Learning Not to Feel Invisible

~ On My Mind with Amy Small-McKinney ~

Mark Danowsky: Amy, are you interested in talking a little bit about your life and work for the On My Mind series?

Amy Small-McKinney: I’m in the process of moving. My poetry has taken a back seat, and I can feel the pain, the loss, but suspect it will return. Still, the fear of losing the poems remains. So, what is on my mind lately is aging, change and constancy, taking leaps of faith, and of course, poems, always poems.

What does this all mean to my art? Naturally, it is difficult to find the silence and space required, at least by me, to write and revise. Letting the poems emerge and then the slow process of revision is my most comfortable space in the world. Now my life is cluttered with boxes and chaos.

I find that to write I need calm and routine and some tidiness because there is so much chaos inside of me. This has not changed with aging.

MD: I think statements like the above are exactly what many need to hear. It’s real life and not the curated best (or worst) life moments that many share on social media.

ASM: Honestly aging & poetry are my obsessions now. Where do I fit? Who will read my work?

What is important? I know the answer to that— always the writing.

You mentioned “curated” moments.  That is something I am unable to do on social media.  I mean sometimes I can and do.  I am so grateful for the supportive social media poetry community.  And I love that some people are able to share so openly those best and worst moments.  I did share a bit about my husband’s death, and I do share my occasional successes.  It is just not my nature to spend a lot of time sharing there.

And, in some ways, and my own nature may contribute to that, as I age, I do feel invisible. I mean, do I push on to win awards and to be more well-known or do I simply (not so simply) let the poems lead me without the frills? How does aging inform my work? What do I want to tell others? I should add that I am grateful for dear poet friends who are especially good at marketing and more than willing to help me in that area, but what I am talking about here are the poems and what I want to say now.

What I want to say: I am very much alive. I am full of hope & energy. I love my body more now than when younger. How to put all of this in poetry?

MD: YES to all of this! Very important. Time and focus and what matters as we age. There is so much to dig into…

ASM: Sometimes when I feel very invisible and yet selfish for feeling that way— I mean I am still healthy and writing and in love and deeply involved in this world— but still feel invisible at times, I think of the poet, Ruth Stone, who won awards in her eighties. These few lines from her poem, “At Eighty-Three She Lives Alone”, published in her book, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) seem startlingly frank to me: 

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket.

You are here; your name on a postal box;

entrance into another place like vapor.

No one knows you. No one speaks to you.

This was written by a poet who won the National Book Award for this collection when she was, I believe, 87 years old. I mean clearly, she was very alive and creative and producing and yet, at moments, she reveals she feels unseen.

I am sure younger poets can feel this way and are hungry to be read. I totally understand. We are an emotionally hungry bunch. Still, there are moments, more than moments, I worry that what I have to talk about will not speak to young poets. I love working with and reading with young poets. I love learning from them and hope they learn from me. I never want to feel forced into a limited role or isolated because of age. 

So, what do we do? What should I do? I have no choice but to write. Recently, a poet who I respect and admire and who happens to be younger than I am said she needs to be seen and heard and I thought yes, yes!  

I need a sense of belongingness and to be known. I think at every age we need this, but I notice as I age, this becomes more crucial to me. I love being part of the poetry world and community. I feel blessed being part of it despite my impulse to isolate myself.

In this world, what I keep returning to are the poems. Honestly, I often have no idea where they come from.  They are knocking on my body, needing to be listened to. So, I listen. And then of course, revise and revise. So, I write and write and reach out, as much as my more introverted nature allows. To be seen and heard.

MD: You talked about working with younger poets. Talk about your experience over the past decade with your poetry group and how having writers of varying ages has had an impact.

ASM: As you know, I am a member of a Montgomery County Poet Laureate group, Montco Wordshop, started by poet Grant Clauser, and as you say, have been for many years. In this group, we have a wide age range. At this point, I no longer see age. I only hear wisdom and support. No one in the group has the same voice or style, and yet we manage to know, really know, each other’s work. We don’t try to impose our own style onto the other’s work. One member, Liz Chang, began when she was 27 and is now 40, I believe.

For many years, I studied with local poet, Leonard Gontarek. I found that invaluable, life changing, as I was finding my way with my poetry. Bruce Smith, poet, and Syracuse professor was a great support and taught me so much at a summer conference at Colgate University. For a year or two, I would send him my work, and he would respond with comments. I had given up on writing but felt deeply sad and lost. I had a very young daughter at home. My late husband cared for her while I took time for myself and my poetry and attended that summer. I never looked back after that.

Through the years, while working and raising our daughter, I sought out and studied with several poets.

I would drive to New York once a week to study with Jean Valentine. At the 92nd Street Y, I was awarded a scholarship to attend Franz Wright’s workshop. I could not stop. I had heard that Jean was part of an MFA in Poetry program so suddenly, in 2017, while caregiving my late husband, I found myself contacting the program at Drew University for information. She was no longer teaching there, but Alicia Ostriker was, among other remarkable poets, including Judith Vollmer, Afaa Michael Weaver, Michael Waters, Sarap Vap, Sean Nevin, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Ellen Dore Watson—am I forgetting anyone?—I mean a remarkable group. I remember Sarah Vap telling me that what I have to say about aging is important to younger women, that I am a scout of sorts. I remember Alicia Ostriker telling me I am not allowed to say I am sorry anymore. I love that! I read Alicia’s poetry about aging and want to thank her for her honesty because she has been my scout, my advance guard. Here are a few lines from a poem, Approaching Seventy, from “The Book of Seventy.” She is talking about, among many things, De Kooning and Alzheimer’s:

Please, I thought, when I first saw the paintings

De Kooning did when Alzheimer’s had taken him

into its arms and he could do nothing

but paint, purely paint, transparent, please let me

make beauty like that, sometime, like an infant

that can only cry

and suckle, and shit, and sleep,

boneless, unaware, happy,

brush in hand no ego there he went

*

A field of cerise another of time

a big curve slashes across canvas

then another and here it is the lucidity

each of us secretly longs for

as if everything belonging to the other world

that we forget at birth is finally flooding

back…

Alicia is one of my great mother poets. She is fierce and funny and honest and can break my heart.

But I want to return to Jean Valentine for a moment. I used to drive to her Sunday workshop from Philadelphia with my friend, Anjana Deshpande. One day, I shared my first chapbook with her (Finishing Line Press). To my astonishment, I received an email from poet, Kate Greenstreet, a friend of Jean’s telling me Jean wants me to send my manuscript to CavanKerry Press. What manuscript?  I had the beginning of one but not even close to a finished book. But who says no to Jean Valentine? 48 hours, the amount of time I took for myself to try to pull it together! (I could hear my husband and daughter in the background and my daughter would say, “We can’t bother Mommy. She is finishing her book.”) 48 hours! I am laughing now. I sent it and they held onto it for a long time, but of course, it was rejected. Still, I was finally able to call myself a poet. I will be forever grateful to her.

And now I try to help newer poets as I have been helped. For five years, I taught a community workshop that began at the late Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s Musehouse and continued in my dining room.

MD: I want to take a moment to reflect on what Kathy (Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno) accomplished with Musehouse and why it was such a special organization. When I lived in NW Philly, I was privileged to attend workshop with Kathy and then work with her a bit one-on-one.

ASM: I met Kathy through my late husband. He was taking a memoir class with her at Musehouse. She was deeply supportive of writers. I launched a book at Musehouse and she bought copies for the salon. Then she asked me to teach. I will be forever grateful to her.

Most of the students were writing memoirs. I loved watching them learn to funnel, to condense and yet absorb what matters into the container of poetry. I was thrilled to see many of them publish. When I teach, sometimes I imagine poets on the side of a mountain with a rope and each of us reaching a hand to the other. This is less about age though and more about community. I should add that I have been talking about all of this with the poet Nicole Greaves.  We “met” on Facebook and then again when we were both teaching on zoom with Caesura Poetry Festival started by poets Chad Frame with Joanne Leva.  Initially, I was an editor/reader of her manuscript that was finally published by Glass Lyre Press, but soon we became great friends.  She is a sister poet. 

But in the end, we write alone and then look for a community of readers. We look for a sense of belongingness, a sense of being read and heard.  I am not invisible, am I? Here I am with you!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus (2011), selected by late poet, Chris Bursk. Small-McKinney’s second full-length book of poems, Walking Toward Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). Her chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, was written during COVID 2020 and her husband’s death (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, The Indianapolis Review, Tiferet, Baltimore Review, Comstock Review, Literary Mama, Pedestal Magazine, SWWIM, Persimmon Tree, The Banyan Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Vox Populi, and Verse Daily, among others.  Her poems have also been translated into Romanian and Korean. Her book reviews have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Her third full-length book of poems & You Think It Ends is forthcoming 2024/2025 (Glass Lyre Press). She resides in Philadelphia.