Paper Sky: Interview with Kathleen McGookey

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​The Mackinaw: You’ve been writing prose poetry for over 20 years, and your first book, Whatever Shines, was also a collection of prose poems. Tell us how you found prose poetry, and why this form works so well for you.
 
Kathleen McGookey: I was in graduate school when I first started writing prose poems, and I was grateful my teachers suggested other prose poets for me to read, to help speed up my learning. They recommended Killarney Clary, Russell Edson, and Gary Young. Pretty early on, I also discovered Peter Johnson’s journal The Prose Poem:  An International Journal which introduced me to a lot of contemporary prose poets. In 2001, the Great River Arts Institute held a conference on the prose poem and I met Nin Andrews, Robert Bly, and Mary Koncel. It was wonderful to be with so many talented prose poets.  
 
I really love that a prose poem looks like an ordinary paragraph, yet it delivers so much more—attention to language, concrete imagery, rhythms, simile, metaphor, repetition, musicality—that is, it delivers everything a poem contains, except line breaks. I love playing with sentence structure and prose rhythms to create tension, which can seem invisible in a prose poem. Gary Young said that a prose poem is a modest form; it doesn’t draw attention to itself. I like that. A prose poem is approachable and invites a reader in because it looks unassuming. Every day, we are surrounded by prose and paragraphs, most of which are not as interesting and magical as prose poems.
 
The Mackinaw: Tell us how Paper Sky came together. What was the creative process like?
 
Kathleen McGookey: My process is not very organized. I try to write poems regularly–I try for a poem a week. Eventually the poems piled up. One day I filled up my gas tank and the total was $53.53, and because my publisher is Press 53, I took that as a sign to ask if they’d be interested in another book. Thankfully, they were. So I printed out all the poems I’d written in the last four years, and began choosing the ones that I felt most drawn to. Organizing the book is always the hardest part. I looked for poems that talked to each other in terms of theme and imagery; I also spent time reading the last line of one poem and the first line of the potential next poem. I knew I wanted a handful of poems from my chapbook Cloud Reports to be woven throughout the book as a kind of spine. So I spaced those throughout. Once I gave the manuscript to my editor Tom Lombardo, he had suggestions about the order, which I took into account. I know I changed the last poem in the book based on his suggestions. I know I also overuse the word “heart,” so at one point, I cut that word as much as I could, and sometimes cut whole poems. Later I missed “heart,” so I put it back in a few places.
 
The Mackinaw: In Paper Sky, and other poems I have heard or read, recurring themes are memory, everyday life, and the natural world. How do you transform these essentials of life into poetry? What drives that?
 
Kathleen McGookey: I wish I knew! I think it’s partly my process. For many of these poems, I went to my desk to write without anything specific in mind. Because so many terrible things were happening in the world (and still are), I’d spend the first few minutes at my desk just breathing and trying to calm down. I’d look out my window, and begin by describing what I saw. Eventually a memory might enter the poem, or an emotion, and I would incorporate it. I do feel my life is ordinary. But paying very close attention to a moment or an image or an emotion is a way to preserve it, isolate it, and maybe turn it into art. 
 
The Mackinaw: Are there other specific themes that won’t let you go?
 
Kathleen McGookey: I think I’m always writing about grief, about time and the awareness of time passing, about how joy and loss are two sides of the same coin, about the lives I didn’t lead. I wish I could write more poems of celebration and pure joy, and more funny poems.
 
The Mackinaw: Was there a particular poem in Paper Sky that was especially challenging to write? What happened?
 
Kathleen McGookey: “Santorini, Remember?” was the hardest to revise. I wrote the poem in response to a call for submissions about place, and while it wasn’t accepted, I was grateful I wrote the poem.  I put it away for a while, and then brought it to my writing group, who told me it had too much repetition, too much “blue,” and too much address to Santorini. Everything I was playing around with in terms of repetition was just too much. They offered ideas of some cuts, and I began cutting as much as I could. I brought it back to the group two or three times. Enough so that they were a little tired of it. I was tired of it, too. Billy Collins says, “Revision can grind a good impulse to dust,” and I was approaching that. But I stopped cutting, put the poem away again, more time passed, and I’m beginning to feel warmly toward that poem again.
 
The Mackinaw: Tell us about a few favourites from the collection, or pieces that are especially meaningful to you.
 
Kathleen McGookey: While I was in the midst of organizing this book and feeling lost, I dreamed I was sitting in a library by a fireplace with my first poetry teacher, Jack Ridl, and we were passing pages of the manuscript back and forth, and he was helping me. I woke up feeling his warmth and affirmation, and wrote down the dream and it became a poem. I know that’s not supposed to work. But I think “In My Hometown Library” works as a poem and I love that I was able to capture that dream.
 
The poem “Without You” was a very late addition to the book—I wrote it last summer, and the book came out in October. It came about as I was gathering blurbs for Paper Sky. When I wrote my friend Jack Driscoll to ask if he would write one, he replied that he would love to, but he was dying. I knew immediately that I wanted to dedicate the book to him. And I wanted to add a poem that captured the last afternoon we had spent together, sitting on his little deck by the river that ran through his backyard. That poem means so much to me, but I wish it didn’t exist and that Jack was still here.
 
The Mackinaw: Can you share a few of your favourite prose poets or favourite specific prose poems?
 
Kathleen McGookey: Oh! It’s hard to choose. I love Yehuda Amichai, Nin Andrews, Killarney Clary, Marosa di Giorgio, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Charles Simic, and Gary Young. 
 
Yehuda Amichai’s “The Box”
https://sundressblog.com/2019/06/19/aaron-abeyta-reads-yehuda-amichai/
 
Nin Andrews “Man-Thing”
Sleeping With Houdini, Boa Editions Ltd, 2007
 
Killarney Clary, “A pretty woman…”
By Common Salt, Oberlin Press, 1996
 
Charles Simic “I was stolen by the gypsies…”
https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-24970_I-was-stolen-by-the-gypsies
 
Gary Young “I put asters…”
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/48/article/411022/pdf
 
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Paper Sky, by Kathleen McGookey
Press 53, 2024
https://www.amazon.com/Paper-Sky-Prose-Kathleen-McGookey/dp/1950413861