An Inside Look at Monica Walen, a Prize-Winning Poet

Imagine sleeping under twelve blankets every night because the rented house that you’re living in has virtually no heat. This was the story of Monica Walen’s life until one extremely freezing January day she was inspired to take out her frustration on her computer and ended up with a prize-winning poem. "I was sick of the whole thing," Monica explains "I took my frustrations out on the computer and the poem rather unexpectedly sprang up from it."



The poem that was inspired from her late night debacle, "January Blues," ended up winning the Academy of American Poets Prize, an honor Monica has achieved two times. Although Monica enjoys writing poetry, she feels oddly about having it judged. The only reason her poem was even entered in the contest was because she had submitted it to Aquinas College's Sampler literary magazine. Now that Monica has graduated from college, she has written a "few things" but finds it hard to write well without a deadline. She is a great writer under pressure; she claims that during her college years, she would often find herself the night before a paper was due with absolutely no material, go to bed and wake up with ideas written down on scraps of paper and all she had to do was compile them into a poem. 



Monica wasn’t always such an honest poetry writer, however. She remembers that when she was six and seven years old she would copy other kid’s poems out of "Cricket" magazine and present them as her own. It wasn’t until high school that that she began to place her own ideas in a poem and take credit for them. Monica writes her poems based on what she has experienced. She used to try to write poems about "important" topics that she did not relate to at all. After a while, she realized that she writes better about topics that effect her personally and her own experiences, not someone else’s.



Monica is a "flighty" poetry lover. She changes her mind about her favorite poems and poets all the time. A few weeks ago she adored "A Pavane for the Nursery" by William Jay Smith, but when a friend introduced her to Wislawa Szymborska’s poems "Vocabulary" and " Some Like Poetry," poor Mr. Smith was left in the dust. "I occasionally feel bad," Monica remarks about switching favorite poems so often, but who can blame this fantasy novel-loving, Doctor Who-watching college grad with so many ideas and the ability to travel far in the poetry world? Not me, that’s for sure.

Works by Monica Walen