Interview with Cathleen Calbert and Patricia Clark’s Advanced Poetry Workshop at Grand Valley State University

Patricia: Hi Betsey, It's Patricia. Are you there? We're here just getting ready. Let me know when you're there.

Betsey: Welcome to the Sarabande in Education Chatroom! Tonight, Patricia Clark's Advanced Poetry Workshop will be chatting with poet Cathleen Calbert.

Betsey: Hi there!

Patricia: Let us know when Cathleen is on. What should we call her? Cathleen?

Betsey: Sure, go ahead and call her Cathleen...that's fine.

Cathleen Calbert: Hello, Betsey & Patricia (Patty from U of H!). I'm here. How are you?

Patricia: I'm good! My class is very excited. (One guy's outside having a smoke.) We'll call you Cathleen...Glad to see you! We wish there was a video link.

Betsey: Hi Cathleen!

Cathleen Calbert: Hi both. I'm looking forward to our talk & wherever it goes.

Betsey: Are the students logged on, or are they sharing a computer?

Betsey: Either way is fine...go ahead and get started as soon as your ready...I'll just be keeping an eye on the time.

Patricia: Yes, we're all logged on & ready to go. Are you folks ready? Cathleen, it's delightful to have you do this chat with us. We have loved your book. Once you reply the students will ask questions in a sequence we've worked out.

Cathleen Calbert: That sounds great. I'm very happy that you liked the book. It can be a lonely world in poetry, & it's a great joy to feel READ.

Brenna: Hi Cathleen, thanks for chatting. I wanted to tell you that I admire your work. My questions are: what are the best/worst parts about being a poet and what are some of your favorite poems that you have written?

Cathleen Calbert: Good questions! Gee, worst part: maybe just how hard it can be to write & how small rewards for that work can be. Best part: creating something that someone else also likes, I think. Being DONE with a poem! I like this poem "Sluts" in my first book, & am partial to the title poem of Bad Judgment--perhaps for personal reasons.

Sara: Cathleen, One of my favorite poems in your book is 'Dead Debutante'--in it you describe how people act negatively towards the persona and her occupation. How do people react to you when you tell them that you're a poet?

Cathleen Calbert: Thanks. Oh, people are nice, of course. But I have had a sense, especially among some "straight" academics that a poet is regarded as somehow more emotionally explosive, wilder, crazier. That old Romantic notion, I guess.

Claire: What is the most valuable question that you ask yourself while revising?

Cathleen Calbert: Hmm. Maybe: can I say this better? I think that most poets know what the weak parts of their poems are already--they're just not always sure how to fix them. I also feel like I can "see" only so much of how to correct something at any one time. Then I can't see what else to do. Later, magically I can see (sometimes) what to do with some weaker lines.

Katy: Hello - I really like the poems in your book, "Bad Judgement." I can personally relate to a few, Trinity and Bad Judgement. My question is how do you know when a poem is ready to be published and what kind of decision process do you go through when you are putting a book together?

Cathleen Calbert: Thanks, & also good questions, Katy. I guess I don't know if poems are ever really finished, if they're ever perfected. (Maybe if we write the perfect poem we'll die on the spot.) So for me, it's usually a question of the poem feeling done for me or as done as I can make it for now. Of course, there's a strong temptation to send poems out fast. I feel that. I want it in print! So if it feels "done for now" I do. If it doesn't go anywhere, I'll keep fiddling. Actually, I keep fiddling anyway. In terms of a book, usually I start seeing a pattern, a motif, forming in the poems that I've been writing, & I can see a book possibly starting to take shape.

Willie: What inspired you to write "The Last Angel Poem?"
In the poem, are you saying that you do not believe in angels? The last stanza you wrote--"for they cannot mean anything more than we can possibly mean."

How much influence does your peer's critique have on your revisions? And how long did it take you to complete the manuscript for "Bad Judgment?"

Cathleen Calbert: I was inspired to write "The Last Angel Poem" because I was sick of all the angel poems--mine & others. Actually, the working title of my first book had angels in the title, & I kept sticking more angels in the book, but it didn't get taken for several years, & in that time I watched angel-titled book after book get published. I am & was curious about why there was such a huge angelic zeitgeist going on, but I think in some ways my Catholic girlhood also entered into my response: that assimilation of angels. As to your other good question, peer critiques have meant the world to me. You're lucky to be in a workshop. I miss that. I haven't workshopped poems for years now. Tough to find a peer group out of school. And how long: The real answer feels like: all my life. Some of the poems go back ten years from the publishing date.

Jeremy: i notice you seem to use the theme of vampires in a few of your poems. Is there any reason you use this theme and is there any type of subtext to its meanning?

Cathleen Calbert: I like vampires--not personally, of course. But I am interested in the imagery of the vampire in our culture--especially in terms of draining energy, absorbing others, a drive towards selfishness perhaps.

Michael: Hi Cathleen. Are there any poets you feel are must reads? That is, who are, in your opinion, the best?

Cathleen Calbert: Gee, I don't know. I'm sure Patricia has good ideas on this score. I don't know if anybody really is a must-read. Maybe better to find people that you like, to read people when you were ready. I read Wordsworth & Whitman too young & hated them. And my own taste is quirky. Poets I have admired a great deal (beside the obvious greats like Shakespeare, Keats, etc.,) are Plath, Sexton, & Bishop.

Patricia: Cathleen, I think I agree that you can read people (be forced to read people) at too young an age. Elizabeth Bishop is someone I found more on my own & really love. Some people advise AGAINST reading your contemporaries. What do you think of that advice?

Cathleen Calbert: That's interesting. Of course, I think it's good to know what's going on now--otherwise you can end up writing in a vacuum. So I'm for some reading of contemporaries for sure. But I think that people can get obsessed with reading only what's coming out now & that feels like too sharp a focus to me. Some distance from a poet--in time-- can be nice too

Rob: Cathleen, do you find yourself going back to the same sources for inspiration, or do you find a variety of sources quite often?

Cathleen Calbert: In terms of poems & poets, I probably do circle back to those that have helped steady me in the past. In terms of other kinds of inspiration, I think that I am trying to shift where that comes from somewhat. I feel a little written-out about my own childhood, for example, so that's less of an "inspiration" for me now. Finding something else of interest helps--I'm playing around with writing this ms. called "The Afflicted Girls" about various screwed-up women. So I find researching those women pretty inspiring.

Alissia: Hello Cathleen. I also really enjoyed your poems and I was wondering what was the most helpful criticism you ever received? Tue Apr 2, 2002 8:01 pm
Cathleen Calbert: Interesting question! Actually, some of the most helpful criticism occurred when I watched my mentor at U of Houston, Richard Howard, go through my poems line by line, sort of hmming at certain lines. Watching him look at my poems with a careful, critical eye made me blanch at some of the badnesses, made me also take the poem seriously, to want to merit that eye. So maybe Richard's well-timed "hmms."

Jeane: I've enjoyed your book. Why was this particular cover chosen? Did you have a choice on picking the cover?

Cathleen Calbert: Yes, I love the painting. My publisher--ahem--was kind enough to ask if I had any suggestions for cover art, so I dug around a # of art books & proposed this: The Venus of Urbino. I just like the painting. I thought that it went with some of sex part of what I think of as my "death & sex" book, & I thought the little dog looked my Pomeranian, although he always slept on my head.

Katy: The first poem, Nights Were Full of Sex and Churches, makes me think of the cover, Venus of Urbino, and the subject of the painting may be thinking. Was that part of the intention?

Cathleen Calbert: No, I didn't think of that, but it's a great interpretation.

bob: Did you choose the helix shape for Bad Judgement? Do you feel it would work just as well "Left Aligned"? Why? What vision of the future should poets create?

Cathleen Calbert: I like zigzag poems. I have done a # of them. I don't know quite what it means in the case of "Bad Judgment" (I'm going to go for the old writer's "I don't know why I do what I do" here.) I can say that it seemed to me to indicate a shifting back & forth of various thoughts & excuses.

bob: What about the future for poetry?

Cathleen Calbert: Wow, that's a question, huh? I wonder about that myself. What's getting old, what will come next. I wonder if Spoken Word is starting to dwindle. How much farther Language poetry can go. I honestly don't know, but one guess that I have is to greater formalism. Poetry has been pretty "hip" again for about a decade, I think, & maybe that will fade. But I think it will survive.

Brenna: Thanks for your great answers so far. I would like to know if you have any advice for young writers. Also, do you have anything to say about spoken word poems or "poetry slams"?

Cathleen Calbert: I felt some resistance to Spoken Word when it started getting really popular around here, especially because of the anti-intellectualism & bashing of anything that seemed "academic." But I've softened since then & have had a good time watching Spoken Word folks do their things. It's wonderful oral poetry, & a lot of regular poetry readings CAN be deadly. Basically, I think new movements are always correctives of something that's gone stale in the mainstream, & that they're very desirable for that. In terms of advice, I'd say just to write & to read. I guess I wrote before I read much, but I'm surprised by how many of my students don't want to read stuff (afraid of being influenced perhaps or they just don't know where to find stuff). I'd say to find a balance between being too open to other people's opinions (& thus be crushed by criticism) & being too closed (& thus not open to growing, to changing).

Betsey: Just a little warning that we have about ten minute left!

Alissia: You artfully construct lists in poems. How do you keep the energy and surprise in a listing poem?

Cathleen Calbert: I like list poems too. They're a lot of fun (& I did come to like Whitman eventually). That's a good question about the energy & surprise though. I guess those things come with the elements in the list, but it's always interesting to see how one's going to work one's way out of a list too. With "After the Tragedy" I didn't know the list was ending there until I hit the last line.

Jeremy: I just want to say first of all that you look alot like J.K Rowling(thats a compliment). Also, you seem to think people should be more brave when they read poetry to a group. I am reading one of your poems tomorrow (Dear, Lynda) and am curious if you have any tips to reading your poetry.

Jeremy: reading out loud as a part of a public poetry reading, that is

Betsey: Just a few more minutes to start wrapping up!

Cathleen Calbert: I wish I had her money! It's interesting that you ask about reading because I've been sweating over this reading I'm doing at my college in a couple of weeks--to the faculty of arts & sciences. Deans present, etc. Actually, I'm always torn between being brave & being nice. For me that line from Dickinson about (bad paraphrase) feeling like the back of your head is blowing off & that's how you know something really is poetry: that's how I like my poems. But I eat my guts out about taking chances too. The last time I read on this campus, someone ran up to me & said, "That was great. You really shocked the faculty." At least, now I have tenure. Tue Apr 2, 2002 8:28 pm
Patricia: Thanks for "talking" with us, Cathleen! With your next book, maybe we can get you to come to Grand Valley & give a reading. School is almost over for the year for us.

Cathleen Calbert: Patricia, I'd love to come. And I really am thrilled that you invited me to talk to your class. I'm honored. And the questions were very thoughtful (& kind).

Patricia: Bye!!!! Patricia

Brenna: Bye, thanks =)

Rob: Bye

bob: auf wiedersehn

Alissia: Have a great evening!

Sara: have a great night!

Jeremy: thanks a lot:) this was fun! have a nice evening

Betsey: Thanks everyone! I'll be e-mailing a transcript to everybody who registered....Bye for now!

Katy: Bye and thank you

Claire: Thank you for your time!

Jeane: Bye,thank you

Rob: adios

Willie: Thank you for your answers. I really enjoyed our chat. My first time on a chat.

Cathleen Calbert: Bye all. Thanks, class. Thanks, Patricia. And thanks, Betsey.