets, and a few that were already in the program, and they looked at me like, ‘did you just list yourself as one of your five favorite poets?’ And I’m like, ‘What, if you don’t like yourself, how do you expect anyone else to?’”
Poetry is a type of writing deeply related to the feelings of the writer, and it requires a writer who is willing to share a lot about themselves, even if it is uncomfortable.
For more information about the Visiting Writers Series, contact Leah Chaffins at ellis@cameron.
edu.