Interview with Cate Marvin

CATE MARVIN IS the author of two poetry collections, World’s Tallest Disaster (2001) and Fragment of the Head of a Queen (2007), as well as the co-editor of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), all from Sarabande Books. She is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

In late July of 2006, she generously undertook this massive e-mail interview, discussing, among other things, why she is interested in neither the McPoem nor the “Can Poetry Matter?” debates, why she never reads Poetry Daily (ever), why it’s important to write poems from the country of your own mind, and how, at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, they don’t fuck around.

KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Cate Marvin consist?

CM: I dislike waking before noon. When I wake, reluctantly, I attend to the needs of my pets (two cats, one dog). If it’s a teaching day, I drive to the College of Staten Island. This involves navigating a tortuously congested road, Victory Boulevard, which runs through the heart of Staten Island; driving a mere fi ve miles typically takes a half hour. My day does not truly begin until I’ve acquired and consumed a 32-ounce Big Gulp of diet coke from 7-Eleven. It’s the Big Gulp that’s important, not 7-Eleven, where I find the employees rather disagreeable.

Because I wake up so late, my day is often short. I’m much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn’t getting enough work done. I go to bed by 3 or 4 a.m.

KR: How did you become a poet? Was it something you always knew you wanted to pursue? Did it run in your family? Where did your creativity have its genesis?

CM: The idea of “becoming” a poet is a strange one to me. Isn’t it more the case that either you are or aren’t? I can honestly say I never thought seriously of doing anything else. I was writing poems pretty regularly by the age of eleven. I can recall being incensed at the age of twelve by the poor quality of poems published in that teen magazine Young Miss; they published what I considered very light, cheesy verse. They rejected my poems, which were certainly clichéd and sentimental, but often took on darker topics. One poem dwelt on my anger at having been informed by my orthodontist I would have to wear my headgear for another year. Anyone who wore braces in the eighties will recognize the pathos inherent in my subject matter.

Neither of my parents are creative writers, but they wrote a lot for their respective jobs and both really know their way around a sentence. They constantly corrected my grammar, verbal and written. I’m sorry to say they still do. My father was a military intelligence analyst for the C.I.A. and my mother edited the newsletter for a nonprofit organization called the Crime Prevention Council, whose mascot/representative was (and still is) McGruff, the Crime Dog, who “take[s] a bite out of crime.” I was an only child in a quiet household. My parents are big readers and had a lot of books on their shelves and it was their poetry anthologies I turned to when I started reading poetry.

I was a very poor student in high school, in that I rarely did the work or attended class. At graduation, I was ranked 506 out of 540 and had a 1.89 GPA. However, during that time I was reading a lot on my own and working on poems. I also took a class with a wonderful teacher named Peggy Pfeiffer, who was at the time the editor of the D.C.-based literary magazine Gargoyle. I worked on the high school journal she advised and that experience helped me realize that I wanted write. Once I got to college (an unusual and progressive college admitted me despite my terrible grades) I kept on writing and also discovered, much to my surprise, that I was drawn to the study of literature.

KR: If you weren’t a writer, teacher, and editor, what would you be?

CM: I worked extensively with animals when I was in my teens: for a brief time at a pet store and then a couple of summers at an animal shelter. When young I was alternately obsessed with insects, horses, tropical fish and, much later, parrots. So, there were points when I was very young that I fantasized about becoming an entomologist, ichthyologist, or veterinarian; work itself, however, even the writing of poetry, is a practical thing, and it was the representations of these professions I was drawn to. I’ve just always loved animals. So I’ve often thought that if I weren’t a writer I’d work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals. But that statement sounds very “rainbows and unicorns,” does it not? That’s the phrase I use in class when a student writes a really, super-cheesy poem about how sunny and green everything is outside when in fact there’s trash practically piling up outside the classroom windows. When asked what I’d be if I weren’t a writer, I’m tempted to respond with one of father’s favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: “I hate ‘what-ifs.’”

KR: You were born in Washington, D.C., educated in Vermont, Houston, Iowa, and Ohio—where is home now?

CM: Home is New York, or rather: Staten Island, New York. I’ve lived, for extended periods of time, in places I haven’t considered home, such as Iowa and Cincinnati. I moved to Staten Island to teach at the College of Staten Island and figured my stay here would be brief. The place has grown on me, however. It’s wonderful to be so close and yet so distant from Manhattan.

KR: Also, to what extent is setting or a sense of place important to your work?

CM: I made the decision long ago that I would go where my poetry took me. Hence: Houston, Iowa, Cincinnati and, now, New York. I generally distrust regional poetics. One of the reasons I never made it a goal to live in New York, other than the fact it’s so expensive, was because I’m not very fond of people or poems that are overly reliant on a sense of place. New York is one of those places people tend to derive a sense of identity from—as if, were to you to remove them from the City, they’d turn limp and colorless. I find the elitism and blatant provincialism of many (Manhattan-based) New Yorkers unattractive. Just as place can be an identity crutch that helps a person feel individual, place can be a crutch in poetry. We’re all familiar with the type of poem that wouldn’t exist if the writer hadn’t traveled through Europe (pick any continent or country, just so long as it’s across an ocean). This writer now insists on boring us half to death with descriptions of a foreign marketplace or some other flavorful setting; the natives appear for the primary purpose of interjecting “exotic” phrases and gestures so as to lend authenticity to the poem and we’re supposed to think the writer has given us something of value, that he is genius because he has ventured into the unknown (when all you need is a rail pass). Would this writer be able, if forced to live in some bum-fuck part of this country, to rely entirely on his imagination to write his poems? I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens’ poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism. I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an “Ohio Poet;” this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.

Conversely, and I apologize for belaboring this subject, place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems. Yet, it’s not my desire to render a landscape accurately. Rather I try to recreate the emotional weather of the place the poem grows out of: this is the pathetic fallacy put to use. Because I prefer the figurative, I don’t like to locate the setting of a poem clearly unless it’s necessary; that is, if I need to so as not to mislead the reader. For example, I have a poem in my next book called “Flood Museum,” which is set in Johnstown, PA and concerns the famous 1889 Johnstown flood; in this case, I obviously need to prevent the reader from going down the Hurricane Katrina path as soon as he or she comes across the title.

KR: You have an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. What motivated you to pursue so many degrees and what do you do with them all? What is your Ph.D. in? What was the title of your thesis?

CM: Being enrolled in these programs gave me time to write, an audience for my work, interaction with great writers, the opportunity to take literature classes and get teaching experience, and financial aid. I don’t “do” anything with the degrees; what I did do with my time at each institution was work on my craft, get a lot of reading done, finish my first book of poems, and get part way through my second. My Ph.D. is in English and Comparative Literature and my areas are twentieth-century American and British poetry and poetics. My dissertation, titled “Chicanery,” was a collection of original poems (the start of my second book) and included an extensive essay on confessional poetics.

KR: Why did you earn dual MFAs, and do you recommend it to others?

CM: That would depend entirely on who was seeking advice. My MFAs are in different genres so it goes without saying that each program’s respective course of study couldn’t have been more different.

KR: What was the Iowa Writer’s Workshop like? Does it live up to its fame and mystique? Did you only write fiction there, or did you pursue poetry and/or other genres?

CM: The Writer’s Workshop is a special place: very intense in how much scrutiny is given to students’ work. But it’s not the place for everyone. It depends on what one wants out of an MFA program. I have a student right now who I think would do very well at Iowa, and that’s because he’s very tough and individualistic and he’s much more interested in improving as a writer than in protecting his feelings about his writing. He would learn a lot there and I think he’d get a kick out of how dramatic the place can be at times. I didn’t get into Iowa for poetry; I think this was a good thing as I’m not sure how well I would have held up. I really grew during the three years I was in University of Houston’s MFA program and I especially benefited from being around the Ph.D. students there, all of whom were very committed to writing and publishing their work.

I got into Iowa with the first two short stories I’d ever written. By the time I showed up, I was scared shitless. As I should have been. Because they don’t fuck around at Iowa. I learned an incredible amount about the basic craft of writing from my fiction classes and met some of my best friends. To the detriment of my fiction writing, I worked on poems pretty extensively (and privately) while I was there. I was there solely as a fiction writer, however; genre borders are very clearly delineated at Iowa.

KR: Have you published any fiction, and/or do you plan on doing so in the future? Do you write (or hope to write) novels or short stories or both? Do you—or would you ever—write creative non-fiction?

CM: I published a couple of short stories, long ago, in small magazines: one in an anniversary issue of Gulf Coast back in 2000, I think. But I’ve always been very bad about sending my fiction out. Fiction, for me, is a very difficult form. I have great respect for fiction writers. When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot. It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one’s writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people’s lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision. The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let’s not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I’d seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer’s pre-ejaculatory tendency: “The End!” I’ve had many a dark moment in which I’ve told myself: Sorry, kid. You don’t have it. And it may be that I don’t. To be honest, if I’m ever to write good fiction, I’ll need to bear down and work a lot harder on it.

KR: What poetry presses do you most admire and why? Would you ever start one of your own?

CM: I’ve enjoyed watching Wave Books emerge over the past year. But I’m more interested in individual authors than I am presses. And, no, I would never start one of my own. I have a hard enough time trying to find time to write as is.

KR: What literary journals do you read? Which ones would you recommend?

CM: I like Pleiades a lot. The Canary is a favorite. And I think Christian Wiman’s been doing very interesting things with Poetry. Ninth Letter is another magazine to check out: it’s so beautiful and strange—it’s huge and the graphics are very extravagant. I keep up with Ploughshares, New England Review, Fence, Open City, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Tin House.

KR: In the acknowledgements to your first collection, you express gratitude for the guidance of a number of well-known writers (Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard, Andrew Hudgins, ZZ Packer, Rebecca Wolff, etc.). How do you know so many famous literary figures? What impact has this had on your career?

CM: Ed Hirsch and Richard Howard were my teachers at University of Houston. I met Andrew Hudgins at Sewanee Writers’ Conference; he encouraged me to apply for the Ph.D. program at the University of Cincinnati, where he taught. ZZ and Rebecca are good friends. I know ZZ from Iowa and Rebecca from Houston. All of these people had an impact on my writing life, as mentors and peers.

I should make something clear: I consider poetry my vocation, not my “career.” My career is as a university professor; that’s what pays the bills. To think of writing poetry as a “career” is not only ridiculous, it’s dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity (except when it’s bad).

That doesn’t mean I don’t believe one should try to publish poems in journals, give readings, etc. For me, publication = more time to write. Writers are always trying to find more time to write and different people configure different solutions for this problem. My boyfriend, the poet Matthew Yeager, works for a catering company; he makes good money, works nights, and has several days a week during which he can write.

I do believe that one’s writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

One might ask: Well, then how did you manage to edit an anthology of 85 contemporary American poets? The answer is: I did not work on my own poetry while working on Legitimate Dangers.

KR: How much success—if any—in the field of poetry do you feel has to do with whom one knows? Given that we can’t fall back on the fiction that talent is automatically rewarded by the invisible hand of the free market—none of us will make much money from this—do poets need some sort of network of friends, advocates, and champions to survive?

CM: One cannot have “success” in poetry. As a poet-friend of mine once said, “If I wanted to be successful, I’d have become a lawyer.”

KR: Judging by Legitimate Dangers, you and Michael Dumanis have a very productive professional friendship—how did you meet, and how did you come to embark on the anthology together? Do you have any more joint projects up your sleeves?

CM: Michael and I met at Iowa. We came to doing Legitimate Dangers because we felt a need for the book. Initially, we were brainstorming an altogether different anthology, one that would pull together poetry we felt was “postconfessional.” We then realized we needed a bigger, representative picture of what was happening in recent American poetry before we could even begin to define the “postconfessional.” (That’s still very much an undefined term, by the way.) So LD began as a process of discovery; we also created the book to teach with. Michael and I aren’t collaborating on anything presently, nor do we have plans to in the future.

KR: Why did you choose to leave yourselves out of the anthology?

CM: I think it’s unethical for writers to publish their own work.

KR: I’ve heard it said that the best way to lose friends is to decide to put together an anthology—how has the critical response to LD been? What about the popular response? How have other poets—both those included and those not—reacted?

CM: Naturally, it’s all across the board. It’s only been six months since the book hit the shelves, so we’re still waiting to gauge the full response. I’m very interested in hearing how it works as a classroom text. I think the book’s spurred some pretty interesting (and some not so interesting) conversations about contemporary American poetry. I do know that several poets I’ve spoken to have discovered poets they hadn’t read before, which pleases me because that’s one of the primary aims of the book: to introduce readers to the work of poets they may not be familiar with by an emerging/just-emerged generation.

KR: I enjoyed your first collection, World’s Tallest Disaster, on the recommendation of a friend (Chad Reynolds, who knew you in Ohio, and who says hi, by the way), and re-read (and re-enjoyed) it for this interview. Both times, I was struck by the lovely way you make use of sound. How important are rhyme and sonics to you? What role do they play in your compositional process? Do you find yourself drawn to other poets who also emphasize sound and rhyme?

CM: Sound is hugely important to me, in the poems I write and those I read. I do not write in traditional form but I employ a lot of internal rhyme. There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. I detest prosey, flat-sounding poems. Such poems remind me of what I call “mouse hands:” you know, those damp little hands that some people have. The type of hand that refuses to pull its own weight in a handshake. The sort of hand that’s proffered like a dead fish.

For the same reason, I get annoyed when people ask if I ever consider setting my poems to music. I think of my poems as crafted from the music of the English language, as songs in their own right. I think of those great Ezra Pound poems in which he commands his songs to go off and do his bidding: “Go, my songs!” I love that.

KR: In the poem “I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed,” you write, “poems grow from my skull”—can you say more about your compositional process generally?

CM: I used to have this ritual where I sat down and wrote four or five poems, one after another, on my manual typewriter. This way I wouldn’t censor myself or worry too much about individual poems; in a sense, this process allowed me to play more with my poems. Nowadays, I don’t have as much time as I used to and I often have ideas/lines for poems before I begin writing them out entirely. So I’ve been composing more on the computer over the past few years. Also, my typewriter’s keys have been sticking and the ribbon always seems to be drying out, and this drives me crazy if I’m in the middle of writing: as if trying to make a poem isn’t hard enough to begin with, without the “e” key sticking over and over. In fact, I recently went on a sort of retreat to New Hampshire to finish up the last few poems in my second book and by the end of my time there I realized I hadn’t even thought about taking the typewriter out of its case.

I write a great many drafts. Some poems take two to three years to finish. Rarely, a poem will arrive whole. It’s nice when that happens. However, process has become so grueling for me over the past few years that when one of my students uses the word “inspiration” I practically shriek with laughter.

KR: WTD opens with “Reader, Please,” and closes with “The Readership.” In the latter, you write, “And if the readership does not exist? Perhaps / it’s only intriguing as a conspiracy theory— / how I want to believe in it, as if it will provide / the answer for everything that’s gone awry.” Who do you think makes up your readership? The readership for poetry generally?

CM: “The Readership” is a poem that questions whether the beloved (a figure that appears throughout the book) even exists outside the speaker’s own mind. I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I’m surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all. That’s the cool thing about having a book: it takes on its own life. Once it’s in the world, you can’t follow it. You’d have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

KR: If the poems in WTD are all love poems (are they?) as Robert Pinsky writes in his introduction, then what motivated you to write a book consisting of all love poems? How did you go about assembling your first collection?

CM: I didn’t go into writing WTD with the idea that it was a book. I was just learning how to write different kinds of poems. After five years, I pulled the poems together into a manuscript (with the help of my friend, the poet Rick Barot). I don’t consider all of the poems in the book “love poems.” A lot of the poems are hate poems. However, the poems are obsessed with the figure of the beloved, and the book works very consciously in the tradition of love poetry, harkening back to the Troubadours and Petrach’s sonnet sequence in which he immortalizes Laura. It’s meant to be comic, too: the female speaker placing herself in what is traditionally (poetic and otherwise) a male role, as if by doing so she will gain power, even though the figure she’s addressing is absent (or if he’s around, he’s not paying much attention). Hence, her venom: “And there is someone I wouldn’t mind seeing / dead.”

KR: Your second collection, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, is coming out in 2007—are these also all a certain kind of poem, or poems on a common theme?

CM: It’s largely about destruction of the self.

KR: Your first book came out through Sarabande’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize competition. What do you make of the contest system in which, for the most part, aspiring poets’ only opportunity to get a first book out is to pay a bunch of sort of steep entry fees with, for the most part, only a slight chance at winning?

CM: It’s one way to keep small presses afloat. I don’t think the business is as corrupt as many insist. I’ve known several writers (myself included) who had no connection whatsoever to the judge of the contest they won prior to winning. I’ve also read slush for a couple of contests and I can tell you that the strong manuscripts stand out immediately; when entering these contests one might be competing against thousands of other entries, but a lot of the manuscripts are blatantly mediocre if not downright awful.

KR: Periodically, literary periodicals run what I think are supposed to be encouraging stories of poets who entered literally dozens of contests before getting their first books out. How many contests did you enter in addition to the Sarabande one?

CM: I entered a great many. It took several years and I’ll always be grateful the book wasn’t taken earlier. The manuscript became much stronger as I continued to work on it.

KR: Did you pick the cover of WTD? How about LD, and how did you decide on each (if you did in fact get to decide)? I like both of them because they seem to suggest narratives. How important, in your estimation, are the cover and title to the success of a book?

CM: Sarabande lets their authors choose the cover art for their books. I think very hard about the cover art for my books because I want it to relate to the content of the book. World’s Tallest Disaster takes its title from the painting on its cover. I had a postcard of this painting long before I wrote the title poem; I liked to keep it in my office cubicle when I was working as a secretary at the National Cancer Institute at the age of 23. I worked a dull job that included making large vats of coffee for doctors (who, being doctors, treated me like an imbecile) in this hideously massive building and I liked to meditate on the building’s destruction. But, yes, the painting is meant to be representative of the poems: I especially like how so much is going on in different areas of the painting/building. And then there’s the lone woman trapped in the top story, waving for help—I like to think of her as the speaker of the poems. And I hope the poems work in a similar way to Roger Brown’s painting (which I kept above my desk throughout writing the book).

I rather like the unpleasant and apathetic gaze of the girl who stares out from the cover of Legitimate Dangers. (However, I had an unsettling experience introducing LD contributors at a recent reading when I looked out and saw a double of that girl in the audience staring right back at me.) Michael and I stumbled across that painting and thought it would make a great conversation with the poems in the book (one I find inherently ironic).

The title for Fragment of the Head of a Queen comes from a poem in the collection inspired by an Egyptian statue of a female head cast in yellow jasper (circa 1353 – 1336 B.C., Dynasty 18) on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite the fact that the piece is extraordinarily beautiful, I hesitated using it as cover art for my book, not only because I believe it wouldn’t reproduce well as an image, but because the context of my collection is quite contemporary. The image I chose for the book, Arturo Herrera’s “Study for When Alone Again, 2001,” immediately struck me as the perfect image for Fragment of the Head of a Queen because it is emblematic of ideas that underlie not only this particular collection of poems, but my poetics in general. “Study for When Alone Again, 2001” displays a Disneyfied female figure, her head combusting with a violent spray/splatter of red paint (which one might just as likely interpret as the result of drive-by shooting, the madness of the imagination run amuck, or sheer frustration against the forms mass media suggests we take).

KR: Do you have any advice for aspiring first-bookers?

CM: Know why writing poetry matters to you.

KR: Are there any underappreciated poets—young or old, living or dead—whom you would especially recommend? Who are your most significant poetic influences?

CM: Underappreciated (dead): Charlotte Mew, May Swenson, Thomas James.

Underappreciated (alive): Robyn Schiff , author of Worth, and easily one of the best poets writing today. Michael Dumanis’ excellent first book, My Soviet Union, is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press in the Spring of 2007. Christopher Davis’s A History of the Only War is astonishing.

Significant poetic influences: Thomas Wyatt, William Blake, Gerald Manly Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, May Swenson, Denis Johnson, Adelia Prado, Medbh McGuckian.

KR: In “Weather to Reel For,” you write, “I’ll never regret those nights lying / like an organ separate and packed in ice, on a flight / to the failing patient who needed me most.” Organ imagery seems to surface a lot in this book. Where does this motif originate for you, and what does it mean?

CM: I think the motif originates in all of us, in that on one hand we have these internal organs, and on the other we have symbols and/or representations of them. “The Articulate” (from WTD) recounts a game I used to play when I was very young and trying to fall asleep: my body parts would argue with each other: you know, the feet would always complain about how weary they were from walking that day; the brain was very rational and would tell the feet to shut up and get some rest; and the heart, for reasons I’ll never know, was just really cranky and unpleasant. That was the personality I’d assigned him in this mental play.

The organ motif is interesting to me because we are all made up of parts, literally and figuratively. One of the primary motifs in Fragment of the Head of the Queen is literally losing one’s head: the speaker’s head falls off, she’s decapitated at one point, at another point her head just floats off her body and gets stuck in a tree. There’s also a poem called “Mug Shot” which is a mock response to the nobility of the younger self as celebrated by Rilke in his “Self-Portrait, 1906.”

KR: Relatedly, weather imagery tends to show up a great deal in these poems—what does this signify to you?

CM: The issue is control, as the speaker wishes to manipulate the elements (along with the fate she desires to share with the much loved/loathed addressee of the poems). I’m reminded of a line from an unpublished poem I wrote back in 1997 which went something like this: “I don’t talk about weather / unless it is sufficiently extreme.” Nowadays it seems like weather will most definitely destroy us all within the next few years, but back when I was writing the poems for World’s Tallest Disaster I was drawing on elements I’d experienced, places I’d lived: Minnesota, where it snows for most of year and gets down to –25; Houston, where your skin feels as if it’s melting off; and Iowa, where it seems as if a tornado occurs every other day.

KR: In “Stopping for Gas Near Cheat Lake,” you write “some of my blood’s origin is here—a family with white gums / and skin blue as this dusk. / Something not right about it—one year they tested vials / over and over. / The doctors: You’ll need to come in again; your blood is strangely thin. / What do you know of your heritage?” What heritage does this refer to? It made me think of Kentucky Blue People, but maybe that’s totally off base?

CM: That’s off-base. I’m not familiar with the Kentucky Blue People, though they sound

very interesting.

KR: Similarly, in “Mediterranean Blood Syndrome,” you write, “Vials of my weakness. Five fingers, black-red. / Tubes of my dizziness. Look, your face / your hands, their paleness. Have I or any of my blood relatives ever had shortness of breath?” To what does this refer, and (if I may ask) how autobiographical is it?

CM: Both of these poems are fictions based on the experience of discovering I carry a hereditary anemia trait (Beta Thalassemia); I was 24 and it was the first time I’d had health insurance for a while. The doctor was like: “There’s something wrong with your blood.” Well, it turns out that this trait is not so rare, nor does it really affect one’s health much. But when someone tells you there’s something wrong with your blood, what do you do? If you’re me, you immediately go to the bookstore and read every medical reference you can get your hands on, and what I read didn’t sound very promising. Just thinking about it made me feel like fainting. I was having fantasies of needing blood transfusions, etc. And I’m not even a hypochondriac.

Beta Thalassemia is also called the Mediterranean Blood Syndrome because the only people who have it are Greek or Italian. In fact, the main danger is that you have to be careful if you intend to have children with someone who also carries the trait, as the child has a 25 percent chance of being born with full blown Beta Thalassemia (which is similar to Sickle Cell), meaning that he/she will have a very poor quality of life, require constant transfusions, and won’t live past the age of eleven or twelve. That’s what “Mediterranean Blood Syndrome” addresses: the fantasy of a child one can never have.

The odd thing about discovering I had this trait was learning that everyone on my mother’s side of the family had it (and for some reason she hadn’t bothered to tell me); the assumption was, and still is, that this family line is Scottish and Dutch. The presence of the anemia trait confirms that someone, at some point, had an illicit (and productive) affair with a Greek or Italian. This proves my theory that most people’s proclaimed lineages are more fiction than fact. “Stopping for Gas at Cheat Lake” explores the fantasy of this fiction: the idea that one’s a bastard from a long way back, and that by returning to this desolate town in West Virginia (my mother’s family is from Western Pennsylvania) the speaker may see her face in the faces of her legitimate cousins. The idea is also that the speaker has (luckily) escaped her fate because she is foreign to the town, which is your typical run down mill town. I was driving to Pennsylvania back in 1995 when I passed Cheat Lake in West Virginia and I immediately thought, “That’s a poem.”

KR: Your poems come across as personal, lyric, but do not seem confessional—do you deliberately avoid confessionality in your poems? Do you enjoy confessional poetry? Why do you think that memoir as a genre has risen to such popularity in recent years? How do you feel about this trend?

CM: I see my work as coming directly out of the confessional poetry of the fifties and sixties, most significantly Plath and Berryman. It’s been a project of mine over the past decade to define what exactly the term “confessional” means. For some it labels poems that rely on sensationalistic experience or extremely explicit personal details to attract a readership; for others, it signals a loss of control in terms of craft. This is, I think, an appropriate evaluation of many poems written in the eighties and nineties, which certainly would not have come about were it not for the innovations of confessional poetry, and I think it’s these poems that have made the term “confessional” (which was problematic from the start, as M.L. Rosenthal well knew) a pejorative one.

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue. Lowell, Plath, Berryman, et al., were masters of their craft and brilliant manipulators. I’ve been at work on an essay that deals particularly with how female confessional poets were/are received, for their situation was different from their male counterparts. It was enough for male confessional poets to admit a weakness, whether that be depression, alcoholism, etc. Female confessional poets literally disrobed, discussed the female body, and revealed their uglier (angrier) selves. Poets like Plath refused to present their intelligence in a coded fashion. I wish people would think more carefully about what they mean when they use the word “confessional” because it’s been bandied about for some time now as a negative term. And this discredits the work of some of our finest poets from the latter half of the twentieth century.

KR: The poems in WTD seem to share a compelling readability, a quality that has always appealed to me, yet struck me as kind of mysterious. What writers do you find particularly readable, and of what components does the trait of readability, to you, consist?

CM: I am finding Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray eminently readable. Can you believe I had not read it until now? I’m glad I waited. I don’t know if poetry should aim to be readable, really. It should be clear, certainly, but I distrust poems that are satisfied with merely being clear. I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author: as Frost said, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” I like poems that make their own rules, that demonstrate the technical skills of the author without risking clarity of content.

KR: The poem “On Parting” is kind of delightfully vengeful—”Before I go, let me thank the man who mugs you / …thank the women who may break you”—as are several others in WTD. Many of these poems also seem to succeed in large part because of their pointed address to an absent “you.” How important is this issue of address in your work? The work you enjoy reading? I have a friend who insists that a poem can stand or fall based on whether or not it is in this “apostrophic mode”—do you agree?

CM: What your friend calls the “apostrophic mode” I refer to as “intimate address”: the I-Thou poem. I find this rhetorical strategy an effective one, which is why I employed it throughout my first book. I used it because it demonstrated the one-sidedness of the dialogue the speaker was engaged in. It also produces the effect of allowing the reader to eavesdrop on the speaker, to feel as if he or she is overhearing something very intimate and, therefore, genuine. This mode of address had been with us for a very long time, since the Greek lyric, so it’s obviously powerful. But to propose one mode of address as more successful than another is a pretty flawed way of thinking about what a poem can be and do. One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader. This is one reason I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have—quite literally—never been made before.

KR: What kind of teacher are you? Are you tough? What do you do if a student’s writing is, frankly, terrible? What if it is very, very good?

CM: I like to think I’m a demanding teacher, but that probably depends on the perspective of the student as well as how much work he or she wants to put into my class. I assign a pretty heavy reading load, even in my writing workshops. The writing assignments work off of the reading so students can have several models to compare and critique. I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there’s always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student’s poem is terrible or quite wonderful. I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work. Frankly, I love a lot of the poems my students write. They come up with things I’d never think of. And it’s a pleasure to hear them talk about one another’s poems because, more often than not, they take their writing very seriously. I try to teach the kind of class I would have wanted to take when I was an undergraduate.

KR: Also, what do you make from allegations from some elder statesmen of poetry (new Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s concept of the McPoem, for example) that workshops lead to the production of a certain, substandard, formulaic “type” of writing?

CM: You can see the mark of some MFA programs on various writers’ work, certainly (World’s Tallest Disaster doesn’t just happen to overflow with quatrains: practically everyone at University of Houston wrote in quatrains), but I think the McPoem idea is pretty played out. It’s an old conversation, along with Dana Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?”, and one I can’t honestly claim to be interested in.

There is a very practical need for MFA programs. They give young writers time to earn their chops, to start their first books. I once had a conversation with the fiction writer Dan Stern, in which he bragged that he wrote his first novel while working for an advertising company. I’ll bet he had a pretty nice office, a door he could close, and that his secretary left him alone when he was “working.” When I had a nine-to-five job, I worked in a cubicle, was exposed to everyone, and had to pretend I was busy with menial tasks even when I’d often finished all the work they’d given me the week before. I sure as hell wasn’t going to be writing poetry in my cubicle. So, to ignore the hugely significant role MFA programs have and have had in fostering our nation’s literature strikes me as ignorant of the realities a younger American writer faces, with regard to both circumstance and time constraints.

KR: In recent years, the poetic blogosphere has taken off tremendously—what do you make of this trend? You do not appear to have a blog, but have you considered starting one? Are blogs the wave of the literary future?

CM: I think I might have flourished as a blogger back when I was a secretary and had nothing to do all day except reorganize the supply closet. However, as a professor, I spend more than enough time thinking and talking about poetry; I’d simply prefer to be writing it. I’m mystified as to how bloggers find the time to blog, day after day. Wouldn’t they be better served spending quality time with their loved ones or, better yet, by working on their poems?

I, however, do enjoy “The Rude Pundit,” a political blog written by a colleague and friend of mine, Lee Papa. He’s a great writer.

KR: Relatedly, how do you feel about online journals? For the most part, the poems in WTD seem to have appeared in print journals—what about the ones in FOTHOAQ? Will online journals replace print ones? Is one inherently superior or preferable to you?

CM: I prefer to publish my poems in print journals and then I’m pleased if the journal

decides to put my poem on their website.

KR: Do you feel it is an advantage for a young writer to live in NYC?

CM: I don’t feel I can speak to this subject with much authority. Staten Island may officially be part of NYC but it has little in common with the other boroughs. Also, it would depend on the “young writer.” I do think it’s important for writers to move away from the area in which they grew up, at least for a period of time.

KR: You write, “I don’t drink whiskey to relax” in “I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed.” There seems to be a fair amount of whiskey in your poems—why is this? And do you have a favorite brand?

CM: Whiskey is a trope in WTD, suggesting romantic intoxication, madness, loss of control, and the visionary experience of living one’s life inside a poem. Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine’s heady, gin is poisonous, vodka’s cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I’m a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

KR: Ditto cigarettes—what do you smoke? How did you start and will you ever quit?

CM: I started smoking at the age of fifteen: Marlboro Reds. I succumbed to the influence of a wayward, and ill-fated, friend. She got me started with drinking, too. I switched to Marlboro Lights about five years ago, thinking I’d surely quit if I limited myself to their blandness. But I’ve never truly desired to quit, and I transitioned to Marlboro Lights with ease. However, I do not smoke during the day—ever—I only smoke during the evenings, and then maybe only seven or eight cigarettes at that. I consider the habit a minor vice.

KR: It’s kind of become an interview habit of mine to ask my interviewees about cooking. So do you cook? Could you share a favorite recipe with the readers of Redivider?

CM: While I know how to cook well, I don’t do so very often. Most of my day-to-day meals are microwave-oriented. However, I discovered this excellent chili recipe while on a recent writing retreat. I am happy to report that it involves no ingenuity whatsoever. Just lots of can-opening and pot-stirring.

WHITE HOT CHILI

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 lb, or more, ground turkey or chicken
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 1 tsp. ground coriander
• 1 15oz can garbanzo beans
• 1 15oz can white (canelli) beans
• 1 15 oz can white corn
• 2 cans chicken broth
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 2 cans (4 oz) chopped green chilies
• 1 cup shredded Jack cheese
• Salsa
• Sour cream or plain yogurt

Directions:

Heat oil in a large pot. Add chopped onion, garlic, and ground meat. Cook until meat is no longer pink; don’t brown. Add all the rest of the ingredients (EXCEPT the cheese, sour cream, and salsa); cook over low heat 30-45 minutes. Top with cheese, sour cream, and salsa, and serve.

Important: Do not cook for more than 45 minutes or you’ll lose the great flavor the green chilies provide.

KR: Is there anything about which I haven’t asked that you’d like to add?

CM: Yes. I know this chili recipe doesn’t sound so great when reading over the ingredients, but I promise you it’s really quite amazing.