By Annie Newcomer:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets from around the globe. It is an honor to share their work and learn more about their lives, influences, and love of poetry.
This week, we feature the work of Catherine Anderson.
Catherine Anderson has published a memoir, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging (Wising Up Press) and four collections of poetry: Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press), and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books).
Please welcome Catherine Anderson!
Annie Newcomer: Welcome to our Flapper Press Poetry Café, Catherine. Recently I started asking our poets to share with our readers what they feel is their literary super power. What is yours?
Catherine Anderson: Annie, I’d say I’ve got a lot of curiosity, a handy tool for a creative artist. Delight in the musicality of speech, and how it’s rendered into verse keeps me pumped and curious about new approaches and old approaches that sound new when shaped by the sonic intention of the artist. I read omnivorously and am always trying to understand what I may have missed, so I ask a lot of questions. That leads me to write and keep writing.
AN: I am impressed with poets who go on for MFA's in Poetry and Creative Writing. This takes not only talent but discipline. In what ways does an advanced degree in poetry enrich a poet, or can an advanced degree label a poet as inaccessible to the everyday reader?
CA: I think this may be a question of how a poet is influenced, how you pick up cues from the culture you’re in, the life you lead. An advanced degree is a gift—time spent away dedicated to the solitary work of making poems. But good poems don’t come only from study, and not many can afford the luxury of obtaining a degree. For poets, nothing is lost, everything or anything can be a poetic catalyst. Galway Kinnell was once asked a similar question on the lawn of the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge. He said that the beauty of poetry is that anyone can do it, no matter who they are, what they have studied, where they come from. I think he was emphasizing the spiritual engagement of the practice. I love that idea.
To get to the second part of your question—because you and I have talked about this off and on—any practice can slide into shop talk, and as poets, we have to be aware of that tendency. Most readers enjoy clarity. I’m also aware of different orientations to poetry, almost what a linguist would call variations in a language. Poetry is the art of linguistic surprise. How a poem appears on a page, how phrasing is structured, how a narration is ordered, the use of anaphora, rhyme, assonance, and consonance may differ across language cultures, such as the academy vs. the street, Midwest vs. coast, etc. When our expectations of a poem are upended, that’s a great thing! The use of videos in an online poem? Verses sung or rapped instead of read at a reading? Language from the Constitution restructured as poetry? Why not? We have to remember that the sound of language, which is often the spark of a poem, changes over time. If a poem isn’t working as I’m reading, I put it aside. Usually, it sounds different later.
AN: I believe that at least three things bring a person to poetry: their personal experiences, people who offer a poetic introduction, and the choices we make. Please discuss these and how they shaped your writing.
CA: It’s funny that in thinking about these, I immediately jet back to childhood, that infinite reservoir, for good or bad. I was lucky to be born into a family of hams who loved words, loved reading and telling stories. My father was a newspaper reporter/editor and my mother a teacher. I don’t think anyone expected me to pursue poetry but assumed I’d use language in a more practical way to make a living like them, and I did. My middle brother, Charlie, made the strongest impression on me. Unlike the other members of our family, he couldn’t use words because of severe autism. I’ve written about him quite a lot, learning from his struggles in utterance as a parallel to the arduous process of writing poems.
For me the poetic door was opened not only by these close people I was related to but by passionate believers in art and expression, whether they were the teaching poets I met in college, visual artists, or political activists.
That is still the case today, grateful as I am for my friends who are poets, artists, and writers. We make the choice to go through the door at any time in our lives, I believe.
AN: Please share how you select a theme for a poem and the process you have adopted in writing a poem from first concept to completion.
CA: The process is slow, from the ground up, and usually without a theme in mind at first but certainly a feeling. A poem isn’t representative of feeling but the cause of it, so staying in that feeling state is important when beginning to write. I always do a lot of reading, observing nature or a work of art and recording details. With my mind in that state of relaxation, some coherent lines might emerge or arrive on a junket with other unrelated images. I also listen for words, phrases, in spoken language surrounding me, just pick up what’s intriguing. This could happen even while driving or, god forbid, watching TV. It’s not as haphazard as it sounds because the method taps the unconscious. The poet Marianne Boruch calls this walking into the world with your beggar’s bowl, like a wandering monk.
On the page, nothing at first looks like it goes together. That’s when I perform the algebra of unifying broken parts. Or I try at least. I tend to write, write, then cut back like a hurried barber, through many drafts. Themes do emerge, because like most writers, I’m always obsessed with something.
AN: When do you know that a poem is completed, or do you keep editing work that you have previously published?
CA: It has been said that poems are never completed, only abandoned. I wouldn’t go as far as abandoned, but perhaps set aside. When read in another light, they will often look and sound very different. I find this is true not only of my own work but of poems written by others. I do take a few liberties with rewriting after publication, especially when putting together a collection. For new poems, sometimes my furious editing can go too far. Taking 20–50 drafts for one poem is not unheard of, and I have (not often) hung on to poems or certain lines for 20 or more years before finishing a piece.
AN: What is the difference between a poet and working poet, and which do you consider yourself?
CA: This question kind of relates to your prior ones on influences. I work with spoken-language interpreters from immigrant and refugee communities, encouraging them to perfect their facility in speaking and listening. One thing I always emphasize is that interpreters are continually learning new words, phrasings, concepts. Poets are in the same boat. Ear to the ground, picking up the vibes, reading the room.
There is something physical and athletic about poetic expression, which is why very often poets also turn to other arts such as music and painting.
The many jobs I’ve had (hotel clerk, teacher, journalist) shaped the poems I was writing, tuned my ear to rhythms of speech and to particular narratives. That’s also true in the decades I’ve had the good fortune to work with new interpreters. The poet Edward Hirsch has described his job as a brakeman for the Chicago rails during that liminal period of his life when he decided to throw himself headlong into becoming a poet. Between shifts, he read and read. I think that’s what we do: between shifts we read, read, write, write, write. I am not sure how else to do it.
AN: Please share what you want people to know about poetry from your perspective.
CA: Annie, like you’ve said, we come to poetry from many directions. Before we attempt to write poetry, we often read it or hear it from someone else who is a great lover of the art. I am not sure if we set out to become poets or simply that we find ourselves writing poems because we love what we discover and want to participate in it. We want to stretch into the language, kind of like singing alone to the radio in your car, not because you’re a good singer (you may be one) but because you want to be part of the music.
Writing even one poem in your life, whether it is perfect or not, is an amazing experience. I hope everyone tries it.
AN: We have actually known each other for over a decade because I am in a group that you started at the Kansas City Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri, where we study the work of esteemed poets. Please share with our readers how you decided to make this commitment of over 15 years and how the poets who attend benefit in both understanding the work of other poets and gaining insight into how they can improve their own writing as well.
CA: I’m delighted to describe the Poetry Reading Circle we’ve created through the Kansas City Writers Place. Perhaps other Flapper Press Poetry Café readers would want to start one in their own communities. We call it a reading circle (first coined by poet Molly Peacock) because it is an informal gathering of people who love to read poetry.
How did we get started? In 2015, I suggested to Maril Crabtree, who was on the board of the Kansas City Writers Place, that we should start a poetry reading circle modeled on Molly Peacock’s efforts. Maril and I were co-facilitators, and then I took over for a number of years. We were in a bit of a hiatus during Covid, but picked up with Zoom, thanks to Robert Cole, who now facilitates the group. Another member, Malcom Cook, came up with ideas to re-ignite us by meeting in person again at a local library. We are all villagers raising this child.
Why start a reading circle? Reading as much poetry as possible is vital for a poet. When reading, a poet recognizes that language is always in flux, a mercurial, living force. I’m often awed by the insights I gain when attending one of our circle meetings, even of poets I have read for years. We are living in a renaissance of poetry right now with such a wide range of voices and approaches to poetic expression. Paradoxically, many of us are aware that reading poems and spending that focused time in dialog with others isn’t often done. It takes time. We want to keep the spirit moving while enjoying poets who mean so much to us. This is kind of corny—I do believe we are all connected to each other in this pursuit, in touch with the lives of those poets who went before us and those writing today. You read or hear a poet and you’re moved to answer back.
How we do it: We don’t have assignments or evaluations, etc., and the leaders are facilitators, not instructors. Many of our participants are poets, essayists, and fiction writers, but we also welcome folks who simply enjoy reading poetry. The simple requirement is that you read the poet selected and come to our group with your questions and insights. Sometimes we ask everyone to bring a poem to read written by poet they like and are interested in sharing. Most of the time we choose a poet together and then ask everyone to read that poet and bring a favorite poem for discussion. Any response, even silence, is welcome.
We also encourage everyone to join the Writers Place, a Kansas City treasure. We choose poets together, and if we repeat a poet covered years ago, that’s OK. We’ve also included songwriters in our pantheon of the greatest. And we’ve shared, though rarely, our own poems in response to a poet selected for reading. Most of the poets we select are found on the Poetry Foundation or the Academy of American Poets websites, both offering a wide selection of poetic approaches, as well as international poets, though their website names would make you think they only feature academic or American writers. Not the case. We’ve also chosen poets who may be known in our community, such as two poet laureates, Maryfrances Wagner of Missouri and Denise Low of Kansas, as well as Diane Glancy, a Native American poet and essayist. We had the opportunity to invite them to our group so they could answer some of our probing questions.
Who have we read thus far? So many! In addition to the three poets named above, here is an incomplete list of our far-ranging interests: Ocean Vuong, Ruth Stone, Adonis, Charles Baudelaire, Ross Gay, Li Po, Wendell Berry, Adrienne Rich, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Walt Whitman, Haryette Mullen, and so many more.
AN: If you had the opportunity to talk with a poet from the past, who would you select and why?
CA: The great American poet Muriel Rukeyser, one amazing soul who lived through an epic group of decades, 1913 to 1980. She’s coming up next in our reading circle. She was a poet engaged with not only poetic expression but also the social world and its documentation, an approach I’ve always been drawn to. She was prolific. I read her many years ago, and I’ve taken a while catch up with her work again. It flies off the page! At sixteen, she studied flight mechanics, her first book titled, Theory of Flight. I have a lifelong affinity for the sky, even studying aeronautics on the ground in the eighth grade, in public school, believe it or not. I’m still in touch with my teacher from those days.
Committed, idealistic, romantic, funny, optimistic. A book that reveals her activist edge is The Book of the Dead, a stunning verse account of the environmental and human damage of an industrial accident in West Virginia in 1931. With her documentary gift, Rukeyser was inspired by what she heard around her—railroad songs, miners’ songs, Native American chants, spirituals, calypso, the blues, along with the stories of people she met on the road. I like that kind of ear in a poet, always listening, paying attention. She was way ahead of her time, envisioning the present with her keen eye on a perilous future for the environment, for humanity. She flew above the clouds.
Not everything Rukeyser wrote was published, and there are some who claim that her radical feminism led to its censorship. Something to ponder. For example, she wrote a novel about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, a war that historians place as a precursor to World War II. Her book was rejected for publication, deemed too experimental. She protested the Vietnam War, and in the latter part of her life, she protested the death sentence of imprisoned South Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha. I’m compelled to wonder, and wish I could ask her, how, as a witness to the extremes of human brutality, did she keep hope alive?
In a prose work titled The Life of Poetry, she wrote of how the study of art compels us to look more deeply, move from an interior self out to the world. Art “will apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to want to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward further experience.” In another study of poetry (unpublished), she wrote an astonishing statement that could have been uttered just a few minutes ago: “The uses of our knowledge are very wide, the uses of its ignorance fatal. Our lives, in a curious way, may rest on this; and our lives are our only metaphor.”
Poet, mother, children’s book author, human rights activist, journalist, lover of flight, everywoman. And that list is incomplete.
AN: Thank you so much. Now it’s time to share your poems, Catherine.
CA: Annie, thank you. I’ve enjoyed this!
For Allen Ginsberg’s Mother
Naomi, who smiled to the moon,
her six dark hairs on the wen
of her breast, the pink nightgown
she wore in the Bronx, her lentil soup made
for God, in his sadness.
A woman who conceived her son in a flash
of light so minute all the hills
echoed, echoed as the universe
continued its brilliance and despair, a sharp bolt
lost to a hymn. For the teenage Allen who
stayed home to save her, for brother
Eugene with tears in his eyes.
When we die, we become onions, their mother said.
Things lost—past, gone, caw caw
Seventeen-, eighteen-years-old, soon to lave
our own mothers, we stood listening
one night to Allen chant William Blake
outside the Jewish Community Center
with its ark-pointed roof raised to the sky—
And all the hills echoed, echoed
as a balm lifted trees—
O strange Naomi.
How to sing the poetic, how to make an edifice
of love and press it into permanency.
About the poem:
I was rereading some of Ginsberg’s poems and remembered hearing him chant William Blake when I was a teen, here in Kansas City, as the poem describes. I came to his great poem, “Kaddish: proem, narrative, hymmnn, lament, litany, & fugue,” written in memory of his mother. I also read prose sections on the poem’s genesis. Reading all of it, I felt the whole impact of the poem, his deep love for his mother who had schizophrenia and his sorrow for her loss. Ginsberg went to extraordinary lengths to understand and love a difficult person. His empathy, humor, and compassion made its mark on me, perhaps forever. I drove around and found the original Jewish Community Center on Holmes Road, now vacated, as the center of Jewish life has moved to the west of the city. The building is disheveled and cordoned off, with chickweed swelled in flat spirals along the broken asphalt. That’s when it occurred to me that Ginsberg’s chant from Blake could just as well have been a chant for his mother. After recording images in my notebook, and a drive home, the poem emerged through many, many drafts.
*Please note: the images from the first five lines are loosely based on Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” and the italicized lines in 13, 14, and 21 are directly from “Kaddish.” Lines 8, 9 and 19 are from Blake’s “Nurse’s Song.”
Heard on the Street
The sky a blue plum this morning
as my friend the bellringer
climbs up to the small
belfry of St. John’s overlooking
the square, the spiral stairs ascending,
descending, like the riddle
he bellows down the stairwell—
what goes up and down
all day without moving?
The rock pigeons who hear him
don’t budge from their roost
on the ledge.
At the top it’s possible to see
new buds on the elms,
and between the branches,
a squirrel’s nest.
The bellringer and I haven’t
spoken in years.
He takes off his belt
to replace for a moment
the worn rope of the tenor bell.
Not to lose his pants, he stops
to hitch up the waistband to his girth.
To sing when no one listens is an act of grace.
He reaches for the end of the tufted rope,
midway up what bellringers call
the sally where he makes a loop knot.
This is how he attaches the belt,
now ready to ring the notes
to the tune of Love Me Tender,
Love Me True, as if it were a hymn
and those of us walking the square
in love with something
we never knew.
About the poem:
The friend in this poem is a close relative. Although we are miles apart and years estranged, I hope we still carry at least a small spark of friendship. The poem is written to honor the creative and zany side of this person, who I may have perceived as difficult at times. The details come from what he told me of his experience as a bellringer, and any errors in the description are mine.
Sylvia Plath in the Night Realm
A few ways to understand her—
think how she just missed
Dylan Thomas, launched straight off
to the Whitehorse Tavern
after the end of his reading.
In her lucent eye, she saw
them both raise a foamy glass
to the muse of fracture and revolt.
How to fire it, how to keep it?
she’d ask the poet, once she caught
up with him, blocks ahead
in his canter through the Village.
Their dialog, in her mind—
straight up, swift—sprung by chance
on the street, the two whispering
their griefs, not as lovers, but as passing
gods of the night realm.
Or remember how hot it was
that summer in Manhattan, the end
of her Mademoiselle
apprenticeship and its bridled
fissure of art from life.
Remember the hotel rooftop where
everything changed. She peeled
off the tight lingerie and silk hose
under her skirt and threw it all
to the muggy wind.
About the poem:
I had in mind Heather Clark’s absorbing biography of Sylvia Plath, one she wrote to restore Plath’s status as a truly great 20th century poet. So much attention has been paid to Plath’s suicide and not enough about what drove her lyricism. The details of the poem are from Clark’s biography, but the embellishment comes from me. I felt moved to imagine Plath at a young age, touched by an intense passion to create. Her chase was after the ineffable in poetry. Like Ginsberg’s mother and my friend the bellringer, Plath was someone with multiple gifts of creativity and expression that may have been hard for those close by to understand.
Annie Klier Newcomer founded a not-for-profit, Kansas City Spirit, that served children in metropolitan Kansas for a decade. Annie volunteers in chess and poetry after-school programs in Kansas City, Missouri. She and her husband, David, and the staff of the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens are working to develop The Emily Dickinson Garden in hopes of bringing art and poetry educational programs to their community. Annie helms the Flapper Press Poetry Café—dedicated to celebrating poets from around the world and to encouraging everyone to both read and write poetry!
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