Interview with Mary Mackey: In This Burning World

This blog is an interview with award-winning author Mary Mackey: poet, novelist and nonfiction writer.

Mary Mackey

Zack Rogow: On reading your book of poems In This Burning World, I was struck by how deftly you change voices. The speakers of the poems range from a goddess, to a young girl, to an older woman hoping her spouse is able to overcome health challenges. How is it possible to weave such different voices into one collection? 

Mary Mackey: The voices of the goddesses are those of the Earth speaking to us. The individual voices are those of various imagined narrators who are definitely not me. For example, if I believed—as one of my narrators says—that “birds without names” were carrying me “south on a carpet of feathers,” I would be a very strange person indeed, instead of a rather boringly normal former Midwesterner.

I’m a novelist as well as a poet and have had a lot of experience creating characters. Because I created both the imagined goddesses and the individual narrators, I could do anything I wanted with them. In addition, they have a lot in common: they’re all speaking out of love for this beautiful green planet and all the living things on it. Whether they speak in peace or in anger, whether they plead or lament, whether their words come from dreams or visions or scientific observations, they all agree about one thing: the Earth as we have known it since the last Ice Age is worth preserving. Given this, I didn’t find it difficult to weave their voices into one collection.

Q.: You’ve said that your new poetry book In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse is different from your other collections. How?

Mary: All my previous collections have contained poems I wrote at various times with no single theme in mind. For example, in The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, you can find a lament for the burning of the Amazon rainforests; a meditation on infinity; poems about rural life in Kentucky in the 1950s; love poems; and a comic poem in which Leda reveals that Zeus (in his swan outfit) was a less-than-satisfactory lover.

 

In This Burning World is different. Taken together, the poems form a single, unified conversation about what I imagine may lie ahead of us as the climate of the Earth changes; and what we can do to preserve hope, joy, and compassion in the face of this slowly evolving catastrophe. I wanted them to be lyrical, striking, layered, and compelling; to cross political boundaries and look at what we all have in common on this beautiful green planet of ours; and, most of all, to speak to each other as well as to the reader.

 

Q.: Did arranging the poems in this book present you with any special challenges?

 

Mary: The main challenge I faced was not the arrangement of the poems themselves, but the emotional impact the arrangement would have on the reader. I wanted my readers to feel we were looking at the future together and that there was hope. So, I wrote a Preface—something I rarely do—in which I spoke about the two “burnings” in the title: the burning of climate change—which is obvious; and the burning of love, which is more nuanced. I said that if we can’t undo the effects of climate change, we can still choose to love and care for one another with passionate devotion; burn with the determination to shelter and comfort those who have lost everything; create places where grief cannot enter; and love one another as we love ourselves.

 

Then I arranged the poems into eight sections: In the first section are poems that imagine what the future might be like. In the second, I imagine a modern Cassandra making prophecies that are ignored. In subsequent sections, I celebrate resilience, luck and defiance, and the beauty of the world we live in now; ending with love poems from my series “The Kama Sutra of Kindness,” and a final poem about the joy of irrational laughter.

Mary Mackey became a writer by tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of nine poetry collections and 14 novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion.

_____________________________________ Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Putting Together a Poetry Manuscript: A Conversation with Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

This blog is an interview with poet and teacher Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet. 

Zack Rogow: What’s the biggest difference between writing poems one at a time and putting together a book-length poetry manuscript?

 

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet: Writing a poem requires close-up responsiveness at the level of the word, the image, the line break. A manuscript asks you to open your aperture, to apply that same amalgam of thought and feeling to a more complex construction.

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

When I first tried to assemble a manuscript, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. it took a long time for me to even figure out what a manuscript was, beyond a pile of poems. I’d think, Is any of what I’m doing working? Am I making things better or worse? I have no idea. Then during my MFA, I worked with Marianne Boruch, who’s a flat-out genius. She had me read a bunch of first books, look at them close up. What happens from poem to poem to poem, and what is the larger arc? How do the poems speak to each other?

What book helped you most?

 

Probably Louise Glück, Firstborn. Her sensitivity to image and sound and especially rhythm (which doesn't get talked about enough as a throughline) helped me understand how poems that weren’t necessarily part of an overt narrative could speak to, and build on, each other. I realized that I had to trust that my own poems were also talking to each other, even if I couldn’t hear them yet.

 

So should a poetry manuscript have a single theme or narrative thread?

 

I'm not going to tell you that. I mean, should it? No. Can it? Of course. And yeah, “project books” are having a moment—or maybe we’re already in the backlash. A book can be drawn together by voice, energy, image, recurring obsession… the perceptions of a human consciousness moving through the world.

 

Take Berryman’s Dreamsongs. They don't exactly have a narrative thread, but…

 

They have a vibe.

 

Berryman is obviously problematic in a lot of ways, but still, a great example. 77 Dream Songs showed me what a book could be, what a voice could be. Its central consciousness is tied up with voice as masquerade, aspects of the self enacted as characters. For me, tracing that kind of shapeshifting is a big part of ordering a manuscript, along with movement of sound and rhythm.

 

What about chronology? Should poems set in childhood come first?

 

A novel can have flashbacks and flash-forwards and other temporal devices; why not a book of poems? And of course, not every manuscript is autobiographical, even given a consistent speaker.

 

How many poems do you start with when you put together a manuscript, and how many do you end up with?

 

My first book went through so many poems, and structures, and forms in the seven years I sent it out. The wait was frustrating—but I learned so much in that time. The first draft had maybe 30 poems. Then it got longer, and shorter again, and longer, in a kind of accordion movement. That’s happened with almost every manuscript I've worked on, my own and others’.

So how do you know when it’s time to put together a manuscript?

When I start to feel the poems as an interconnecting web, writing back into their ideas and images.

 

What if you feel a gap in your manuscript, but you wrote the poems on either side of the gap a long time ago?

 

Don’t try to go back to who you were then. Think instead in terms of call-and-response across time. I sometimes ask students to write out an old poem, then write into the space between the lines. They end up with either a new take on the original poem or raw material for a new one.

 

With my current manuscript, I started by writing about autoimmune disorder, this literally self-attacking system, in part as a metaphor for women’s internalized perfectionism. I followed the questions those first poems raised, and the world flooded in—all our disorientation and suffering and grasping for control. What’s the connection between the ideal of the optimized self and rising fascism? What is it to be a person, or a nation, or a community? I say this as a continually recovering perfectionist, an intersectional feminist, a neurodivergent human with chronic illness who thinks most easily in metaphor. You trace the constellations, feeling a spark that can leap the gap.

 

How long should it take for a poem that connects previous poems to appear?

 

We live in a culture that prioritizes success and achievement and finishing things. But poems don't work that way. You have to be patient, wait for the poem you weren’t ready to write before this moment. Often I’ll finish one poem, then maybe five years later, be surprised by another that approaches the same territory much more deeply.

 

The flip side is that sometimes a poem just doesn’t work in a particular manuscript. Many poems I love, poems published in my favorite journals, have never ended up in a book.

 

Sometimes they're the beginning of a new book.

 

Yes—and when you’re working on a first book, it's very hard to think beyond that. Eventually, each book might include a few poems that are still working out questions from your last one, and a few that prefigure the poems to come. I often go through a long period of writing stuff that doesn’t end up in the book I’m working on, because my emerging obsessions are still, well, emerging.

 

Do you have a particular editor or publisher or reader in mind when you're compiling a manuscript?

 

When I’m writing the poems, I just need to write them. I guess there's some consciousness that my consciousness is whispering to, but it feels strange to ask that question until much later on. Once I begin putting a manuscript together, then I can start to see it from outside, and to think about where it might be in good company.

 

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (lisagluskinstonestreet.com) is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Plume, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She reads, writes, edits, teaches, and works one-on-one with writers from her backyard Poetry Shack. She has terrible handwriting but is surprisingly good at math.

_____________________________________

Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Interview with Poet Joan Larkin about Her Book Old Stranger

Joan Larkin’s sixth book of poems is Old Stranger (Alice James Books 2024). Her previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award, and Blue Hanuman (Hanging Loose Press). A lifelong teacher, Joan has served on the faculties of Sarah Lawrence College, Smith College, and Brooklyn College, among others. Her honors include Lambda and NEA awards and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Joan Larkin, poet and author of Old Stranger

Zack Rogow: Many of the poems in your collection Old Stranger are very particular to your own life and memories, and yet they resonate deeply for me. How do you present highly personal experiences so they reach the hearts of readers with different backgrounds and stories from your own? 

Joan Larkin: I’m almost never thinking about a possible reader when I write. Instead, I’m focused on trying to find words for some experience or feeling that won’t let go of me. But thinking about who might be listening does come into the revision process. The reader matters––I don’t want to be obscure,  nor do I want to explain what the images convey. To make a world the reader can enter, I work to describe what I’m seeing with an exactness and vividness that satisfies me as fresh and true, and to make a kind of “mouth music” that gives me a kind of primal pleasure. I feel surprised and lucky when a reader responds with recognition. 

 

You seem to resist making conclusions or tying up loose ends in these poems. Why is it some of the poems come across more as questions than as answers, and who are the questions being asked of?

 

Though I love to end a  poem on a strong image and want it to be a memorable one, my choice not to tie up loose ends or to provide an answer is deliberate. Sometimes I go through several drafts before seeing that I can cut a final line or lines that state something I’ve already physicalized in the poem. The poem can’t be an essay. I want to make a world that goes on spinning.

The language in Old Stranger is precise and crisp, with no wasted verbiage. You also create startling combinations of words, such as “red milk,” or “well of onions her bread signature.” Do you think the texture of your writing has changed in this book, and if so, what was the progression for you to the style in this new collection?

 

I do think that the texture of my writing has changed in this book. Less chatting. More elliptical leaps. I’m less concerned with whether a line makes sense (though I do want to make sense!) than that it be alive. Ezra Pound’s “Deliver it alive” is still the test.

 

I didn’t get there alone. One example of what changed over more than a decade of conversation with a few trusted poets: I’d written a long poem about 17th century Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi, line after line filled with details from my research into her life. After a long silence, my friend Jean Valentine pointed to six lines that focused on a single painting and said, “This is the heart of the poem.” Dubious, I asked, “But is it enough?” Her reply, “It is, for me,” changed the way I saw what mattered most in the poem and in many others over the years since.

A number of the poems in Old Stranger are ekphrastic, meaning they’re inspired by a particular work of art. Those include six short poems on paintings by the German artist Paula Modersohn Becker, the woman Rainer Maria Rilke addressed so personally in his major poem “Requiem for a Friend.” What is it about a particular work of art that provokes a poem for you?

 

Music and visual art––made things––have engaged and sustained me from early on. My two brief long-ago marriages were to painters, and I’ve fallen in blind love with singers and other artists, my attachment in part the result of mistaking the maker for the making-ness. Turpentine fumes and the squeak of a bow still attract me like nothing else. I’m drawn to what can I learn from the artist’s process and skill, vision and commitment, and what it can touch in me.

 

The Paula Modersohn-Becker self-portrait I chose for the cover of Old Stranger looked to me as if her face were a whitish mask she was holding up, both covering and revealing the face underneath––suggesting the play between her art and interior life. I saw the beaded necklace as the sole marker of femaleness. The expression of mouth, eyes, and hand spoke of a vivid consciousness I wanted to know more about. Modersohn-Becker painted it in the first decade of the 20th century, long before I attended literature classes in which work by women poets was absent. The college library’s sole book about Emily Dickinson was part of the American Men of Letters series. But Modersohn-Becker, like Dickinson, knew what she was: “wood, with a gift for burning” (Adrienne Rich’s self-image in her 1970s poem “Song”). Modersohn-Becker produced strong, original work before her early death from childbirth. Her cut-short artist’s life, as well as what I saw in a revelatory gallery exhibit, drew me to make ekphrastic work based on her paintings.  Similarly, Camille Claudel’s tragic career and Bonnard’s wife’s role as his barely visible model inspired poems of loss and erasure.

 

Some of the poems in Old Stranger strike me as being almost a new genre, poems such as “My Father’s Tie Rack.” Those poems capture a moment of precise observation that takes place at a specific time, but one that echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past. How did you come upon that form, and do you have a way of referring to it or a name for it?

 

I think of “My Father’s Tie Rack” simply as a list poem. But in the process of revising it, I also thought, What if this could be a kind of loose sonnet? Limiting a poem to fourteen lines or imposing some other rule (for example a certain number of strong stresses to the line) helps me work the language to make it more concise and alive. There’s power in limiting one’s options.

 I often don’t know what shape a poem is going to take until some sound pattern begins to recur and a form suggests itself. But with “My Father’s Tie Rack,” I had a clear idea beforehand that I wanted to write a list poem, in this case a list of images and metaphors to evoke neckties I remembered––something extravagant and unusual about them had struck my young eyes, each tie a piece of art. I didn’t know consciously at the beginning that I wanted to convey my father’s complex, rich personality. And I had no idea that I’d end up intuitively swerving toward an image of his death (“the hole”) and the hint of power or even violence contained in the final word, “belts.” In hindsight, I see that the poem is both a portrait and an encounter.

The way this poem took shape is true of others, too, where my unconscious mind was making choices. I love your discerning that a particular observation “echoes down a tunnel of memories into the past,” but in the moment of writing, I typically don’t understand or consciously control the process. The U-turns a draft wants to take often surprise me.

           

In many poems you describe a vivid incident from your earlier years, such as “All at Once.” Are there particular types of experiences that sparked those poems?

 

I’m still thinking about familial and societal expectations of girls and women, of shame and trauma held under pressure at a depth. But though difficult past experiences still ignite poems, my old ways of seeing and representing them have changed as I’ve loosened my hold on my old story lines. “All at Once” was sparked by a memory of what people used to call a shotgun wedding (do we still say that?), followed by a miscarriage in a car on a cross-country journey. What I wanted to do in that poem was to look back without attachment and evoke the physical sensations of that awful moment in the car. I wanted to find language for the life of the body––the house of pleasure and trauma, wounding and healing.

_____________________________________

Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

“Yes”—The Power of a Single Word, by Federico Roncoroni

This charming and thoughtful essay is an excerpt from the Italian writer Federico Roncoroni’s book Words: A Private Dictionary [Parole: Un dizionario privato]. Roncoroni talks about the word “Yes” and how many shades of meaning and emotion even a tiny word can express. Translated and adapted from the Italian by Zack Rogow. Thanks to Sabrina Orefici for bringing this essay to my attention.

Federico Roncoroni (1944–2021)

Yes is such a short word, but so dangerous. It should be used only with the utmost caution. 

It takes just an instant to pronounce the word Yes, but that little word can have disastrous effects.

 

In fact, when it’s not used merely to answer in the affirmative a question that is in itself innocent and innocuous (“Do you like pistachio ice cream?”—“Yes”) or to express assent to a specific proposal of limited scope (“We’re gonna go see that new action movie, you wanna come?”—“Yes”) there is the risk that the word will bind you to a solemn commitment, a promise or a choice with effects that can last a lifetime (“Do you take for your lawfully wedded spouse…”— “Yes”). Everyone knows that answering Yes to such a question has serious consequences, much heavier than being considered a pistachio ice cream lover or spending a bad evening sitting through a boring film in the company of boring friends.

 

The affirmative and binding force of this little word is reinforced by the fact that this one syllable is actually the equivalent of an entire sentence: “Did you buy the newspaper?” “Yes” (I bought the newspaper). So, if you really can’t use its opposite, which is just as short but disengages rather than engages (if you say Yes you’re definitely signing on for something, but if you say No you’re turning in the opposite direction), it’s advisable just to keep quiet and hide behind expressions like “Don’t know,” or “Lemme think about it,” or “We’ll see.”

 

This little word is no less dangerous on the level of significance, rich as it is in shades of meaning depending on your intonation, how you say it, and the pitch you use to release that phoneme, all of which communicate a vast array of sensations and emotions, not always easy to decipher.

 

In actuality, a simple Yes can be, depending on the situation, whispered murmured susurrated meowed stammered barked shouted screamed or muttered under your breath. It can be beseeched requested imposed extorted or demanded. A Yes can be spontaneous sudden impulsive hasty sincere frank blunt cordial false treacherous forced unexpected expected sarcastic providential advantageous or disadvantageous wrong useless absurd too late liberating enthusiastic formal warm festive passionate cold icy humiliating or servile. A Yes can be conclusive decisive determinant and even definitive.

 

It can open up new horizons and perspectives, or it can get you into deep trouble trap and ensnare.

 

Yes can also be used ironically to say that you really have no intention of doing what the other person requested: “Yes…sure, tomorrow,” or “Yes, in your dreams.”

 

When repeated, a Yes can mean forceful agreement, or more often doubt, depending on the tone: “Yes, yes… of course I believe you.”

 

Please avoid substituting for Yes the word Affirmative, which is best left to military personnel, and also avoid saying Absolutely, a highly ambiguous word at best.

 

If you just precede Yes with an article, which is, of all parts of speech the most attentive servant, the word Yes can also function as a noun:

“Was that a Yes?”

“All in favor? The Yeses have it.”

No less a writer than Dante immortalized the Yes as a noun in Canto XXXIII of The Inferno, using it to portray his homeland:

Italy “…that beautiful country where the Yes resounds.”

 

from Parole: Un dizionario privato, copyright 2015 by Federico Roncoroni, Marcello Sensini, and Mondadori Education S.p.A. All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

_____________________________________________

Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

x