This blog is an interview with award-winning author Mary Mackey: poet, novelist and nonfiction writer.
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| Mary Mackey |
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, so I didn’t find it difficult to weave their voices into one collection.
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 is 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.
_____________________________________ Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
