Cate Marvin is an American poet.
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 place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.
The cool thing about having a book is that 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.
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.
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.
When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.
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.
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 am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.
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.
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.
I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career. " My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.
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 grantcontest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.
There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.
Because I wake up 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 like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.
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.
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.
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.