Moon Beams #15 - Emma McCoy
“There is poetry out there that will be able to reach out to you, and will grab your heart, and will make you see the world in a different way,” poet and fiction-writer Emma McCoy told me in episode #15 of “Moon Beams,” as bright an invitation to the genre as I can think of.
Our conversation, per usual in this series, covered no shortage of different topics, including radical optimism, “the idea that we can participate in our own optimism,” as she puts it, “in our own naming of the good, and we can create the good.”
Emma found a remarkable example in Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”, made especially so by being published in 2020, the line, “You could make this place beautiful” striking what could be a succinct manifesto of the radical optimism as a whole.
When I asked Emma to share a recent selection of poetry that she found remarkable, she read the following couplets from Magnolia Canopy Otherworld by Erin Carlyle, specifically the poem “Doctor Shopping Ghost Story”:
“In the beginning it was not about becoming a ghost,
a transparent pill casing empty, longing
In the beginning, I was flat on my back
looking up at the stars.”
Emma connected the passage to her father’s work as a pastor, ministering to people in recovery from addiction in Bellingham, Washington.
“It’s right there, it’s very visceral,” Emma said, connecting the poem and her own witnessing of, “the effects of addiction, and honestly how it can happen to anybody.”
Emma’s poetry collection, This Voice Has an Echo, is now available by Solum Press, a piece exploring, “What it’s like to hear God’s voice in a very visceral way,” by following Old Testament prophets.
“I had really a lot of fun with all of these stories, either keeping them in their contexts or putting them into a new context like Esther as a Miss Universe contestant, she has a conversation with Death in the waiting room, or the prophet Joel, I make him a therapist in one of the poems.”
I’m grateful to Emma for her time and energy and thrilled to see what she does next. Stay up and insist on optimism, everybody.
