A Poem Holds Everything
Interview with Kay Cosgrove by Blue Edge Books
Do you find a relationship between words and writing and life in the US in 2023?
What I love and admire about many poems are the fragments stitched together. How the broken pieces and brokenness itself, and broken thought and experiences make a whole poem, a whole culture, a whole life and maybe even a whole truth. I love when poems contain a range of references from high to low, from the Greeks to popcorn; how true that feels to my experience in America, living in the 21st century, being a person. It is so human to want it all and then more of it.
I think American poetry today shows its fingerprints. It is not presented as flawless and that becomes part of the making of poems. And in a certain kind of way, makes a poem come alive. It values the mundane. It is democratic. It is full of contradictions.
Do you find a relationship between words and writing, and being a mom?
Something I’ve realized these last few years is that being a poet and everything else I do are not separate enterprises. One always informs the other. And it’s true for becoming a parent. I had no idea when I had my first child what a massive, scary and inspiring undertaking it is to have a child. And, on a smaller scale, it was the same when I first wrote a poem. I went into each blindly, without much thought really, and was floored by the way both changed my life. I can’t go back to being the person I was before I wrote poems or became a mom. There are difficult days in each endeavor and such indescribably rich moments of joy. Most of all, I can’t believe how little I knew of being alive before I became a mom, before I wrote a poem. I’m very grateful.
How do you think about poetry?
I think of poetry as the container of the possible, for what we want to understand, or examine, or get to know, or can’t say. “A moment’s monument” is how Christina Rossetti described the sonnet, but I think that definition applies to all forms. I love that a poem lets you really look hard at an instant, from all directions. And to move through it again or for the first time, in ways you didn’t or couldn’t in life. It’s outside of time and space. A poem holds everything.
Visit her website at kaycosgrove.com.