Across four collections of poems, Kathleen McGookey has demonstrated a mastery of the prose poem format. In McGookey’s hands, the prose poem is a deft instrument for querying grief and new life as a single if complex organism, writing along the interstitial spaces that link each extremity of our mortality. Through McGookey’s grace-giving but unflinching eyes, grief is no enemy to be fought off, and birth is no herald of unsullied joy. Each informs the other, and they find union in her taut but tender constructions. In her most recent poems — including in her 2019 collection Instructions for My Imposter — she isolates individual moments of whimsy and melancholy, freezing time to make each momentary image count in turn, and creating a scrapbook of everyday life as her children near adulthood.
David Nilsen: Before we look at anything thematically, I want to talk about format. Why prose poetry?
Kathleen McGookey: It goes back to when I was a graduate student and had a full-time job. I wasn’t a TA, so I developed this routine because my job was overwhelming me and I didn’t have time to write. I would get up every morning half an hour early and just write freely in a notebook, filling the margins, filling three pages, and then close the notebook and go about my work day. After several days had passed, I’d look back and highlight phrases and images, and then I’d try to gather all those into a poem. The poems weren’t narrative and linear, they were more like collage. Because I was starting with the filled pages, I just kept that format of paragraphs when I finished my pieces. It felt natural. Later on, I just felt like the prose poem was where I could find my voice when I sat down to write.
David: Did you have any particular influences that you looked to?
Kathleen: In graduate school, it was so helpful to have professors who recommended things to me. It saved me a lot of time wandering around. They recommended Killarney Clary, Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End. I also read a lot of Nin Andrews, whom I really admire. Gary Young. Of course, you can’t talk about the prose poem in grad school without discussing Russell Edson. I feel like Young and Edson are always in the background for me. Edson’s such a large figure. I write some things that are a a little surreal and I know those all go back to him. Another influence is Marosa di Giorgio. She’s from Uruguay, and she has a beautiful book called Diadem that came out in 2012.
David: I imagine there are advantages and disadvantages to using this form. When you’re writing verse poetry, you have the advantage of letting those line breaks and spaces speak some things you don’t have to put into words. What are some of the advantages and constraints of using the prose poem?
Kathleen: One advantage I’ve found is — and Gary Young says this — it’s a more modest form. It doesn’t announce itself. The pressure is lowered on the writer but also for the reader. The reader can come across it and not feel like they need to explain it and understand it and they can just experience it. We’re surrounded by prose every day. A newspaper, a cookbook, a magazine. So one advantage is that prose is all around us. That might also be a constraint. You have to figure out how to create rhythm without line breaks. The way I do it is by looking closely at the sentence and different kinds of sentences. How to pace the prose poem by varying sentence structure and rhythm. I love to do that at the editing stage. Am I using repetition of words or phrases or structure, and creating the music that way? The reader might not expect it, but it’s a pleasure to do all that in a form that looks like it might not offer those things.
David: How does one of your poems actually come together? Do you create one of these entirely in one sitting, or are you jotting down images and thoughts over time and then pulling those together?
Kathleen: Now the process is, I sit down and write the poem entirely. I’ll get a good draft in one sitting across a couple of hours. I’ll write draft after draft after draft. I’ll handwrite it and continually edit while I’m writing. Toward the end of that process, I’ll enter it on the computer and see how it looks typed out. I don’t usually sit down with an idea of what I’m going to say. I’ll read a bit, or write a bit, until I find what the poem’s going to be about.
David: Let’s talk about themes. Across your three most recent books — Stay, Heart in a Jar, and Instructions for My Imposter— you really go for the big themes — birth, death, new life, mortality. Looking at Stay from 2014, where that is perhaps most explicit, can you give me a bit of life context for what was going on in the background that led to the poems in that collection?
Kathleen: My dad had a brain disease for about 10 years before he died. He was diagnosed so we knew about it, and we were watching him decline and taking care of him. Also, about four months before he died, my mom was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. She had been his main caregiver. That was a shock. While that was happening, I had my first child when my mom got sick. It was something I never thought would happen, that both parents would be sick and I’d be taking care of an infant. It was a lot.
David: Were these big themes conscious and front-of-mind, or was this just what you were living and then reflecting back later you picked these things apart?
Kathleen: Yeah, I couldn’t get away from it. It was there all the time. When I had some time to write, when someone was taking care of my infant a couple hours a week, I couldn’t look away. I had to write about what was happening. I was looking at it more in terms of very small details. I don’t think I intended to talk about those huge themes. I had to talk about giving my infant a bath after my parents died, thinking about him experiencing grief someday. I had to write about the little post-it notes my mom left on the mirror for inspiration during her day. So even when the subject felt so large around me, I felt like the way into that was through these small, concrete, mundane things.
It was hard to have this happening all at once — but one really beautiful thing was that taking care of an infant is a lot like taking care of an older person at the end of their life. They need help in the same ways. That was a lovely moment, but a sorrowful moment at the same time.
David: It’s the same kind of nurturing, but in one case you’re shepherding them toward life, and in the other you’re shepherding them toward death.
Kathleen: Exactly. And to have both at the same time, it was such a strange bookend, or circle. It’s almost cliché, but it didn’t feel that way. It’s been 17 years since that happened. My son is 18 now. It was a number of years before a publisher accepted the collection.
David: One thing you do throughout all three books is personify and then abstractly look at particular aspects of your personality. In Stay, for example, you personify your anger in several poems. Can you talk a little about the role of that process in your writing?
Kathleen: I’m interested to know where you see that in Instructions for My Imposter, but we can come back to that. Initially I borrowed that idea from Shivani Mehta. She’s another Press 53 writer. In her book Useful Information for the Soon to Be Beheaded she writes a series of poems “to my sadness.” I loved what she did there. I settled on anger because I was feeling it quite a bit. When you’re feeling grief, you’re not expecting to feel really angry, but I did at times. Once I started doing that, writing about my anger as a personified being, it was so much fun. I almost worried because they were fairly easy. I didn’t have to write as many drafts. So in some ways it was like getting to play, but at the same time, it was playing with this volatile emotion.
Self Help
Yesterday I locked My Anger out of the house. I said Unless you’re bleeding, you can’t come back in. For a while she rattled the windows and doors, but the locks held. Stillness enveloped the house like snow. Dust motes lingered in shafts of sunlight that glazed my cluttered rooms. I took a bath. I baked a pie. Out in the yard, My Anger juggled bones. She filled three wheelbarrows with dug-up rocks, took an axe to the birch, and stacked the wood for winter. Already she’d shrunk to half her usual size. Black walnuts thumped to the ground, encased in hard green shells. She stained her hands and clothes when she gathered them. Even though she had so much more to do, she crouched in the rubble and cried.
David: I could see that as a form of therapy. We could probably all benefit from taking our individual emotions and talking to them.
Kathleen: I’ve always been grateful that I’m a writer. It helped to do that on the page and have my relationships with my family separate from that. I think it helped preserve things, but you’d have to ask my family.
David: You asked about where I see that in Instructions, and you’re right that it’s not nearly as explicit. You’re not naming it on the page. But I feel like it’s between the poems throughout the book. In Stay you’re directly working with the immediacy of grief and joy. In Heart in a Jar you’re starting to get removed from that. In Instructions, I see this being the one that is most about you. I might be projecting, but I feel like you really are trying to put together a useful set of descriptions of yourself in some way. You’re looking toward this imagined you and saying this is who you are. I feel like you’re doing that throughout, but it’s all between the poems.
Are you familiar with the asemic poet S. Roderick Roxas-Chua? He writes poems where he creates visual art to accompany each. He always talks about the invisible poem, where you have the poem on the page and then a mirror or shadow poem that says what’s between the lines. I don’t always see that, but I feel like that’s at work in Instructions.
Kathleen: I love that. I don’t know that writer, but I would love to read his work. I love what you’re saying, but I don’t know exactly how to respond to it.
David: Let’s come back to that. Throughout Stay, sorrow has a similar role to anger. In “When Sorrow Arrives” and “Sorrow Came,” sorrow comes to you, and what I thought was interesting was the tenderness and gentleness of sorrow. It’s not coming in as harsh grief, but more as a friend.
Kathleen: I wrote those because when I would sit down to write, it felt like there was another presence with me. It felt like sorrow was an actual presence in the room with me. It was such a strange feeling, but it wasn’t like feeling haunted, just feeling accompanied by sorrow. The more I thought about it, I felt like what a thing to have to do, to have to be with people who are suffering. It’s not sorrow’s choice to be there, but sorrow has to come. That was my mindset. I was surprised by it. Also, I wasn’t angry at sorrow. I was just feeling sorrow was with me for as long as it took. And I had no idea how long that was going to be.
David: You mentioned earlier the poem when you’re bathing your son — “Lament at Bath Time” — and realizing someday he’ll be going through something like this. I don’t think you actually have sorrow as a figure in that poem, but there’s that same sense of tenderness. It’s really a moment of joy, but it’s tinged with deep melancholy, like it’s inseparable from eventual sorrow.
Kathleen: That’s how my son’s early life was. He wasn’t aware of it, but I was so aware of it. When you have an infant, there are so many joyful times, but I was experiencing that joy inside this larger sorrow. They’re inseparable. It’s so much to bear all at once.
David: In Heart in a Jar, the very first poem is “Dear Death.” Throughout the book, you continue to directly address death. You’re very friendly in your tone with death here. There’s almost a playful whimsy in these conversations.
Kathleen: I walk every day and on these walks sometimes I felt like I was accompanied by this presence of death. By the time I wrote the poems in Heart in a Jar, I had written a lot of elegies, I was getting tired of feeling grief. I decided to go right to the source and start speaking to death bluntly, one on one. I was tired of this. In some ways, I was straight out saying, “I’m sick of you. Please go away.” The fanciful part comes because my kids were younger. There were a lot of playful times with them, as well as the language and apparatus of childhood, the way you speak to children a little differently from how you speak to adults. Some of that overlapped with how I spoke to death. I was going to be straightforward. I was going to include details of life at that time. I volunteered in my kids’ classrooms, I baked cupcakes for their Halloween parties. Death was right there, and I was a little tired of it.
David: The one that stands out to me is that one in the classroom, “Pull Up Your Red Pickup.” I found it interesting how casual you were with death. You weren’t having these massive philosophical explorations.
Kathleen: I think it’s because I had been having these conversations for so long. The thing that surprised me about going to those parties was that with grief, you get blindsided by it. I remember going to one of those early Halloween parties at school. I live in a small town. The parents and grandparents would be there, sometimes both sets of grandparents, and here I am, just myself. That’s all I can offer from my family. And I would get floored by grief, it was such a strange feeling. If anyone’s ever been to one of those classroom events, they’re incredibly chaotic. The teachers do a good job, but there’s just so much going on. And to be feeling the way I was in the middle of it, and to be surprised by it, it was like, oh my gosh, I really hate this. I’m sure I was the only one there thinking about death being in the corner of the room. It was strange.
David: It feels like you have a bungie cord connecting death and new life. Whenever one comes up, it seems to pull the other one with it. Does that feel accurate?
Kathleen: I think so. Can you think of a specific poem, or is it more general?
David: It’s general, but I think there are specific examples. Quite possibly my favorite poem of yours is “Possum Skull in the Field” from Heart in a Jar. You’re not directly interacting with death here, but you have this very tender, gentle look at death as this possum is dying and decaying and giving life, and then at the end it concludes with the joy and wonder of this child who has found treasure in half of a possum’s skull. It feels like, if you’re going to explore death, or the wonder of a child, there is this elastic cord that can’t help but tug the other into the poem.
Kathleen: I think it’s really true, what you say, looking at it now. I do have to say, when I sit down to write, it’s not on my mind to connect them. This poem came to be because my son found this possum skull. At the same time, I was asking my former teacher Jack Ridl for a prompt so I could write. I was super busy. Jack had suggested I write a prayer from the point of view of an inanimate object. My son brought this skull home and I wrote from that. I wasn’t consciously connecting birth and death, but I think the poem does that. In my more recent poems, I’m moving away from it.
David: Instructions for My Imposter brings a whole new set of images. You’re not dealing with a direct, identifiable theme. I don’t know that I can say what this collection is all about.
Kathleen: I’m growing out of those earlier themes. What was it you said before, that they’re kind of between the poems? I think death may be kind of haunting those poems, or have a presence, but not as much.
David: I feel like when death does show up here, it’s no longer controlling the conversation.
Kathleen: I agree, and it’s a relief.
Instructions for My Imposter
Do not burn bridges with the school secretaries or the librarian who lets you use her copy machine. You’d drown in a minute if they didn’t keep the boy’s migraine pills in a drawer, unauthorized. At home, you’ll need sharpened pencils, dollar bills, and a place to store permission slips. People call and hang up all day long. When stillness fills the house, scrub honey off the counter, sweep sugar off the floor, and glue the yellow gauze butterfly back together. After school, the girl drops it in the Goodwill bin. Almost everyone will speak to you from the living room while you wash dishes. Don’t try to sleep when you’re mad. Instead, spread peanut butter on bread, wait for sunrise’s blurred silk, and make a list of what you’ll accomplish today. At the top, write Forget About Time. It doesn’t care one bit about you, while three kinds of blue — wind, water, sky — rush past.
David: One exception to that I think is “Star-Crossed.” It feels like your relationship to death has come full circle, to where there’s almost a sense of death playing a romantic role, like it’s a relationship you have.
Kathleen: I’m not sure I would call it romantic. I think I was looking at the idea of luck, and bad luck. This probably goes back to that more playful way of being with death that you were talking about. The feeling that no matter what I want, death is always there. I know that’s not original. Hopefully the poem does some unexpected things, or offers enough of the concrete world to soften that cliché, that there’s no escape.
David: You mentioned luck, and it makes me think of “Into the Throat of Morning.” You personify luck there. “My luck lives in a rice paper house I keep on my bookshelf.” Can you touch briefly on how luck interacts with what you’re doing in these poems?
Kathleen: There’s another poem that talks about luck. I think about luck both ways — good luck and bad. There’s no controlling it. It visits you, and then you’re left with the aftermath. I think that’s all I can say. “Today on Norris Road” is the other, where I’m walking in the horse’s prints in the sand. A writer in my writing group commented on the unusual last line of “Telling myself it was for luck,” because you didn’t know what kind of luck it was going to be.
David: Do all these individual images exist independently, or do they have a cohesive project they’re working on together? Are you crafting an image of identity in the aftermath of death and life in these previous collections, or are they just these things you’re observing?
Kathleen: I wish I could say it was the first one, but I’m afraid it’s the second. The images of daily life are existing independently except that I’m always the one observing them. There might be one or two persona poems, but mostly it’s me. The common denominator is that I am the one experiencing them.
David: I wonder if that’s still embarking on that project in a way? Because the common denominator is you and you’re recording these daily moments, and especially in light of what the previous two collections were with these big themes of mortality, and your hope now that you’re moving past those themes, what is left is the aftermath of those, or the aftermath of luck. Who are you when those aren’t your themes? Is that too much of a reach?
Kathleen: I mean, it makes sense now. I don’t think that was my project sitting down. I felt relieved at not having those other large subjects right in front of me, so close. It was a relief to move into poems that were more celebratory, like “Living Inside Sunrise.” To write a poem like that that felt like I was celebrating the daily life with a small child. I was relieved to be able to write this. It was something my daughter said: “Wouldn’t it be great to live inside the sunrise.” We were looking at a sunset but she got it confused. “Gratitude Practice” is another. My kids were older, my family had grown up a bit. I finally felt like these were moments where joy could take center stage. It gets back to what you were talking about with what’s in between the poems, thinking about luck or bad luck, and what if things go wrong. That’s in the background.
David: You have your most immediate sensory details in this collection. In Instructions for My Imposter, you have hunger, color, all these physical details, because you’re right in the moment.
Kathleen: I think that’s a direct result of life with children. Your daily life is so concrete. It feels like you’re never going to have another abstract thought. I think that’s actually really good for poetry, if you can capture those concrete details and have enough quiet time in your mind to do that.
David: Your son is 17 and your daughter is a few years younger, so they’re about to enter adulthood and presumably leave home. Looking at all the themes we’ve talked about, how does that affect your life and writing? That’s its own grieving process in a way, both joy and grief.
Kathleen: What it does is, it makes me aware of time passing in a way I haven’t felt before. When kids are little, it feels like time isn’t passing. The days are so long. Time is moving extremely slowly. Now it feels like I can’t slow time down, and where did it go, even though I know where it went because I was there. It’s a very bittersweet and strange time. The poem on the back cover of this collection, “The Waiting,” that’s really the answer to your question of what’s it’s like. Looking at my kids and seeing all the changes they’ve grown into, and seeing a finite number of days they’re still going to be with us here at home and seeing that slip away. What it makes me want to do is make time stop just briefly, which is what a poem can do. It can stop that moment in time.
David: What’s next you’re working on?
Kathleen: I think I have enough poems to make another collection. I haven’t felt like I wanted to take that on just yet. I keep in the back of my mind that I should look at that stack. I have a number of poems that could probably lead to a book but it would need to be shaped. I do have a series of postcard poems that are persona poems that I think could be a chapbook. With any luck, in a few more years, there’ll be another book.
David: Have you noticed what your progression is in what you’re doing with these new poems?
Kathleen: I think the evolution is that the poems are getting more pared down to the essence of what they’re trying to do. I think they’re getting smaller and they’re getting clearer in terms of images and emotions. When you become a parent, what’s essential is what you’re going to get done. That same thing is happening in my poems. They’re including only the essential detail and emotion.
David: They’re becoming sharper instruments?
Kathleen: Yes, I think so.
David: Is there anything from Instructions for My Imposter that we haven’t touched on that you feel is important for people to see or feel or hear? Perhaps a particular poem you want to touch on?
Kathleen: Well, these poems kind of bookend the book. The first is “Let Me Be as Patient as that Missing Pet Tortoise.” It’s kind of a prayer to myself. This started with that internet story of the family who found their pet tortoise that had been missing 30 years. I chose to believe the story, whether or not it’s true. This is a prayer to myself of wondering what that was like and how that was possible. How is it possible to survive something like that? That starts out the book. And then “Gratitude Practice” toward the end is a conscious effort of practicing being grateful for things that don’t feel wonderful at the time but are still worth it. These two create a nice circle in the book. I would be glad for a reader to notice again the small details of my life. Hopefully they resonate.
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