What We Talk About When We Talk About Plath

When we talk about Sylvia Plath, we talk about Ted Hughes, the poet-husband who nurtured and tormented her. We talk about the way she died, and occasionally the downstairs neighbor she nearly killed in the process. We talk about her overbearing mother and monolithic father. We talk about her confessional style and how this relates to Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. We talk about her infamous mental health issues.

What we discuss less often, outside of criticism and academia, is how formidable she was as a writer. The personal struggles she faced have eclipsed this fact in popular discourse, and as a result, the public keeps Plath pigeonholed. Hers is the domain of madwomen in the attic (or, in her case, the basement), mothers needing their little helpers, females who act out when they are spurned. While she was certainly aware of her own issues--she was often medicated and had a close relationship with her therapist--she was far more than a depressive girl crying huddled in her room. 

Just after they met, Plath wrote a poem about Hughes called "Pursuit," in which he is a panther. She knew then that Hughes was dangerous. What she neglects to mention is that she was a God-damned tigress.

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Tracy Brain, in her essay "Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon," featured in Anita Helle's anthology The Unraveling Archive, makes a compelling case that the reader and/or scholar cannot fully rely on Plath's published works--particularly Ariel (including the Restored Edition) and The Collected Poems--because Plath's archives reveal typographical discrepancies between manuscripts and "finished" products as well as Plath's own working manuscripts and notes, and those notes especially reveal contradictions and changes we can't fully understand, as Plath was dead by the time the bulk of her work fell onto editors' desks.

While this issue shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, we are, thanks to Ted Hughes, largely left to rely upon printed material as "definitive." Even if we can never know whether "Edge" was truly the last poem Plath wrote (Hughes seemed to think so, based on his sequencing in The Collected Poems, but the argument for "Balloons" is equally valid), we must work with what we have been given and rely on Hughes' judgments.

"Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like," he tells us, and "if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy." This is not the idle speculation of a husband who took walks as his wife scratched away with her Shaeffer pen. It's the keen observation of someone who often wrote by her side and who trusted her with his own words, both as typist and workshopper. He knew her prowess with words, and her capacity to wound with them: he was the subject of many of Plath's more powerful poems ("Daddy," "Burning the Letters," "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," and more), and though he was in a position to suppress their publication, he chose to go ahead with them and make sure that the world knew her name.

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No one has ever written a truly "authoritative" biography about Plath, because her legacy is complicated. 

Ted Hughes, by his own admission, destroyed her final diaries after her death, eliminating the possibility of scholars gaining personal insights into her final, powerful poems. 

Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's mother, worked diligently to expunge certain unfavorable communiqués from the record when she published Plath's collected Letters Home. (Not coincidentally, this is the same reason Plath delayed the publication of The Bell Jar so long: to spare feelings.) However, the originals remain largely intact, mainly in the Lilly Library at Indiana University but also elsewhere; the first volume of Plath's wider collected correspondence is set to be published this fall. 

Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and the executor of both estates until her death in 2016, was notorious for refusing to cooperate with anyone who might criticize her brother too much. Plath herself was not a fan of Olwyn, but Hughes trusted her implicitly.

The net result of this is that most biographies of Plath lean heavily in favor of either her or Hughes, depending on who the author cozied up to during the research process. Aurelia died in 1994, but not before she assisted Paul Alexander while he collected information for Rough Magic. The biography is problematic in some ways for the reasons listed above, yet it remains the best available overview of the poet's life.

Fans of Plath almost uniformly come down on her side, and her grave was repeatedly vandalized; rather than gravediggers, she was disturbed by headstone editors, who would rip the "Hughes" off the marker so it read Sylvia Plath rather than Sylvia Plath Hughes. They would rather Ted Hughes be punished in perpetuity, Plath be rid of him in death.

For my part, I think Hughes made some mistakes. Undoubtedly, a few of them were even cruel and contemptible. And he had no right to do what he did to Ariel prior to its publication, though he was, in general, a capable advocate for Plath's work. And as a poet, he is unassailable; his work is not my style, but he knew what the Hell he was doing.

Further tangling the matter of biographical scholarship are two obvious figures, one innocent toddler, and a much-maligned woman: the Hughes children, Frieda and Nicholas; their half-sister Alexandra, called Shura; and Assia Wevill, the most widely recognized of Ted Hughes' affair partners. Frieda Hughes has gone on record, sometimes in verse form, to criticize those who are obsessed with her mother and who have fired shots at her father. Nicholas Hughes committed suicide in 2009 after pursuing his love of nature and ecology, no doubt following his father's example (Ted Hughes' fascination with the outdoors is one of his trademarks); the younger Hughes was always reluctant to discuss his mother publicly. 

Shura died at the age of four in her mother's murder-suicide. As for Wevill, it's no secret that she was married to a poet (David Wevill, a respected Canadian writer) before meeting Plath and Hughes and later chose gas as her weapon of choice when she killed herself and her daughter. These are not mere echoes of Plath, and Wevill is often a reviled figure in the Plath mythos.

But again: these are things people always discuss when Plath comes up in conversation. Except for the most casual readers, everyone knows at least that the Plath-Hughes marriage was torn asunder and that Hughes' actions after Plath's death--all the way up to his own demise in 1998--led to controversy. What they might better discuss is how each of these people appeared in print. (Shura, born two years after Plath's death, is exempted.)

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Aurelia  Plath became the focus of a few of her daughter's works, as any parent of a serious writer might expect. Yet she attempted to be even-keeled about the matter, at least publicly. "One observation I can make," Aurelia wrote in 1983, for a piece in Paul Alexander's anthology Ariel Ascending, "[...] involves Sylvia's tendency to fuse characters and manipulate events to achieve her own artistic ends." In truth, this statement might apply to every writer who ever lived, and I believe it is both a fair assumption on Aurelia's part as well as her fervent wish as a parent that it be completely true.

Plath could be cutting when she directed her words at specific individuals, however obliquely. And Aurelia did feel that sting: "[...O]ther poems [...] involve the mother figure as the whipping boy, so characteristic of the Fifties." She also mentions that in The Bell Jar, Plath "transformed personalities into cruel and false caricatures." However, as one might expect of a mother, she asserts that "I had faith in [her] genius."

No amount of faith, though, can change the fact that the title of "Electra on Azalea Path" contains a name that sounds awfully like Aurelia Plath, nor the fact that Mrs. Greenwood in The Bell Jar is, in the main, a character who hews closely to Aurelia as Plath experienced her during that electroshock summer.

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Ronald Hayman speculated in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath that Plath intended to kill her children when she took her own life in 1963, but this is based on a reading of some of her final poems, including "Edge," and not supported by the documented facts of the incident. And anyway, the opposite argument can be made using different pieces; Plath often wrote about her children, in pieces like "Nick and the Candlestick" and "Morning Song." It's likely that she did this for the same reason another writer might: they were readily available subjects, like their father and grandmother.

If you subscribe to the notion that turnabout is fair play, it's worth keeping in mind that three out of those four had their own say in various works published later, as we see above. Call it a literary circle of life.

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In the main, Assia Wevill has been unfairly castigated. Yes, her final act--killing Shura--is unforgivable and must have been the source of much anguish for Ted Hughes (who later dedicated Crow, his 1970 collection of poetry, to the memory of both Assia and Shura). But in life, Wevill was no different from a million other women: a little bit wild, prone to making mistakes, desperately in love.

Of course, one can also understand why Plath despised Wevill. She was a woman who committed the highest form of girl-on-girl violence: man-stealing. But Plath wasn't utterly unreasonable; she also laid the blame at Hughes' doorstep, where it belonged. (Ultimately, neither Wevill nor Hughes can be held more culpable than the other, but Hughes' betrayal was worse, as he broke the vows he made to his wife.) 

As in other cases, though, Plath was vicious in her descriptions of Wevill, particularly in "The Fearful." And Wevill was not unaware of Plath's ire. She--like many others--ended up haunted by the specter of her (ostensible) rival. But like Plath, she was also haunted by her own past and by the invisible scourge of mental illness.

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I know what you're thinking: "Cate, please. You've only given us examples of poems about Plath's family. So why SHOULDN'T we snoop around and learn things about her personal life?"

And that's totally fair, if you didn't listen to the thing Aurelia Plath said about situations and characters transforming in Plath's--or any writer's--imagination. And again, it's totally fair, if you're willing to ignore Plath's craftsmanship and Hughes' statement about it. And sure: it's totally fair, if you're willing to ignore the criticism Frieda Hughes levels at everyone she feels has co-opted her mother's legacy.

And once more: it's totally fair, if you're willing to forsake all other possible critical responses to Plath's work, or the multiple angles the biographical method could use: an American woman living abroad, a scholarship girl coming up in a privileged environment, a pre-feminist powerhouse, a deeply academic personality, a poet living with and surrounded by other poets. 

This is about so much more than just mental illness and interpersonal drama, and we must acknowledge that, or we are doing Plath, and ourselves as readers and critics, an enormous disservice.

*

Sometimes I wonder if Plath deserves better than us: the avid, trenchant fans who think she is somehow a projection of ourselves and that--as a result--we can claim some ownership of her. I attempt not to be that person, but I admit it: I get defensive of her, and I am often dismissive of those I deem clichés--the sad girls dressed in black trying desperately to be serious--even though I am exactly the same. On the other hand, fame (especially the posthumous kind) comes at a price, and devotees are one item on the bill of sale.

And sometimes I wonder if we deserve better than Plath: a woman who was nearly always on the edge of becoming unhinged, who threw Holocaust metaphors around to describe her own pain, who once destroyed some of Ted Hughes' manuscripts in a vindictive bonfire. On the other hand, if we threw out Plath, we would have to get rid of the Conrads and Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the world, as well, to avoid committing the double crimes of sexism and hypocrisy.

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I spend a lot of time thinking about Sylvia Plath.

It's true that I arrived at her doorstep, as most of us do, when I was a moody teenager struggling to fit in. This is a detail I can't help and won't deny. But I think it's worth noting that the bulk of the time I've spent with her was in my early 20s, near the end of my college journey, at a juncture when people were starting to refer to me as a woman rather than a girl. As it happens, I was also about the same age Plath was when she made the suicide attempt later immortalized in The Bell Jar.

It was a time when I loved boys and eyeliner and the idea that my future might actually turn out the way I wanted. But I resembled Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, too much for my own comfort, so I chose to focus on Plath's poetry instead.

Years later, I return to her work again and again, and I do so happily. And if I didn't know all the things I know, it never would have occurred to me to write about her now.

I composed this essay, as I compose so many things, in fits and starts between other activities, and it took me about a week and a half to draft. My memory of facts learned over eight years ago was surprisingly solid, which I take to mean that Sylvia Plath has never been far from my mind. I did have to retrieve my collection of books by or about Plath (and Hughes, and Wevill): 18 in all. 

For a complete accounting of my Plath collection, see the list following this post. Some books are either out of print or difficult to locate; many of my volumes came from Better World Books or Thriftbooks, both excellent online sellers for academics searching for titles your average used bookstore doesn't carry. There are many, many more titles out there that I've never seen or read; Plath has her own cottage industry now.

I do encourage readers to seek out resources that will illuminate Plath's craft, as well as those which properly contextualize her in both American and British history as well as in the continuum of literature. There are so many things to explore in her work that lie outside the confines of biography.

And when you talk about her, remember that she was both human and hard-working.

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Resources

About Plath
Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath (ed. Paul Alexander) 
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Judith Kroll)
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Ronald Hayman)
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage (Diane Middlebrook)
Rough Magic (Paul Alexander)
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (A. Alvarez)
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Linda Wagner-Martin)
The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (ed. Anita Helle)

By Plath
Ariel: The Restored Edition
The Bell Jar
The Collected Poems (ed. Ted Hughes)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Letters Home (ed. Aurelia Schober Plath)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (ed. Karen V. Kukil)

About Hughes
Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Elaine Feinstein)

By Hughes
Birthday Letters
Difficulties of a Bridegroom

About Wevill
Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev)

MaWhitDonManNa, or Getting Your American On

Let's talk about Madonna and Walt Whitman for a minute.

Maybe it's an unorthodox pairing. But frankly, these two work well together: each taking in as much as they can, whipping it around in their personal brain-blenders, and then spitting something out and sharing it with the masses. Plus they're both uniquely American, albeit in different ways: Madonna the gregarious, outspoken, spotlight-seeking variety in the vein of Benjamin Franklin (don't fight me on this), Whitman the contemplative, wordsmithing, diplomatic type along the lines of Thomas Jefferson (I'm telling you: it's true).

The thing that really unites them, though, is their proclivity for tinkering. Madonna has been on 10 tours--9 of them worldwide--and many of her songs have been rejiggered along the way. "La Isla Bonita" seems to be one of her favorite tunes to reinvent, as she's introduced new versions of it on 5 separate tours, in addition to the album and radio cuts.

Does this sound like anyone we know? Perhaps--could it be--Uncle Walt? He of the multiple revised/expanded printings of his landmark work, Leaves of Grass? Why, yes it is.

And this is also a mark of their American nature: the constant need for improvement. Ours is not a nation that feels comfortable letting something stand if it needs to be fixed. We're at our best when we take what has been good about our past and bring it into the present. That way, we honor both history and progress; that's why the Constitution has had amendments added to it throughout the years.

So maybe let's look to the examples of Madonna and Whitman and try to forge ahead, better than we were yesterday.

-Cate-

Images via here and here.

The Little Things

Over the summer, I read this really excellent article about how awesome chapbooks are. It's called "Small Is Beautiful: The Importance of Chapbooks," by Michael Young, and it was published over at The The Poetry back in May.

It's been a long time since I read an article that I connected with so well. Chapbooks ARE beautiful, and they are something that not everyone understands. 

In poetry, the goal is often to see a full-length collection published. Officially speaking, "full-length" is anything over 48 pages, and you'll usually see them in the 80-100 page range. Some, but not all, publishers require--or at least hope--that a chunk of the individual pieces have already been published elsewhere, as in literary journals, in a sort of vetting process. Assuming one poem per page, that's a huge, time-consuming undertaking. 

But the full-length collection is not always the best route to take, as Young rightly points out. He name-drops William Blake, whose most famous works, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, were both well within the chapbook range. This is a form that essentially allowed Blake to curate a streamlined poetic experience, with no concern about extraneous poems that might weaken his narrative arc (and make no mistake: narrative arcs are entirely possible to create in poetry collections). 

That is what draws me to the chapbook form. My first book, Miles, was a chapbook, and I remember spending endless hours paring down the pages, rearranging the works, and agonizing over any little thing that felt out of place. Having been 22 at the time, I was, of course, not particularly awesome as a writer, but even so, I feel good about what I was able to produce, and I am glad that I was limited to so few pages. And even now, I recognize that my poetry is stronger when the opportunity to ramble is removed from the equation.

So I would encourage you all to check out chapbooks, either as a reader or as a writer. You may find that they leave you with a stronger sense of who someone is as a poet, or that they give you the freedom to be precise with your own work. 

-Cate-

Spot the Difference

When I finished my undergraduate degree, a professor of mine gave me a copy of Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works. Years later, knowing that I am no fan of Emily Dickinson's but that Niedecker's work is influenced by and at times strongly resembles Dickinson's, that same professor asked me if I had disliked Collected as a result. It was an interesting--and valid--inquiry, one that I was able to answer truthfully by saying that I in fact found that I enjoyed Niedecker's work.

Having recently come across the volume in question, I wondered what it was, exactly, that attracted me in Niedecker's poems but repelled me in Dickinson's, and I think the most honest response is that there isn't necessarily a strong set of criteria. Sometimes, it's just a gut feeling that you have.

Here's another example. I love Quentin Tarantino's oeuvre, and my experiences with him began in high school prior to the release of Kill Bill, which was the first Tarantino film I saw in real time rather than on DVD or (gasp) video. But when Inglourious Basterds came along, I hated it with a force that surprised me. To this day, I cannot fully articulate what made me dislike it so much. The acting was superb. The editing was impeccable (RIP Sally Menke). The production values were unimpeachable. Yet there it was: I couldn't stand the thought of a repeat viewing. When Django Unchained premiered, I worried that perhaps I had lost my connection with Tarantino's craftsmanship and would despise it as well, but I was pleasantly surprised when Django proved to be at turns hilarious, haunting, and heroic. 

What, then, was the difference between Basterds and Django? I can't even say. The former simply felt wrong to me, just as Dickinson's poems always have. 

The reading, listening, and viewing experiences are, for the most part, deeply subjective. This is the easiest way to explain my quandary. Yet I continue to find myself shocked when people I meet profess their undying love for Emily Dickinson. What is the difference between us? It's nothing more than a matter of personal preference.

-Cate-

IT'S HERE, 2.0

Gods in the Wilderness is now available for purchase! If you're interested in ordering a copy, please see Amazon or my publisher, Pink. Girl. Ink. Press.

 

Happy reading!

-Cate-

IT'S HERE!

Boomerang Girl arrived in the mail yesterday. If you're interested in ordering a copy, please contact me (cateismilesaway@gmail.com) or my publisher (tigerseyejournal.com).

Happy reading!

-Cate-

Snobbery and Hipocrisy!

Here’s a thing I’m occasionally forced to admit: I am a snob.

This is, perhaps, unsurprising to some of you who have met me in real life. I suffer from that well-known disease, Resting Bitch Face Syndrome. Apologies to my parents, but it’s a genetic condition. Several people have told me that they thought I hated them when they first encountered me, because my default facial expression makes me look like I’m pooh-poohing everyone and everything around me. The truth is that I am only doing this about 25 percent of the time.

When I am, it tends to be because people are in the process of telling me that they are in the midst of reading the Fifty Shades of Grey series, anything by Nicholas Sparks (the king of white people almost kissing), or the latest Kardashian publication. This is funny because I’ve gone on record several times as saying that I believe people should read anything that appeals to them rather than following some prescribed list, as well as because I am nothing if not a fan of the trashy romance novel (mainly of the Regency persuasion).

But when I get to an open mic event and someone reads their maudlin, poorly-rhymed, unlearned poetry that was influenced by Billy Collins or a spirit journey to the desert or the really awful time they had with addiction/cancer/dying pets, I judge the writer and then I tune out their words. It’s a horrible way to act as an audience member, and I know this because I’ve been on the wrong side of a less-than-enthusiastic crowd in the past.

There’s something in me, though, that cannot accept hearing a piece written in such a way. I’m all for artistic expression, especially as a healing tool. Simply committing words to the page, however, does not make it poetry, nor does it make the thing fit for public consumption.

This is a sort of long-winded way of saying that we all need to be careful about what we put out into the world. No matter how heartfelt your efforts, you cannot create something worthwhile by running the poetry playbook (rhyme, meter, alliteration, and so on) and applying it to whatever topic springs to mind. That’s what a diary is for. Even the so-called “confessional poets” (Lowell, Sexton, Plath, and their contemporaries) were able to turn their psychic wounds into something better for themselves and their readers and connect with them without falling completely into the self-obsession trap or--more importantly--the sentimental trap. Sentimental verse is great for greeting cards. It’s not useful in a poetry collection.

Lest I should sound like a complete jerk, I readily admit that I struggle with this in my own writing. I’m absolutely self-centered when it comes to producing poetry. I’ve never written a single poem that wasn’t at least partly about me and my hang-ups. But I want to bridge that gap between my interior life and my reader’s sensibilities, and so I work hard to make it happen. This isn’t my way of tooting my own horn; it’s simply my way of encouraging others to take a similar approach in order to avoid alienating their audience with a simplistic rhyme scheme and platitudes.

Of course, I’m likely judging everyone too harshly, given the quality--or lack thereof--of my own poetry, and for that I apologize. But as someone who loves the written word, I want to read and hear the best work possible, and I hope this will nudge some authors in a more polished direction.

-Cate-

Three Things About Gods in the Wilderness

Kamy Wicoff, the founder of SheWrites, recommends that authors tell their potential readers three things about their book: 1) What is it about? 2) What was your inspiration? 3) Who is your ideal audience? While this can be a challenge to do at all, let alone succinctly, for a poetry collection, I'd like to tell you these three things about my forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Gods in the Wilderness, if you'll indulge me.

1) What is it about?

As with any poetry collection, Gods is about many things, including nature, faith, violence, love, and identity.

2) What was your inspiration?

The first section of the book is heavily influenced by religious imagery. The second section uses the Norse-named days of the week as an organizing principle.

3) Who is your ideal audience?

People who enjoy free verse and don't mind some blood and guts.

I hope this has piqued your interest, and if you have any in-depth questions to ask, please don't hesitate!

-Cate-

The Year of the Two

So. Shit got real this year.

In an unexpected turn of events, a publisher I'd queried (Pink.Girl.Ink. Press) contacted me in late January to inform me that yes, they would like to publish my full-length poetry manuscript, Gods in the Wilderness. It was one of those moments where I had to read the e-mail eight or nine thousand times to fully comprehend the situation. 

This is a strange feeling for me. When I moved home, everything was crap and I kind of wanted to die a little and I was convinced that I would have to give up on the things I'd worked toward my whole life. Now, I feel so lucky to be in demand (if that's what you would call it).

With the publication of Boomerang Girl right around the corner, I wanted to share this news as well; after all, about a third of the material in Gods comes from BG. My little chapbook is wonderful and I love it more than I can say, and I would have been happy with BG alone. Now, I have twice as many opportunities to reach people with my words. I hope I can live up to the things I've been given.

-Cate-

Special Update: Cate Is Going to Judge a Contest!

Hello All!

In the event that you or your friends are interested:

Tiger's Eye Press is now accepting submissions for its 2015 Chapbook Contest! Submit your work from 1 April - 31 August 2015.

2015 Judge: Caitlin Johnson

Send 20-25 pages of poetry with a title page, table of contents, and an acknowledgements page, all with no identifying information. Please include a second title page with your name and contact information.

Submit your entire manuscript, e-mail address or SASE, a 2-3 line bio, and a $15 reading fee to the address below.

Winner receives $100 and 25 copies of the published manuscript.

Tiger's Eye Press
P.O. Box 9723
Denver, CO
80209

For more information, visit http://www.tigerseyejournal.com or e-mail Colette Jonopulos at tigerseyepoet@yahoo.com

The Boomerang Girl Playlist

This may or may not turn out to be the year of the listicle for Cate Is Miles Away. I'm on a solid roll already, what with three of them in January and now this piece. But I'd like to think this one serves an actual purpose: spreading the word about my upcoming chapbook, Boomerang Girl. 

As of yet, we haven't started typesetting or designing because the publisher, Tiger's Eye Press, must first edit and release the latest issue of Tiger's Eye Journal, which I personally can't wait to read. But in the interest of looking toward the future, I wanted to share something with you that I made for my cover artist so he could get a feeling for what influences my work.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Boomerang Girl playlist.

1) "The Truth Is in the Dirt," Karen Elson

There are days when I think I could live with listening to nothing but The Ghost Who Walks for the rest of my life. While "Pretty Babies" would fit into this list as well, I chose to include "Dirt" instead for the absolutely epic lines, "Here she comes; it's killing time. / Flames are burning behind her eyes." It's my go-to listen when I really want to be a badass.

2) "Lady Picture Show," Stone Temple Pilots

For many years now, STP has been my favorite band. Not a traditional choice, perhaps, but Scott Weiland's voice and Robert DeLeo's bass make me feel better when I'm down. "Lady Picture Show" fits in pretty well with some of the themes I explore in my poetry, and particularly with the Boomerang Girl pieces.

3) "Let It Will Be," Madonna

"Just watch me burn," she sings. And I want you to watch me, too.

4) "Alright," The Lucy Nation

Who among us has never felt the need to reassure ourselves, saying, "It's going to be all right?" The Lucy Nation has embodied that in this song of self-assertion and strength. Sometimes I wonder if it really is all right now, and this song helps me work through that.

5) "Bite Hard," Franz Ferdinand

I love this song so much that I decided to pull a line or two from it as an epigraph to the chapbook. Feel free to speculate about which section I chose. (The whole thing is quotable from top to bottom, so good luck.)

6) "Hot Knife," Fiona Apple

Apple knows her way around songs about relationships. From her first album to now, she's been exploring the different aspects of love, and I adore how this shows two different approaches to it: on one hand, the girl who's melting, and on the other, the one who's burning.

7) "Soul Love," David Bowie

Even if this is a slightly incomprehensible song, it's so spot-on that it doesn't matter. Bowie's voice and music transcend the sometimes wacky lyrics and makes me feel like he's singing directly to me. (How cool would it be if he was actually doing that, though?)

8) "Original Sin," Elton John

We all grew up listening to--and occasionally loving--Elton John. I'm no exception to this. For me, though, the moment I grew really attached to him was when I first listened to Songs from the West Coast start to finish. "Original Sin," in particular, crept into my brain and set up camp. It's a gorgeous love song that hearkens back to John's earlier work in the best way.

9) "In the Cold, Cold Night," White Stripes

Meg White may not be the greatest singer (or drummer) in the world, but when she does sing, I feel deeply connected to her because of the vulnerability in her voice. On an album full of standout tracks, this one is especially great and important, at least for me.

10) "Gardenia," Mandy Moore

I know people overuse this phrase, but Mandy Moore is--and always has been--criminally underrated. The whole of Wild Hope is a great album that showcases her range of musical interests and helps her shed the teen singer image with which she started. In a perfect world, everyone would know at least this track of hers, which is a little bit haunting and so relatable for women of a certain age.

11) "Simple Things Part 2," DirtyVegas

Who would have thought a Pink Floyd sample could be put to such use in a techno-acoustic hybrid tune? This is one of my all-time favorite songs, and I think that I've referenced it many times in my own work, either consciously or not.

12) "Fast As You," Dwight Yoakam

Dwight Yoakam is incredible, and he--like any good country artist--really gets the intertwined ideas of heartbreak and revenge. In this song, he says everything I'm trying to say in the final poem of Boomerang Girl, which y'all will just have to wait and read someday soon.

-Cate-

Meeting with Gods

Hey, remember that time I mentioned how Richard Blanco hated my outfit? It was really traumatic, guys. But the point is that I got to meet Richard Motherfucking Blanco. 

I was considerably lucky for many years. Due to some incredible work on the part of professors and administrators, excellent writers regularly showed up on campus at my undergraduate alma mater, and in grad school, the stakes were even higher. Right before commencement began for the summer 2012 MFA graduates, Nikky Finney turned to three of us and asked if we were nervous. Steve Almond once laughed at me for essentially revealing to two hundred people that I'd had a bad day in workshop during a q-and-a session. David Rakoff, may he rest in peace, was gracious enough not to guffaw when I asked him about the connection between comedy and pain.

I don't say any of this to brag, as in, "HEY, LOOK AT ALL THESE COOL PEOPLE WITH WHOM I RUBBED ELBOWS, HOWEVER BRIEFLY." I say it because I realize how invaluable these experiences were.

If you are ever able, go to readings and book signings. Ask questions of the authors, should time allow. You will learn so. freaking. much from them, even if you don't speak to them directly. Sometimes just watching an author read can teach you a great deal--for example, how best to present your work in public, or perhaps how to connect better with your audience.

And here's a secret: about 97 percent of the authors I've met are the nicest people in the world, so you don't have to be afraid of approaching them. The other 3 percent? You don't want to spend time with them, anyway. I promise.

-Cate-

The Impossible Imposter

My parents and I are going to Las Vegas in March. This will be my first visit to Sin City (and Nevada in general). When Mom asked me what I wanted to do while we were there, I came up with one of my typical batshit ideas: I decided I wanted to visit the campus of UNLV and find out more about their MFA and Ph.D. programs in creative writing.

"Wait," you're saying to yourself, "doesn't she already have an MFA?"

Yes. She does.

Once every three or four months or so, I decide that I should go back for a second MFA. This is not because I enjoy being in school. In fact, there are few things I hate more than being in school. And it's certainly not because I feel like getting tossed around in workshops again. (Not to brag, but I only cried once during a workshop in all my years of education-getting. Those of you who know me know that I cry over everything, so this is a pretty big deal.) No, it's because I feel like what I have done is not enough. It's never enough.

As I said to my parents, "I don't think I went to the wrong school. [Lesley is the best, for real.] I just think maybe I should have studied poetry instead." Earlier this year, I mentioned that I've won a competition to have a chapbook published, and on my way to that point, I was also a semi-finalist for one prize and a finalist for another. But I'm terrified that someone is going to take these things away from me because they'll figure out what a horrible writer I am or--worse yet--everyone who ever reads it will think that I'm useless and don't deserve to be published.

This stems from something called imposter syndrome. And I have a severe case. Women, in particular, are susceptible to it. This is speculation on my part, but I assume artistic types have the most trouble with imposter syndrome, because our work is already undervalued and (some of us) feel like jerks whenever we manage to pull ahead of the pack. I mean, just read this list of actors/actresses/assorted others (including Don Cheadle, Meryl Streep, and Maya Angelou, of all people) who seem to suffer from imposter syndrome!

I'm working hard to internalize the notion that there is a difference between being realistic and giving in to imposter syndrome. For example, I want to stay grounded and remind myself that--at least at this point in my life--I'm not the kind of writer whose work is going to show up in The Paris Review or Poetry or even Passages North (thanks for rejecting me twice so far, and an extra shout-out to Northern for dismissing my grad school application back in '09). And there's a good chance I wouldn't be happy in a poetry program, anyway, partly because I'm not happy in school. Yet I also have to remember that Laura LeHew, Carlos Reyes, and Ted Enslin (!) have said some nice things about my poetry. 

Striking that balance is difficult, as are so many other things in life. Any time it gets too difficult, I have to remind myself that, to this day, Richard Blanco telling me he didn't like my outfit is still the worst thing a poet has ever said to me (to my face, anyway). But that's another story for another time. Meanwhile, I'll be over here trying to talk myself out of a second MFA. Who has that kind of time, anyway? I should be out in the world writing, instead.

-Cate-

Some Updates

As one might expect, some stuff happened while I was on my blogging break. During my "time off," I was actually working seasonal retail, which was either the best or worst experience of my life (more on that in a later post). Our first Christmas without my aunt and grandmother was a subdued affair, and it didn't feel quite right. Another family--one made for themselves by my friend Charlie and some of his brothers of the heart--suffered a terrible loss just before Christmas when one of them passed away. Finally, the new year arrived, as evidenced by my New Year, New Playlist post last week, but the "holiday hangover" is the worst in recent memory, at least for me. 

Yet a few items of good news did find their way through the fog, so rather than dwell on the aforementioned difficulties, here's a short list of exciting events.

1) The North Carolina Poet Laureate situation has been cleaned up. I'm so happy to report that Shelby Stephenson, who is practically an institution unto himself, is the new head honcho there. Having met Shelby and several of his contemporaries and students, I can say without a doubt that NC poetry is in good hands.

2) Speaking of Poets Laureate: my (imaginary) poet boyfriend Dr. Benjamin Myers has been named the PL for Oklahoma in 2015-2016. Many congratulations to him! Go read his work now if you care anything for current American poetry.

3) I was named a finalist in the 2014 Susan K. Collins/Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest, run by the Midwest Writing Center, which is a pretty cool thing.

4) Oh, and I won this other contest. Nbd.

I'm glad to be able to pass these tidbits along after the endless months of terrible things that happened in 2014, and I hope that everyone out there has a better year than the one that just ended.

-Cate-

The Problem with Caitlins, Part 2: Caitlín Ní Uallacháin, or, William Butler Yeats Ruins Everything

Although I go by Cate, my given name is Caitlin. Throughout the years, this has been a problematic thing for several reasons. In this series of two posts, I'll take you through the challenges of being a Caitlin.

For part 1, click here.

***

Unintentional legacies. We all have them, whether it’s your uncle’s collection of worthless Confederate money or something less tangible like a deep and abiding fear of attics because you were once locked in your grandmother’s for five hours. Mine came from a most unexpected personage: William Butler Yeats.

Y’all know WBY, right? Lived well into his 70s at a time when that was unusual, had a great deal to say about Ireland, wrote like a grillion poems? Well, Yeatsy had a soft spot for his home country, and by soft spot, I mean he was kind of the U2 of his era, writing about all of the oppression and war and political messiness. (I’m talking U2 circa War here, not How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.)

As a consequence of this nationalistic bent, Yeats spent some time discussing Caitlín Ní Uallacháin (pronounced Kathleen Ni Houlihan--no relation to Hot Lips, as far as I know), who is not an actual person but a personification of the spirit of Ireland. She’s like Uncle Sam, only less bombastic and more homeless.

Not Caitlín.

Yeats had some other obsessions, among them Maud Gonne, but she was flesh and blood, not his beloved homeland in (fictional) human form. In 1902, he teamed with Lady Augusta Gregory to write a play called Cathleen ni Houlihan, which was first performed in Dublin. It's possible that Yeats is responsible for making Caitlín known internationally, insomuch as she IS known; after all, he is one of the foundational writers for those of us who study English-language poetry. James Joyce, that other famous Irish scribe, also referenced her in some of his work, but I would argue that Yeats had the bigger influence.

The thing about Caitlín is that she requires young men to sacrifice themselves for her. It's not an awesome legacy to live up to. In fact, sharing a name with the symbol of Irish nationalism--which, to tell you the truth, I know nothing about--is a daunting task. Here is someone, however imaginary, who holds a great deal of power over some of the more patriotic writers of Ireland.

The very foxy Sargent portrait of Yeats.

The upshot of all this is that, in America, my name is not freighted with so much meaning. Still, I can't forget what I learned the fateful day in 2005 when a college professor first introduced me to Caitlín, my literary doppelgänger. Should I ever be lucky enough to visit Ireland, I intend to pay her--and Yeats--homage to the extent that I am able. But I'll stick to being plain old Caitlin for the most part.


-Cate-

Image of Loretta Swit as Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan via IMDb.
Sargent's Yeats portrait via Wikipedia.