The Real McCoy

Kathleen McCoy on Poetry

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I’m a poet, a professor, a mother, a wife, a bit of an activist, a lover of the word at https://kathleenmccoy.wordpress.com. Poetry books include Ringing the Changes (Finishing Line Press, 2019), Green and Burning, Glas Agus a Dho (Word Tech, 2016) and More Water Than Words (chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2017). Books are available from the publishers or Amazon, or order from your local bookseller.

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  • Between “Human” and “Being”

    Poets, like humanoids of all stripes, play a balancing game on a daily basis. Grade papers. Run to meetings. Teach classes. Run kids to events and activities. Check in with the spouse. Dust once in a blue moon. Throw leftovers in the microwave. Eat. Run some more. Rinse. Repeat. It’s what Ekhart Tolle, in A…

  • Book Signing

    Daughter, do not give your stories to the wind . . . . — “For My Daughter” by Kathleen McCoy The Willows Bistro in Warrensburg, New York is hosting a book signing/reading event this Saturday, December 7th. I will be selling copies of my chapbook, Night-blooming Cereus and other poems, for $5.00. (Makes a decent…

  • Web Words

  • 100 Thousand Poets for Change

    There may never be a time when it is more important to bring the Big Ideas of Peace and Sustainability home. And nothing brings Big Ideas home to roost like poetry. It’s been my joy to assemble local poets, artists, and thinkers with a global initiative: the SUNY Adirondack Writers Project is sponsoring 100 Thousand…

  • Poetry of Witness

    How do you feel about “poetry of witness”? I’m referring to a still-debated term used by Carolyn Forche and other poets that respond in their poems to the injustices, oppression, and violence suffered by others. At the recent AWP conference in Boston, I heard wonderful poets–from the Old Guard and the Newer  alike–including Sharon Olds,…

  • Do the Catwalk

    This year, I’m challenging myself–and any of you who care to join–to claim your own catwalk to move across steadily and with as much grace as we can muster. I’m not talking about a Kate Moss catwalk, but the kind that’s tethered near the tops of trees, a single cable you inch across for the…

  • caroll ann duffy | mr. midas

    Originally posted on poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground: POETRY DISPATCH No.386 | November 27, 2012 Carol Ann Duffy Editor’s Note: Though the “Poet Laureate” honor has never been my cup of tea (given the politics present in such selections), I do occasionally visit whatever fashionable Laureates have been honored on the American…

  • Retooling with Rumi

    After a series of personal challenges in the past six months (fire, three moves, close deaths, and associated challenges), I’m baaaaack . . . . Now that I’ve dusted off, it’s back to teaching, pulling out the poetry manuscripts, mixing things up (big-time), greasing wheels, feeding my inner nerd, hoping I remember how to see…

  • For Adrienne Rich

    In the memory of Adrienne Rich, one of our country’s finest poets who died last week, I offer the following poem, penned a couple of decades ago and revised very recently: The New Androgyne She will be like the deaf mute                                                 turned composer: ink will pulse               through her veins the color of half-lit…

  • What Poetry Requires

    Poetry–like music, like theater, like many arts and community activities–brings people together. And when people get together, as the world screen has displayed prominently in the past year, stuff happens–good stuff. Empowerment. Liberation. Education. Social justice. Political rallying is not the only kind of populist empowerment. Poets do it too. And the powers-that-be are threatened.…