Kathleen McCoy : part one

Kathleen McCoy teaches and lives at the edge of the Adirondack Park in upstate New York where she lives with her husband and the cats who own them. Her poetry has appeared in publications in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. Her poetry collections include Green and Burning, More Water Than Words, and Ringing the Changes.

Photo credit: David Graham

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers' group that you work ideas and poems with?

As far as primal genesis goes, I think of poetry as an evolutionary form of life and imagination, one that can be generated initially by language itself, by the image, or by the idea. Sometimes, a poem begins to form around a line culled from a dream or the music that was a constant source of creation in my child-mind. My twin sister and I used to play on the stairs of our two-story house, traipsing up and down all afternoon, singing folk songs and making up our own. We learned a kind of back-and-forth and separate solos way of improvisation that I think carried on into adulthood; for her, it led to a career in music education and singing, and for me, to literature education and writing. It's enjoyable to work from sound, which conjures images, which conjure stories, which lead to ideas. But poetry can spring from anything--a memory, a bit of overheard conversation, an image recalled from the day, a phrase that pops into existence, a few bars of a new tune that won't go away. But I don't think in plots, just in ideas and images and musical phrases, so for me the end goal is generally a poem.

My work enters the world at its own pace, quite unrushed. I do keep a journal, rather loosely, in which I enter scraps of imagination, dreams, ideas, or images that arise during a walk or reading or even in the tub, at times when my consciousness can slow down and allow whatever needs to bubble to the surface to do so. I usually pound out a draft fairly quickly--between twenty minutes and three hours--and then compulsively rework it over months. I keep most of my drafts digitally, so that when I'm up to number 6 or even number 15 and am satisfied that it's gone as far as I can take it, I know it's time to send it out. I submit my work sporadically, working it around my teaching and civic responsibilities.

I am fortunate to have a writer's group with four to five other women who are incredibly talented, consistently encouraging, and gently honest about each other's work. We met every month for about thirteen years before the pandemic. Now we meet when we can, on a few days' retreat we make for ourselves when the pandemic is relatively under control in our area, or via Zoom. If it weren't for their sage counsel and urging, I'd probably have a couple drawers filled with drafts that few people would ever see. But now that just isn't enough. The writing isn't complete, is it, until it has earned an audience? It feels that way now. I write for myself, but the final draft has to speak to a wider world. When it's going well, there should be a sort of balance between timelessness and hitting at least a glancing blow at the zeitgeist for me to be satisfied with a body of my own work.