Outside the Lines

Corey Van Landingham BA ’08 was feeling confident. In an introductory poetry workshop at Lewis & Clark, her professor, Jerry Harp, had just asked the group what they were reading. Van Landingham had been writing since she was 5 years old. She’d grown up in Ashland, Oregon, home to the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She had fed the cats of the state’s poet laureate, local resident Lawson Fusao Inada. But in that moment, she panicked.

She recalls that Harp gently listened as she recited her high school reading list. Then he began to guide her toward unexpected ideas and authors. Over the course of the term, she learned, “I can cultivate my own taste and find what I like, and I don’t have to just regurgitate the name of the last poet I read.” For instance, the class read Catullus, the bawdy, romantic, and at times sublime poet of ancient Rome. Van Landingham fell in love with the way history informed Catullus’ personal poems.

That combination—intimacy and history, the personal surrounded by societal context—has become a hallmark of Van Landingham’s own work, in which the concerns of the intimate self are orbited by larger social structures.

After taking Harp’s class, Van Landingham changed her major from international affairs to English, went on to MFA and PhD programs in creative writing, published three poetry books, and became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2025, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for creative and intellectual achievement.

Her witty and self-aware poems on love, loss, and home inhabit both the personal lyric and the world of power and social expectation. In her poems, she blends such disparate topics as drone warfare and wedding planning, frat parties and Egyptian goddesses, home buying and the gendered politics of marriage—all in deft, incisive verse.

Van Landingham’s Guggenheim will fund research for her next collection, which explores isolation and exile. Her interest in seclusion began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when she and her husband found themselves teaching online. Despite the difficulty of that time, Van Landingham said it felt artistically fruitful to be isolated. “I think that having time to slow down, to just pay attention to the world around us—to not have to speak, but to take in—is crucial,” she says.

Van Landingham directed her focus to moments of quarantine throughout history, ranging from the Plague of Justinian in Constantinople to a Venetian lazaretto that confined people with leprosy and other infectious diseases. She began to think about seclusion more broadly: “How did power and conquest relate to isolation?”

To explore this idea, she started writing in persona, speaking as varied characters from history, including a sex worker from medieval Italy and Julius Caesar’s daughter Julia, who lived in exile on a remote Italian island. The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow Van Landingham to continue her poetic exploration of these historical figures.

Performing the voice of a character in verse perhaps feels natural to a poet raised in a theatre town. Growing up in Ashland, a city infused with Shakespeare, Van Landingham recalls that poetry and performance were a kind of constant background music. Her mother encouraged her love of literature and often read poetry out loud. She remembers checking out a book of plays when she was young: “The only thing I could read was the ‘Double, double toil and trouble’ line in Macbeth. I was obsessed with it just because of the sound. I kept going back and reading it over and over again,” she says. Although she struggled with the plays’ difficult words, the “music of Shakespeare” became an unconscious part of her early relationship to language.

At a young age, she was captivated by the voices of “villains and unlikable figures.” In middle school, she wrote a persona poem from the perspective of a school shooter—and got in trouble with her teacher. Van Landingham had to explain that she was creating a fictional character on the page.

Van Landingham lost her father during her undergraduate years at Lewis & Clark. During that difficult time, she was enrolled in a senior poetry seminar taught by Mary Szybist, Odell Professor of Humanities. Van Landingham reflects on the effect of Szybist’s mentorship: “Her writing guidance was gentle, but also rigorous. I think it was exactly what I needed at that time.” Writing through and about her father’s death was crucial to her development as a writer.

Szybist recalls her student’s work from this period: “I was struck by the strength of her clear-eyed candor through that bewildering grief. Her early poems reminded me of Dickinson’s lines: ‘I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true—’ Corey began writing in kinship with that spirit, and it is a spirit that has only strengthened in her work.”

She interrogates how different power structures regulate our spaces,” says Szybist.

Grief threads through Van Landingham’s first collection, Antidote, which is a surreal swirl of defiance and sorrow. In the title poem, she describes a medicine “Given against devotion. Given against proclamations / of love…” Skeptical of relationship but still hungry for affirmation, the speaker of Antidote deals with love as a kind of malady to be guarded against or warded away.

Romantic relationships, in all their complexity and risk, have been part of Van Landingham’s subject matter throughout her three books—but the focus has shifted with each collection. In Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, love swirls with technology, invasion, and remote warfare. Interweaving the intimacy of love with reports of violence abroad, Van Landingham plays with the sense of culpability and helplessness many of us feel when we hear the news. “She interrogates how different power structures regulate our spaces,” says Szybist.

In her poem “Epithalamium,” a speaker’s romantic life is interlaced with reports of a drone strike on a wedding in Yemen. The poem’s tension arises from the distance between the speaker’s situation—safe but troubled, erotic, intimate—and the horror of the attack. “I’m really interested in panning out and seeing how history has collided with art, language, and philosophy to make this type of violence possible,” says Van Landingham.

Poetry offers a way to delve into big issues with thoughtfulness, she says. When she reads the news, she feels, like many of us, overwhelmed. Poetry lets her enter that news cycle in other ways. “A poem is when I can kind of slow down and start to pull all of the threads together that inform and form a moment,” she explains.

An interest in taking a closer look influences her most recent collection, Reader, I. Although it too contains poems of love and marriage, Van Landingham makes big shifts in her focus and form. “She is a wonderfully restless poet, able to transform herself into new poetic incarnations,” says Donald Platt, who mentored Van Landingham during her MFA program at Purdue University.

The book takes its title from the closing quote of Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Honest, wry, at times funny, and often achingly lovely, Reader, I dissects a marriage: sickness, health, mortgage, jealousy, fights, and all. Van Landingham reflects that modern marriage, while often less abrupt of a change in circumstance than in the past, still carries social weight. When she herself got married, “I felt like I was entering into this social contract. While it was fraught historically in some ways, it also really felt like it enlarged my world,” she explains. That social contract informs how the speaker of Reader, I interacts with marriage—resistant at times to its forms and expectations, but often also seduced by life in proximity to a beloved.

In this collection, many of her poems are written in prose, organized in paragraph blocks that lack the visual cues of a traditional poem. Van Landingham thought about those blocks as little stages on which her characters—the collection’s speaker and her husband—would act out their dramas. She considered the characters “movable figures who needed to do something for an audience to produce some type of a reaction,” she says, and the theatrical mindset helped her to get away from herself. Despite some of the poems’ basis in autobiography, she wanted to write about issues, ideas, and characters larger than just her own experience.

One of the delights of Reader, I is the breadth and depth of Van Landingham’s allusions. Mentor Donald Platt explains that rapid and varied allusion is a hallmark of her work. The poems “sometimes go quickly from irony to image to anecdote to classical allusion to colloquialism within the space of a few sentences,” he notes.

I love dissonant allusions, things that don’t seem like they should belong,” says Van Landingham. They speak to the layers of reality. I appreciate those happy coincidences that aren’t really coincidences.”

Apart from the nod to Charlotte Brontë’s work in the book’s title, the poems include a wide variety of classical and modern references—from Dante to Samuel Johnson to Pat Benatar. In one poem, she writes, “I do admire his brain, the ease with which he speaks. I like when he compares my ass to a Man Ray, recites a passage straight from Proust. I just tend to quote, more often, Phoebe Buffay.” Here, the rhyming names—“Man Ray,” a Dadaist artist, and “Phoebe Buffay,” a beloved buffoon from the TV show Friends—illustrate her allusive style: the juxtaposition of classic and pop culture, with a humorous twist.

“I love dissonant allusions, things that don’t seem like they should belong,” she says. “They speak to the layers of reality. I appreciate those happy coincidences that aren’t really coincidences.”

For her Guggenheim work on isolation, Van Landingham will likely leave behind the prose style of Reader, I. She often works on a subject or style for a time until she exhausts it; sometimes, she has to force herself to move to new forms. “I work well with some type of constraint, and I think I’m kind of an obsessive writer in some ways,” she says. The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow her the time to pursue her current obsession—not love this time, but the interplay of separation, aloneness, and colonial power.

That attention to the world outside, the decentering of the individual, has become an important part of her lyric style. In Van Landingham’s work, love poems are not only exercises in introspection, but also acts of awareness. “I am not only / I,” she writes. Power, in her work, always intrudes on our most intimate moments. History tugs on our relationships; community scaffolds our desires.

In an era obsessed with selfies, her poetry urges us again and again to see what remains outside the frame.