Goedicke was an accomplished and passionate downhill skier and her poems frequently celebrate both physical movement and, quite literally, cerebral movement. In Invisible Horses, for instance, she set out to capture “what it feels like to think.” Though her books often have a thematic focus, such as The Trail that Turns on Itself, in which she decided to include all the narcissistic poems she could, her books’ themes were not always “preordained.”
This combination of cohesion and a resistance to preordainment is reflected in her long and complex thoughts, revealed both in her poemsand our interview. She is known for her extended lines and extended metaphors. Goedicke can be tangential, gracefully returning to the beginning, to her starting point, but always, in returning, defining it more clearly. Peter Schjeldahl described her in the New York Times as having “discipline and the nerves of a racing driver… with enough vigor to rattle teacups in the next county.” The prepositional beginnings of her lines set up an expectation that is often fulfilled many lines later, after a multitude of associative meanings have been added. And yet her poetry remains grounded and memorable, rather than wandering into abstraction. Patricia’s poems “are a joy to read, and to reread. And reread,” Jonathan Holden wrote. Erica Jong wrote that she is “a poet to read in silence, to read out loud, to reread and to learn from.”
The following interview took place in the summer of 1998, at Goedicke’s home in Missoula near the University of Montana campus, where she taught for 25 years. One year later, As Earth Begins to End was published by Copper Canyon Press, and was declared by the American Library Association to be one of the top ten books of 2000. In 2006, at the age of 75, Patricia Goedicke died from pneumonia related to cancer. Among her notes regarding this interview, she wrote, “Please be sure to speak of my utter joy,” and in fact, her ruminations on death and deterioration are always balanced by an almost giddy celebration ofpleasure and its importance, which she invites readers to share
