A Little Love to Accompany The Cancer: A Profile of Cate Marvin

This is the second installment of our member profiles highlighting writers who've taken workshops with us during our 35 years. It was originally published in the current Workshop & Event Guide. The first installment was last week, and it featured Paula Whyman on Carolyn Parkhurst. Now here's poet Brian Brodeur on Cate Marvin:





By Brian Brodeur

Cate Marvin is the author of two books of poems: World’s Tallest Disaster, which was chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky as the winner of the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award. Marvin is also co-editor with poet Michael Dumanis of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. In 2002, she was awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. 

Born in Washington, D.C., Marvin grew up in Potomac, MD, where she attended Winston Churchill High School. She first became connected with The Writer’s Center through her high school creative writing teacher, Peggy Pfieffer. Between the years of 1989 and 1992, Marvin participated in workshops at The Writer’s Center with Ann Darr, Nigel Hinschelwood, and Peter Klappert. 

Marvin received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont, and holds two M.F.A.s: one from the University of Houston in poetry, the other from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. She also earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati. Marvin has been awarded scholarships to attend both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as New England Review, Antioch Review, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, and Ploughshares, among others. 

About Marvin’s first book, Pinsky writes: “Cate Marvin’s cunningly-measured, deceptively regular stanzas partition the elegant dwelling where Eros like a wild ghost bangs anyhow against the walls or bursts across windowsill and threshold.” The poems in both of Marvin’s collections are alive with a dangerous sexuality, awakened to the notion that the erotic exists not just in sex but in every vital aspect of our lives. Formally taut, tonally brash, and always inventive, Marvin’s poems are fraught with risk as they meld the dramatic and metaphysical in work sung from deep within the belly. 

In August of 2009, Marvin co-founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a grass-roots organization that addresses the need for female writers to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in this country. Marvin currently teaches poetry at Columbia University’s M.F.A. Program and Lesley University’s Low-Residency M.F.A. Program, and is an associate professor in creative writing in the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. 

Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes, which was chosen by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize. He maintains the blog “How a Poem Happens,” an online anthology of over 150 interviews with poets. His second poetry manuscript was chosen by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2011 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest. The book will be published in Spring 2012 (and hopefully he'll be reading from it at TWC in the spring).

Unanswerable Questions: An Interview with Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, and are forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving. Brian lives and works in Fairfax, VA. He blogs at http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/



When did you first know you wanted to be a poet?

I didn’t start to get serious about writing until college. While studying abroad for a year in Galway, Ireland, I took a class on W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Ulysses bowled me over. I remember reading that episode in which Bloom huddles behind the rocks on Sandymount Strand to “admire” Gerty MacDowell, getting so excited I kept thinking: this can’t be literature, can it? By the end of my first semester at UCG, I had drafted ten short stories, much to the detriment of my course work. When I returned to Salem State College the next fall, I enrolled in my first creative writing workshop. The instructor, J.D. Scrimgeour, introduced me to the poetry of Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara and many others who would become touchstones. He also encouraged my own fledgling attempts, exposing me not only to the vastness of modern and contemporary poetry but, as a poet himself, exemplified writing as a way of life.


If you had an opportunity to prognosticate the future of poetry in America —as you do right now, in fact—what would it look like?

I love this question because it’s impossible to answer. When I think about why poetry matters, I often return to Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment of 10 O’clock,” which ends with these lines: “Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches Tigers / In red weather.” That drunk sailor seems the perfect stand-in for the artist, the outsider, the dreamer, the one who preserves the health of a culture by living far enough outside of it to subjectively criticize it, even if that culture despises or (worse) ignores him.

When Plato and Socrates banished the poet from their Republic they were completely justified. Poetry provokes unrest by upsetting the status quo, by raging against complacency. What do I think the future of American poetry will look like? Beats me. But I hope it continues to push itself into new territories—to find new forms, new subjects, new tones. I’d like to see an even heartier inclusiveness, an entirely different breed of drunken sailors.


Last year you published your first book, Other Latitudes. How different is it to be working on your second book from your first?

I’m not sure how to answer this question either. Though I keep a regular writing schedule, I feel far away from a second manuscript. Basically, I’m trying to write poems that are better than those in my first book. Which is proving to be difficult considering OL is an assemblage of the best work I produced over a period of five or six years. Writing for me, especially the writing of poems, is mysterious at best, painful at worst. Can I say that I’m superstitious, would rather not comment on what hasn’t yet been finished, and hope the muse will still return my calls?


Tell us about “How a Poem Happens.” What prompted you to start that blog?

The project began in selfishness. I wanted an excuse to contact some of my favorite living poets and ask them how they wrote some of my favorite poems. So I came up with this scheme of an online anthology, like the print anthology Alberta Turner edited in 1977, Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. “How a Poem Happens” is a collection of interviews with poets who discuss the making of specific poems. I choose one poem, ask the author of that poem to answer ten to fifteen more-or-less standardized questions about it, and post those answers on the blog. As of April 6, 2009, fourteen posts have gone live, featuring interviews with Eric Pankey, Stephen Dunn, Adrian Blevins, Daisy Fried, Dorianne Laux, Michael Ryan, Ron Slate, Steve Scafidi, Richard Newman, Dan Albergotti, Sandra Beasley, Richard Frost, Philip Levine, and Oliver de la Paz, with posts from many others forthcoming. Honestly, the generosity and graciousness of the writers I’ve contacted has confounded me.


If you shaved your beard, would you, like Samson, lose all your superpower?

Yes, sir. Try it and die.

Thanksgiving Week (Where Does the Time Go?)

So as we glide toward the Thanksgiving holiday and a mild reprieve from work, I'd like to share some small bits of information. First, tomorrow's guest blogger will be C.M. Mayo. She will share three of her most frequently asked questions about writing and the business of writing. It's always a treat when C.M shares what she knows. On Thursday, Carollyne Hutter returns with a post about the new movie Twilight. Her last post generated some good feedback. Those of you out there who're interested in YA lit should know this: I hear you. I'll look for some cool ways to bring more YA lit discussions to this blog.

ONE way is to share Gottawritegirl's excellent post today about the Susan Shreve and Tim Seldes event at the Center this fall. As you know, Susan is a wonderful YA writer (having written many YA titles). So head on over to that blog (when you're done here!) and read all about it.

The Center hosted Eric Pankey and Brian Brodeur over the weekend. Kiley Cogis was kind enough to share these two photos from the event. We had a good turnout and an equally good time hearing these two poets read from their work. If you didn't get the chance to read his excellent post on what it was like to win the Akron Prize, you can do so here.



As an FYI item, from December 1st to December 31st The Writer's Center will have an ad in Metro buses in northern VA, NW DC, and Montgomery County. Those of you who ride the bus should have a look for them--and take a picture. You could win something! The ads will be placed right behind the bus driver, so you can't miss them. Anyone who sends us a picture of the ad--either electronically or in person--will be entered into a drawing to win a FREE multi-session workshop of his or her choice.

And finally, The Center is closing on Wednesday at 2:30 and it'll reopen on Tuesday of next week.