Kathleen McCoy : coda

On Twitter recently a writer wailed that she was about to give up writing because an editor had put down her work in rejecting it. I made a plea to her not to give the editor that kind of power over her and her ambition and her work itself. While I have no idea whether a general reader or poetry editor would consider her work valuable or not, I have learned to separate self from work. Sometimes the work stinks, and all the scrubbing in the world won't fix it. That doesn't mean you're a bad person or even a bad writer. It means it's time to turn to something else, to try another direction, to play or revise or resend to an editor with a very different set of literary priorities. 

So whoever reads this, take heart. It can take a long time to find your readers, but if you're serious about your need to communicate in poetry for the sake of the poetry, don't give up until you do. Craft can improve, but it takes time to find your voice and resolve to get to publication.

Kathleen McCoy : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

In most of my poetry, music is as central as the image and the well-wrought phrase. Even vers libre demands attention to rhythm, consonance, and assonance. There is great joy in trying out, sounding out, even occasionally singing a poem to see if the best words have found their best order, to quote Coleridge. Often I fail and return to the line, the strophe, the whole poem. Sometimes I work from a prose paragraph before breaking it like brittle and arranging the lines in multiple modes across and down the page. That's when music is absolutely the deciding factor, when the visual and the aural coalesce to help create a pleasing and a logical--or mind-bending--form. 

Joy Harjo says that in Native cultures, there is little to no difference between and among poetry, song, and dance. The arts flow naturally from one form into another. Our Western minds are a bit too stiff for that fluidity, but I appreciate the underlying centrality of music to each of those three forms of art. The song must be heard; the dance is both heard and seen. And so is the poem. It is literature; it is music; it is performance. In its printed or digital form, it can be carried down for generations the way we used to do with song and oral history. 

Music is key to memory, and both memory and music are keys to poetry, to poetry that resounds, that's resilient, that resists and refines and revises our thoughts, our knowledge, our stringent proprieties. Music breaks boundaries, so it's an element of poetry I will always pursue. It can't be restrained but it can be courted. It makes a poem dance into the imagination. 

Kathleen McCoy : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I've been reading Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz, EDGE by Barbara Ungar, Loving in Truth by Jay Rogoff, and An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo. I skim some of the major journals, of course, particularly American Poetry Review, Poetry (if you can overlook the recent scandal), Image, Rattle, and a lovely one out of Cambridge I recently discovered, la piccoletta barca. I'm also drawn to the great Americans we've lost recently or in recent years-- the incomparable bell hooks, the bicontinental Eavan Boland,  Robert Bly, and of course Adrienne Rich. In the past couple of years I've been enjoying poems by Jane Hirshfield, Kazim Ali, Honoree Jeffers, David Graham, James Crews, and Ellen Bass on this side of the pond, and on the other, many from Northern Ireland, poets like Medbh McGuckian, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, Nick Laird, Stephen Sexton, and Paula Meehan from Ireland. There are so many really fine poets publishing now, both locally in upstate New York and around the English-speaking world. It's humbling and energizing and awe-inspiring. If you like your poetry to be provocative--aesthetically, spiritually, or socio-politically--poetry is a rich minefield these days.

For anyone looking to sample more contemporary poetry, I'd suggest they start at the local bookstore with a contemporary journal of poems. Then jump on Twitter and look for poetry that turns you on. It's as near as breath, and as life-affirming.

Kathleen McCoy : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Like most writers I know, I find revision quickening, life-affirming, and submission grueling, enervating. Reworking a poem is both physical and metaphysical for me, by which I mean I taste the words, play with line breaks, make substitutions, rearrangements, enlargements, and condensations. That process is exciting, like working bread dough--you feel the warm pliability of it, the forgiveness, and the point past which you must not go lest your bread-poem become too difficult to chew. 

Submission, on the other hand, feels like a hamster's wheel. You jump in, cycle around, cycle around again and again and sometimes have to jump off before you lose your lunch. It can be dispiriting. I tend to get a lot of "almost" rejection letters, where I'm dubbed a semi-finalist or finalist in a contest or submissions round. It's enough to keep me going, but it takes a push to jump back into the wheel and go around some more. So many have said this, but it's true--you keep at it for love. Nothing less, nothing more. If your love fades, you should get out of the game. If your love persists, nothing can stop you. Stall you, yes, but not stop you.

Another difficulty for me is physical. Anyone who has spent adulthood trying to balance family, work, and writing knows that this is enough, and when you add chronic illness(es) to that mix, the balance is easier to throw off. I've learned to give myself permission to take my time, to get it right, to take time off for self-nurturing when I need to. I don't buy the old saw that you have to write every day to call yourself a writer. Martin Espada says he writes in spurts sometimes; at least he did when his son was very young. Any family woman/poet I know who is still teaching also expresses this frustration/need to alternate energies, to spend some periods on work or self/family nurture and others on nurturing the craft. I comfort myself in the knowledge that ideas are always brimming in my subconscious, even when I'm not hitting the page as regularly as I would like. 

It helps that I always try to write when my students are writing, too. I often give a ten- to twenty-minute writing prompt for idea generation in creative writing classes, so I practice my craft along with my students. While this practice rarely produces finished work, it often spearheads a new piece, or gives me lines or images for work already in progress. 

Kathleen McCoy : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms of literature can’t?

I love this question because I actually think about it a good bit. While I enjoy all forms of creative writing and art in general, poetry is to literature what music is to the performing arts--a sacred space, a language of its own, a touchstone, a portal. Poetry is the first place I go for consolation and the one place I work out my own voice, my way of saying something true, something that's both grounded and, well, transcendent in the sense that it starts with the banal, the fractal, the quotidian, and spirals down and up again to a kind of song that enlarges the perspective. At least, that's my aim; it's what I find the poems do that inspire me most. That's what Seamus Heaney does in "Digging," when an image of his father digging potatoes finds analogy in the poet's pen which is then compared to a gun. It's also what Audre Lorde does shockingly well in her little-known poem "The Women of Dan Dance with Their Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors" ("I come as a woman/dark and open . . . .") 

Literature in general can tell the truth "but tell it slant," as Dickinson wrote, but it's poetry that springs from oral tradition, from music, from storytelling, and from history/herstory. The rhythm, the images, the finely wrought phrases make earworms and mud pies to delight the senses and haunt the memory.

Poetry has to speak to the spirit in content and in form, however trifling the subject may be. I remind my students that this is the difference between subject and theme, that you can write about absolutely anything, but what you say will be larger, greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, this can be said of a novel or story or play or song as well. However, in poetry, the theme and the form are so intricately interwoven, so compacted, so layered that it can make more memorable music. In that way, poetry is the most intimate guest. It comes for just a minute but its presence remains for many years like pleasant scent that just will not dissipate.

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.