To poet Midge Goldberg: "The Whole Gray Lake's a Sky"

I caught up with New England Poetry Club member Midge Goldberg. Goldberg will have a new book of poetry coming out titled,  "The Whole Gray Lake’s a Sky."(Feb 2027) The manuscript is the winner of the 2026 New Criterion Poetry Prize

Midge Goldberg was born in New York but grew up in Florida. She attended Yale University and holds an MFA from University of New Hampshire. She received the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award for her second collection, Snowman’s Code, which won the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Readers’ Choice Award for poetry. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published widely in the US and the U.K. She is also the editor of Outer Space: 100 Poems, (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is a member of both the Powow River Poets and the Derry-based Hyla Brook Poets, and lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Robert W. Crawford.

You are a woman of many trades—you have evolved-- how do you feel your poems evolved over the years?

I’d say my poems evolved alongside me, sometimes following, sometimes leading the way. When I was younger, there were more poems about having little kids and the challenges people in their 30s and 40s face, wrestling with their own childhood and identity. When I’d written some of that out of my system, I still loved poetry, so I looked for new topics and forms. I ventured into writing dramatic monologues, because I love to eavesdrop! It’s fun imagining other people’s lives. As I’ve gotten older, I find myself reexamining early relationships, emotions, and beliefs with a new perspective. And just this year, I’ve challenged myself to write my first ghazal, and I’m working on my first sonnet crown. Whether it’s my poems following me, or me following my poems at this point, I don’t know!

The book's title centers on a lake in New Hampshire where you live. Why this lake? So many poems are written about bodies of water—what is the allure?

The title comes from a poem called “Out of Season,” which is about visiting what’s normally a summer resort town in November, when all the stores and restaurants except one are closed. The cold, gray lake is part of that feeling of being just out of step with the normal and expected, being “out of phase” (like Picard in a favorite Star Trek episode of mine).

The allure of lakes for me is their changeability. I wrote a poem called “Walking on Ice,” which describes my Floridian fear of walking out on a frozen lake, even when my husband reassures me that the ice is several feet thick. I never get over the surprise of seeing a lake that’s blue and refreshing in the summer become a frozen expanse in the winter. I live on a pond and watching it change throughout the seasons has inspired lots of poems.

In one poem "Argument of Periapsis" you exhibit the orbit of a relationship— the close alignment—the pull away, and the timid but inevitable return. It would seem like the space; the cosmos—would be a fertile ground for exploring relationships. Your thoughts?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve written poems where the moon, a planetarium, even the rover Curiosity are metaphors for relationships. Mind-bending, infinite, mysterious—what better metaphors for love and loneliness are there? In an anthology I edited, Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2022), one of my favorite poems is “Delay,” by Elizabeth Jennings, who uses the speed of light as a remarkable metaphor for love.

You are a member of the Powow River poets.... a formalist poetry group. Do you consider yourself a formalist? Robert Frost wrote that "Free verse is like playing without a net." How do you look at it?

Absolutely. I write primarily in form; therefore, I’m a formalist. I write some poems in free verse—I teach that it’s another tool in your toolkit, and you have to match the form to the content. But in general, I prefer writing in form. The meter, the rhyme, the form, they all push me to revise and revise, and most times I end up with a poem that’s much better (and sometimes completely different!) than what I started with. If I were writing in free verse, I would have stopped sooner, thinking it was done, when there was so much more to uncover.

Funny story about that Frost quote: I have a poem called “Tennis Practice Against the Garage Door.” It’s about watching my son practice tennis, and it ends with “the beauty in tenacity and sweat, / the ace over the imaginary net.” That quote must have been lurking in the back of my mind—I need that net!

Why should we read your book?

I hope there’s a lot in it that people will recognize or relate to or be curious about—hiking, baking, deer hunting, a high school locker, saying Kaddish for your mother—everyday things that carry so much possibility for metaphor.

Button Box

  

You never see this shade of coral now.

And these big pearlized circles—very vintage.

My mother kept them in this plastic shoe box.

 

She taught me how to sew when I was ten,

or tried. I liked the stepstool at her table

but not the steps—measure, mark, pin, baste, sew.

She couldn’t see paying for store-bought clothes,

higher prices, shoddy work—“Look at

those crooked seams!”—so she made all my clothes.

My favorites were striped pants, a gingham dress,

a green corduroy blazer, all with buttons—

anchors, berries, leather—from the box.

 

At 14, with the money I had saved,

I got my first new pair of store-bought jeans.

She never sewed me anything again

(though, to be honest, I was fine with that).

 

She did give me the box—well, not exactly.

She always had the box. And then she died.

And then I found the box and took it home.

 

It sits on a high shelf. I take it down

occasionally and rummage through the buttons,

hold one for a minute, then put it back,

not knowing what to wish for anymore,

not knowing how to sew, or how to mend.