{"id":36019,"date":"2014-04-12T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-12T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36019"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:41:50","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:41:50","slug":"issue-76-a-conversation-with-william-t-vollmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-76-a-conversation-with-william-t-vollmann\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 75: A Conversation with William T. Vollmann"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>75<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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April 12, 2014<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

DAVID ALASDAIR, MELISSA HUGGINS, GENEVA KAISER<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"William<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Elliot Bay Book Company<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!\u201d <\/strong>declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times<\/em>. \u201cFor then I should know such liberation.\u201d This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin\u2019s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marvin grew up in Washington, D.C., the only child of a military intelligence analyst. Although she admits she was often unhappy as a junior high and high school student, she found salvation in poetry. Marvin defines poetry as \u201csacred space.\u201d Her poems are constructed with surprising images, insistent music, and textured language, as illustrated in the following lines from \u201cLandscape with Hungry Girls:\u201d \u201cThere is blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds \/ raw and rain\u2019s course streams a million umbilical \/ cords down windows and walls. Everything gnaws\u2026\u201d The images are surreal, but the poem\u2019s experience remains tangible, and each line break creates a raw, stunning musicality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marvin is the author of three books of poetry, including Oracle<\/em>, forthcoming from Norton in 2015. Her debut collection, World\u2019s Tallest Disaster<\/em>, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, and her poem \u201cAn Etiquette for Eyes,\u201d which first appeared in Willow Springs<\/em> 72, was chosen for Best American Poetry<\/em> 2014. Critics often compare Marvin\u2019s work to Sylvia Plath\u2019s, but as Jay Robinson points out in his review of her second collection, \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to classify the poems of Cate Marvin\u2019s Fragment of the Head of a Queen<\/em>. Of course, comparisons are handy, but inadequate, and claiming Marvin akin to Plath is off the mark. For one thing, Marvin\u2019s poems are more narrative than Plath\u2019s. And also, Marvin goes places not even Plath would dare.\u201d Marvin\u2019s poems are often bold, but her purpose is never solely to shock; rather, she aims to portray a complex range of human emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cate Marvin holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, and a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati. She serves as Director of Operations for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and teaches English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. We met with her in her room at the Hotel Max in Seattle during last year\u2019s AWP Conference, where we drank wine from coffee mugs and talked about motherhood, risking sentimentality, and \u201clying like the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KRISTIN GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my favorite poems from your first book, World\u2019s Tallest Disaster<\/em>, is \u201cThe Whistling Song from Snow White.\u201d I love the speaker\u2019s sense of confidence in lines such as \u201cI command. Make yourself look like you want to get fucked \/ because in my land, nobody gets fucked over\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CATE MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote that when I was twenty-five, so it\u2019s nineteen years old. I was writing pared-down poems at the University of Houston, and my instructor, an amazing poet, Adam Zagajewski, said to me, \u201cYour poems are anemic.\u201d That was part of a series of poems where I was letting myself swagger a bit. I remember writing that poem and knowing it was a moment of change for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was a good summer for writing. I was working with a lack of self-consciousness and a better idea of who my reader might be, maybe someone like me. That poem is very much a statement of poetics; I was claiming my turf. Poetry has always been a sacred space for me. It saved me. I was a miserable high school student. I started writing when I was eleven, didn\u2019t fit in, like most poets, and poetry was the thing\u2014 I realized when I was seventeen\u2014that I was going to do. So when I went to a graduate program, I had a very high notion of the importance of poetry. In some ways, I had to reclaim what poetry meant for me. When you\u2019re in that situation and you\u2019re duking it out, you have to be strong. That whole change was like, I\u2019ve got my own motherfucking country. This poem is my land and I make the rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was talking to a friend of mine and asked if she recognized Free To Be You and Me<\/em> as a reference in that poem, and she said, \u201cI\u2019ve heard of it.\u201d But if you were born in the late sixties or early seventies, and you had progressive parents, you would have known that record, Free To Be You and Me<\/em>, by Marlo Thomas. It\u2019s like, we are all equal and everything\u2019s cool. The notion of equality we know now is problematic. But at the time, you were raised to believe you could be anything, the American dream. The irony of that is thinking you can be president, and then realizing that, well, no. And then, there\u2019s this assumption: Oh, well, I\u2019ll get married. And that becomes your worth\u2014someday someone will marry you! That\u2019s why romantic comedies trigger such sentiment in us. Because they provide catharsis. We\u2019re taught that this is what to hope for, and if we don\u2019t get it, then we did something wrong as a woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KATE PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you going to let your daughter watch romantic comedies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to let her watch anything. My parents let me read what I wanted. They were very open-minded. I was reading adult books, explicit books, at a young age, and I don\u2019t think it messed me up. I don\u2019t think we can prevent our children from seeing things today, with access to the internet. I don\u2019t want my daughter to find porn sites online and I intend to figure that out as I go, but parenting is something I try to compartmentalize. I try not to worry too much about what\u2019s going to happen five years down the road, because I have tomorrow to handle. My kid asks a lot of questions, and a lot of them are about death. We\u2019re dealing with mortality now. A good friend of mine died last summer and several of my daughter\u2019s fish died, so she\u2019s curious. I get nervous when she\u2019s crossing the street, because she\u2019s like, \u201cOh, well, and then we\u2019ll die.\u201d Most parents will tell you their kids have predilections to certain things, often gendered. There\u2019s not a lot you can do about that, and if your kid likes princess stuff, you\u2019re going to let her dig princess stuff, because that\u2019s what makes her happy. Of course, later on you can talk about the larger issues. My daughter\u2019s not interested in princess stuff. She\u2019s interested in dinosaurs and unicorns and animals. But she asks me every day if she looks pretty. A lot of that comes from people telling her she\u2019s cute, and her girlfriends evaluating each other\u2019s outfits every day. One day she came home from school\u2014she was four\u2014in a very bad mood because no one liked her outfit. This has been disconcerting for me. I was not a cute kid. I was skinny, with buck teeth because I sucked my thumb till I was eleven, and I had not the greatest haircut and was a total tomboy. My daughter is blonde\u2014she\u2019s not blonde anymore, but she was when she was a baby\u2014and she has gray eyes, so it\u2019s weird, because I have brown hair, brown eyes. I never thought I would have a kid that was fair. It was interesting to watch people dote over her when she was a little blonde girl. It felt like something that separated us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STEPHANIE McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In past interviews you\u2019ve mentioned that earlier in your career you were too busy with school and writing to be in a successful relationship. But now you have a daughter and you\u2019re finishing a third book\u2014how do you manage everything? What\u2019s changed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I made the decision to have a kid when I was thirty-seven. I found out I was infertile, so I had to do IVF. I had to make a decision pretty much then and there whether or not I wanted to have a child. I wasn\u2019t prepared to make that decision because I thought, like all of us think, that we can wait until we\u2019re fifty to have a kid. That\u2019s not really true. It\u2019s actually quite difficult. And I still haven\u2019t found a relationship that will work for me. I got frustrated thinking I would have to settle for a relationship in order to have a child. When I found out I had to start undergoing fertility treatments, I was told that most clinics would probably show me the door. I had to make a decision, and I decided that it would be for my work and my life. I had spent so much time by myself, smoking cigarettes and holed up reading books and writing poems, I felt like that could come to a very poor end in terms of my life\u2014not the persona of my poems, but me. So I got pregnant. It took three tries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having a child changes everything and changes nothing. My life improved by having a kid. But you\u2019re really much the same person. In some ways, you\u2019re almost more who you are. But you have to kind of fall out of love with yourself. Narcissism has to go out the window. That\u2019s painful, to break up with yourself. Juggling it all has definitely slowed my progress, but a couple of things have happened. First of all, I write differently now, and because I was writing so much for so long, I can work on a lot of stuff in my head. I also work on things over a very long time. I was working on a poem last night that I started in 2008, when I was pregnant. I\u2019m finishing that up, and rewriting it again. The process is different now. You don\u2019t actually get the time to sit and write, but you write differently, and if you\u2019re a writer, you have to write and you end up writing things in spite of yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what happened to me is that I discovered I had a book. I didn\u2019t think I had a book, but when I pulled together my poems I realized I had a manuscript. It was not the third book I\u2019d planned to write, which was some dense, elegiac, almost philosophical thing. This book is more irreverent than my previous books, weirder in a lot of ways, because I had to do away with some filters in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recognized that having a daughter was ordinary, and before that I had lived comfortably with a sort of special woman\u2019s status. I almost thought of myself as a guy in some ways, and you can\u2019t think of yourself as a guy when you\u2019re so obviously not. Then you have this kid with you and people are criticizing you or blessing you, and you\u2019re pushing the stroller around and you can\u2019t be at the house. When I found out I was going to have a daughter, it scared the shit out of me. I thought, Oh, my God, this person who I already love\u2014it\u2019s really weird when you get pregnant, you\u2019re just like, I love this kid already; I don\u2019t even know this kid. I was convinced I was having a boy. When it was a girl, I was like, Oh, my God. No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having a kid has made me figure out I have to say no to a lot of things. But it\u2019s also forced me to take some downtime I might not have otherwise taken, because if your kid wants to go to the park and play, that\u2019s all you\u2019re doing. And it\u2019s nice. I\u2019ve met a lot of people as a result of having a kid. I used a sperm donor to get pregnant and I know a lesbian couple who used the same donor. They\u2019re part of my extended family and our daughters know each other as sisters. As an only child coming from a small family\u2014just me and my parents\u2014it\u2019s nice to have that extension and to sort of move in other parts of the world. My kid is like a living poem. She says stuff that blows me away. It\u2019s wonderful to have that kind of love in your life. It puts everything into perspective. But I don\u2019t worry about what my daughter is going to think about my poems. My writer\u2019s office is separate from me running around day to day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned realizing you had a book. How does it compare to the first two?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know yet. Wallace Stevens has a great quote from the essay \u201cThe Irrational Element in Poetry,\u201d and I\u2019m just going to paraphrase it, here. He says: I don\u2019t know what the poem is going to be, except it is what I want it to be once I make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sense is that you have to accept the poem on its own terms. You have to feel it and dress it and allow it to create its own shape. It\u2019s almost like I picture an invisible form I\u2019m putting clothes on so people can see it. This new book came out of nowhere. In a lot of my projects, I\u2019m interested in the post-confessional mode, taking it further. It\u2019s a good rhetorical mode for talking about some things people aren\u2019t necessarily ready to read\u2014what I call stealth poems. I don\u2019t know if I can speak to that yet. I also haven\u2019t gotten to the point in the press kit and stuff where I get asked a bunch of questions and I look at my book and say this is what it\u2019s about. Right now I can say that it\u2019s about death in a big way and, in some ways, it ends on a rebirth. It\u2019s full of elegies, and while I wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s slapstick, there\u2019s a lot of whacked-out humor in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you expand on what you mean by the stealth poem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stealth poem is something I was doing unconsciously when I was at the University of Houston, where they like you to have nice, neat, quatrain poems, a tight, shapely stanza. You can have chaotic and unseemly content in a poem, but visually, when it\u2019s crafted really well, it impresses; you can imply any number of political opinions or agendas in this poem that are not necessarily picked up by the reader, because the reader is like, Oh, well, this is a very well-made poem. It\u2019s what literature does all the time\u2014makes the reader empathize with someone they may not have previously empathized with, whether they know it or not, because they can see themselves in the speaker. It\u2019s a kind of code; women have been writing that way for a long time. As have queer people, as have people of color. It\u2019s something I do a lot less of in my third book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned that your daughter is talking a lot about death and that your third collection is about death. Do you think your daughter influenced your third collection?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. My book was done before my friend died of liver failure. She was my age. It was very unexpected. A good friend died in 2005 and that was hard, because he represented to me the most awesome way to be in the world, a very funny, offbeat person who connected with a lot of people in a way that was contagious. He enjoyed life. One of the problems with our culture is there\u2019s no proper way to grieve. Poetry can be one place to explore that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to go back to what you said about \u201cThe Whistling Song from Snow White.\u201d You said that up until that point your poems were \u201canemic\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My undergrad poems\u2014people would get appalled at what I wrote about. I\u2019m tame compared to how I was then. I\u2019ve learned over time to have a better understanding of how I\u2019m coming across, how I might be affecting my audience. One of my flaws is that I can be oblivious. That\u2019s a bit of a gift, because it means I\u2019ll say things and not think too much about them and not realize people are taking me seriously and are like, What the hell is she saying? Maybe some of that comes from not being heard for a long time. When I was in junior high and high school I was unhappy, and that particular generation, the parents were like, Okay, you\u2019re unhappy, deal with it; we\u2019re going to work now. When I first asked to see a shrink, it was like, No, you can deal with your problems yourself. It was a typical suburban upbringing, but it was existential for me, the way I think it is for a lot of kids, and even more painful because you can\u2019t put a finger on what\u2019s wrong. Or it doesn\u2019t seem legitimate to be in psychic pain. I went to college and was among people I had a lot in common with, but when I was in high school, I was a bad student. My self-esteem was for shit. I think some of that comes out of not actually thinking anyone will care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your essay \u201cTell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,\u201d you say you\u2019re pleased to discover that you \u201ctricked someone into believing the world of [your] poems is true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t want to waste my reader\u2019s time. We\u2019re not on this planet for long, and I get frustrated with indulgent writers. I know I\u2019ve been indulgent at times and I apologize for wasting anybody\u2019s time, but I really do try, first of all, to be entertaining. I write a lot of poems no one ever sees that are boring, self-indulgent\u2014no one wants to hear about my cats. But you want to write about everything. So anything that comes to fruition, the stakes have to be high, there has to be an emotional input on my part, I have to feel convinced in the poem. All of that has to do with language, with creating something unique with language, so that every line or phrase is something no one has encountered before, something actually changing someone\u2019s experience of reading, something visually and viscerally communicating, giving someone a scene or an atmosphere or an experience. You want your poem to be interesting, you want to know that there\u2019s trouble, great trouble, that something is going to happen. As far as tricking someone into believing the world of the poem is true, all the best writing is trickery. It\u2019s lying like the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, trickery is actually good for your readers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not manipulative?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manipulative has a bad rap. Rhetoric is manipulative; all language is manipulative. When we use language we are moving to get something we want. We\u2019re always making arguments for something, always trying to negotiate a space. If you know your way around words and are good at manipulating them, that\u2019s good. On the other hand, if it\u2019s a formula you\u2019re using over and over to manipulate someone, that\u2019s a lie. But if you\u2019re writing something that you can\u2019t even believe you wrote, and you yourself are convinced of the truth of it\u2014I mean, sometimes I write something and the experience of the poem becomes that experience itself in some ways. I think it\u2019s naive to think that any writer who\u2019s good is not manipulative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that same essay, you mention how Sylvia Plath\u2019s work was criticized based on facts from her personal life. People are still reading Plath and other poets that way. I had a professor tell me never to read Plath. He had reduced her poetry to a cry for help. Why do you think readers mistake intense emotion for autobiography or a cry for help?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems like a reductive way to approach a craft that is endlessly changing itself, endlessly complicated and fascinating. That view of Plath is conservative, old school, pretty much over. It was supposedly \u201cuncool\u201d to like Plath when I was an undergrad, but I loved her anyway\u2014I wrote a seventy-page paper on her. I also think that to dismiss the personal in poetry\u2014that kind of dismissal almost always takes place when it\u2019s women\u2019s poetry. People are sympathetic toward Lowell\u2019s plights or John Berryman\u2019s plights. In those cases, within the confessional mode, the transgression is to display weakness. For female confessional poets, the transgression is to display strength. Your professor said Plath\u2019s work was a cry for help. This individual was probably not Plath\u2019s intended reader, probably didn\u2019t grasp the irony of her work. You have a poem like \u201cDaddy\u201d and it works on multiple levels. It employs the second person, it seems like a dialogue, but it\u2019s not. It seems sincere, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s mercilessly artificial. It winks at women with irony. Every woman loves a fascist. Plath knows every woman loves a fascist and, of course, in life, no woman loves a fascist\u2014she\u2019s working off of that fifties advertising jargon. There\u2019s a lot packed into that. Also, one of the primary things you learn from Plath is craft. From her syntax to her punctuation, she\u2019s a master. She keeps a poem moving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the conversation \u201cYour Silence Will Not Protect You\u201d between you and Erin Belieu, you mention that you have born the brunt of the \u201cangry poet persona.\u201d How do you feel about readers inventing a Cate Marvin from what\u2019s on the page?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re probably doing your job pretty well if someone thinks they know you. I can\u2019t take issue with that, but I would hope my poetry is challenging enough that people don\u2019t come to it with a reductive interpretation that my life is on the page. I get frustrated with that because it\u2019s silly, though it happens to pretty much every writer. People make assumptions. I make my students swear not to show their work to anyone outside the workshop for the semester because I don\u2019t want a boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, reading their work. They need to understand that their poems will be written for people they\u2019ve never met and never will meet. Those are the people they\u2019re going to move. If you\u2019re really ambitious as a writer, those are the people you\u2019re writing for. If you\u2019re worried about someone reading you, you don\u2019t experience the liberty of writing whatever you want and shapeshifting, being whoever you want to be. Poems that are fun to write are fun to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A student once said to me, \u201cAren\u2019t you scared to put these things out there?\u201d I don\u2019t have a sense of people paying a whole lot of attention to me. I go through life pretty oblivious. I\u2019m not especially paranoid, I\u2019m not especially self-conscious. I spend a lot of time by myself and I am just like, you know, poetry is this other world, so I can\u2019t really worry about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We listened to one of your poems on YouTube, \u201cYellow Rubber Gloves\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had no idea that had been unleashed onto the world. That\u2019s fucked up. And that poem\u2019s very Plathian. I was totally thinking of her. I hope you laughed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s so powerful. I didn\u2019t really laugh, I just felt like, Yeah, this is it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing about the speaker in the third book\u2026she\u2019s getting old. She\u2019s aware of herself in relationship to younger women. She\u2019s not nice about other women. There\u2019s a poem called \u201cPoem for an Awful Girl\u201d that\u2019s about competition with other women and jealousy. It sucks to get old, to realize you\u2019re not in the running anymore. With \u201cPoem for an Awful Girl,\u201d I\u2019m plotting this woman\u2019s demise. She has the guy I want. But then the speaker realizes that this woman she\u2019s wishing horrible things upon isn\u2019t even aware that the speaker\u2019s alive. The speaker\u2019s talking about needlepointing, and she\u2019s at a needle point. It\u2019s like this focus for women, that there\u2019s this division in some ways which is funny, because I love my students and the age they are, and I hang out with them all the time and they\u2019re my favorite people in the world to talk to, but I\u2019m always registering the fact that I\u2019m older than them and worried about that, freaked out that I even got this old. There\u2019s also this thing like, Don\u2019t be so carefree, don\u2019t think it\u2019s all so good because look at where I am now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speaker in \u201cYellow Rubber Gloves\u201d seems to have a direct purpose when it comes to relationships\u2014could you talk about the impulse behind that poem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That poem has an autobiographical impulse. In fact, there are a lot of autobiographical impulses in my third book. It\u2019s more personal in a lot of ways, more connected to my actual life. I\u2019m not ashamed to say that, because the poems, I hope, completely transform that, and I don\u2019t think anybody should be ashamed about the personal. I think women are often made to feel bad, that their writing is inferior because it is not \u201cobjective,\u201d because they are writing inside their experience\u2014but that attitude directly invalidates female experience, or anybody\u2019s experience. It\u2019s like, We don\u2019t want to hear your complaints. You\u2019re just whining. So in \u201cYellow Rubber Gloves,\u201d I was married and always washing the dishes. I was the dishwasher and I used yellow rubber gloves because my hands would get fucked up if I didn\u2019t use them. There\u2019s a disaster to the situation, being in servitude and washing someone\u2019s dishes all the time. I was a PhD student and writing. I decided I wanted to reclaim the term \u201cconfessional.\u201d I was like, If you\u2019re going to damn me as being confessional, then I will be confessional in a way that will scare the shit out of you. That\u2019s been really fun, because I think it scares people who should be scared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem started back in 2000. I started with the image of the centaur. But the mop and stuff, the whole idea was that the end would be like, Oh, my paramour\u2014. But how do I confess this, how do you tell the new lover where you\u2019ve been in a past relationship, that you\u2019ve been denigrated? At the time, I had this new lover who\u2019s mythologized in the poem as Pan. But how do you explain that you\u2019ve been defiled and still seem whole to someone? I always wanted that poem to work. I\u2019d show it to my friend, my main reader, and he was like, No, no, no, and I would rework it. And then I finally just finished it one day, not too long ago, one of the last poems to go in the book. I was doing this big run, writing poems all day and night to finish the book, and I just wrote it. It\u2019s a general address to women. It\u2019s also like this huge, you know\u2014I\u2019ve cashed it in. I\u2019m ready, I\u2019m done with it, I\u2019m going be that old woman with cats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s meant to be awful in that way. It names it, like, Yeah, I\u2019m the fucking cunt who should have shut her hole long ago. I was laughing the whole time writing it. And I think you should use rubber gloves when you wash dishes, because I am a huge proponent of skin creams and lotions and I\u2019m like, Use gloves!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s supposed to be funny and awful, but the thing is\u2014be careful out there, just be fucking careful. Because you could spend a lot of time negotiating relationships where your time to write is being taken away maybe by someone who is not a writer who thinks maybe, Oh, you\u2019re not spending enough time with me, and if you live in New York or anyplace you can take public transportation, you know the ease with which men take up space on a subway. And there is a whole tumblr or tweeting thing of photographs of men taking up space. All women writers\u2014it\u2019s like we\u2019re here, tucking into ourselves because we\u2019re afraid. And that\u2019s no way to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of your poems go to uncomfortable places. Do you ever think to yourself, I shouldn\u2019t write this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No. I\u2019m kind of compulsive and revealing. My father was a military intelligence analyst and his whole life was about keeping secrets. Whenever I feel like I shouldn\u2019t say something, that means I\u2019m about to blurt it out. For me, typos or coming across as sentimental are far more embarrassing than saying something unseemly. I\u2019m working on a poem right now that has patches of sentimentality that I really need to work out of it. I\u2019m rewriting it line by line, to wring that out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is sentimentality in poetry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, with women it\u2019s often a rhetorical device employed at a point when the reader\u2019s not expecting it, and it gets them. It\u2019s like in the movies, a technique. I guess we should look at the definition of sentiment; is sentiment less than love? What is it about sentiment that makes it bad? Is sentimental not beautiful? You know, hell, we\u2019re all sentimental at some point, aren\u2019t we? Because love leaks into sentiment. People are worried about sentiment, worried that people will be sappy or something and write love poems. I don\u2019t know. I actually think sentimentality can be used as a rhetorical weapon in some ways. Like very ironic sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think there are people who confuse sentimentality with love, like in a love poem\u2014as if, just because it\u2019s about love means it\u2019s sentimental\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What would Pablo Neruda say about that? What would Garcia Lorca say? It\u2019s easy to make someone feel bad about expressing a feeling when we pretty much go around feeling things all the time\u2014that\u2019s part of being human. I don\u2019t like poetry that doesn\u2019t have feeling in it. And you know who also didn\u2019t write poetry that doesn\u2019t have feeling in it? Robert Frost. A lot of people looked to him as the model for neo-formalism, but Frost was a tormented person, suffering a lot of the time. So it\u2019s interesting to see what\u2019s happening in his poems. He says, \u201cNo tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.\u201d Okay, so let\u2019s see. Sentiment. Exaggerated or self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. Exaggerated or self-indulgent. I guess that\u2019s the problem with sentiment, or that\u2019s the criticism, but I think if you didn\u2019t have some sentiment in a poem, you might not have the whole pallet of human emotion. I want to create an emotional atmosphere in my poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Johnson says poets should risk sentimentality. Why does it have to be a risk?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because it\u2019s always a risk. It\u2019s a risk when you\u2019re in love with someone, a risk to reveal your feelings; it shouldn\u2019t be but it is. In a poem, if you\u2019re sentimental in the beginning, you\u2019ve already given it away. It\u2019s the writer\u2019s job to seduce. You\u2019re not just going to walk in buck naked and be like, Here I am. You have to lure them in from the title on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That goes along with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics and the idea that personality shouldn\u2019t factor into reader response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

T.S. Eliot is always saying the opposite of what he means. When he says there\u2019s an absence of personality, he means that in some ways you can be anything, but it\u2019s clear that absence actually allows your real self to be present. The way he states these things, it\u2019s always sort of wonderfully complicated, like the objective correlative, which is where he\u2019s just making an argument that you should employ figurative language, that you should show, don\u2019t tell. It\u2019s Ezra Pound all over again. Eliot is interesting because you can mold him in a way to make many of his statements advocates for just reading a poem on its own terms, reading a poem by its own rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the self-sacrifice and the extinction of personality can actually allow for the personal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personality is, in some ways, almost a process, because what he\u2019s talking about is like body odor. He\u2019s talking about the state of personality. Where it\u2019s like with poetry, you can\u2019t be that person, you can\u2019t be the daily person\u2014in some ways it\u2019s like getting rid of personality to allow a voice in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the back of your latest collection, Rodney Jones says that, \u201cThe work bristles with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face single women of this time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked him to take out \u201csingle\u201d and it didn\u2019t end up getting taken out. I didn\u2019t think it was fair. First of all, sometimes I\u2019m single, sometimes I\u2019m not. In fact, when a lot of that book was written, I had a serious boyfriend who helped me with a ton of those poems\u2014Matthew Yeager, who is now a good friend, a brilliant poet, who totally understands my poetics and helped me get through this book. \u201cMuckraker\u201d is a poem he saved. I\u2019d thrown my hands up and was done with it. It\u2019s probably the best poem in the book. So, sure the speaker is not having such a great time with relationships, but she\u2019s having a lot of relationships. She\u2019s not single. She\u2019s maybe kind of getting around a little bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So a woman has to be either single or married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess facebook gives us those options, right? I mean, what if you\u2019re married to a fucking idea? You know, I\u2019m married to poetry. It\u2019s like what Ad\u00e9lia Prado, the Brazilian poet, says in her poem \u201cWith Poetic License.\u201d She says, \u201cI\u2019m not so ugly I can\u2019t get married.\u201d She says, \u201cWhen I was born, one of those svelte angels\u2026\/ proclaimed \/ this one will carry a flag.\u201d She says, \u201cIt\u2019s man\u2019s curse to be lame in life, \/ woman\u2019s to unfold. I do.\u201d And that\u2019s sort of like saying, \u201cI\u2019m married to poetry.\u201d Rodney is one of my favorite people in this entire world and it was important to me that he blurbed the book, because he\u2019s an exquisite poet and one of my mentors. I also wanted to show that someone who is a male, Southern poet gets it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are the emotional contradictions he was talking about?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contradictions women face all the time regarding what they\u2019re told by media, what they\u2019re told they should and shouldn\u2019t be. We\u2019re told we\u2019re on the brink of death every moment we leave the house at night; if we wear skimpy clothes, we\u2019re probably not only going to be raped but probably deserve it. That\u2019s what culture tells us, what media tells us. And women are adaptable, we kind of go along, we\u2019re going to be friendly and kind and shit like that. But what we\u2019re doing is accommodating a vocal and almost banal expression of violence toward us all the time. It\u2019s not just women who see this\u2014plenty of men see it and find it repugnant too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Fragment of the Head of a Queen<\/em>, you have poems that seem to be written from a male perspective, such as \u201cAll My Wives\u201d and \u201cA Brief Attachment\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a female speaker in \u201cA Brief Attachment,\u201d a female speaker in a relationship with a woman. I tried to make that explicit. There\u2019s something ironic about that poem, because the speaker is a poet, and has this attachment, this affair, with a younger poet who is really driving her crazy, but who is also someone to admire. There\u2019s a lot of arrogance on behalf of the speaker. That\u2019s what the poem is about. Both of the characters are problematic. That poem riffs off Thomas Wyatt\u2019s \u201cNoli Me Tangere.\u201d Do not touch. It\u2019s trying to work off of Wyatt, a sixteenth-century poet, but it has a lesbian spin, even though people expect the speaker of this book to be heterosexual. I thought that would be amusing. Twisted. That poem deals with a great unease regarding sexual ambiguity\u2014bisexuality or homosexuality. With \u201cAll My Wives,\u201d I was reading a Michael Burkard poem that had that line, \u201cAll my wives,\u201d and it just clicked for me. That poem is strange. And ominous. There was a reading series in New York where actors read your poems, and this actress read that one and scared the fucking shit out of me. Basically, that speaker is the figure in \u201cMuckraker,\u201d a silly, arrogant man. But I also like him. You know how fiction writers say they like all their characters? When I read that poem, I am so him in that. But of course, he\u2019s totally evil. He\u2019s also pathetic, because he\u2019s just this high-dictioned combination of two of my ex-boyfriends, someone I dated when I was twenty and then someone I was married to. I assumed that attitude. It\u2019s kind of like, Oh, I see how he sees women. And the whole thing is like, Why would I desire to look in your eyes when I could pick up a book? \u201cIt\u2019s like buying a book I\u2019d never want to read,\u201d he says. But also, you see in the end, he\u2019s scared because he knows there\u2019s this animal sense, that there are women waiting for him and he\u2019s talking about his inheritance as a man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You dedicated your second collection to boys and their mothers. What boys in particular are you hoping to reach and why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a cynical dedication meant to operate as a technique in the book. And the book, there\u2019s a lot of criticism in there inherently about gender norms and stuff like that. At the time, I was frustrated with mothers who hadn\u2019t let their boys grow up, because there are a lot of boys out there who need to be men. But I\u2019ll also say that that was a dedication to my ex-boyfriend, who I love still. He\u2019s a brilliant poet, Matthew Yeager, and the book was originally dedicated to him, and I probably should have kept it dedicated to him, but I was bitter about our breakup and I was sad and lonely. I felt like his mom was overprotective and had sort of been the one that came between us, and I think that was probably a miscalculation on my part. I was talking to a colleague of mine, a guy, and I said \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll dedicate it to Catholic boys and their mothers,\u201d and he said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just dedicate it to boys and their mothers.\u201d It was a last minute change that went through. I think it\u2019s funny as hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the difference between boys and men, or a factor that makes boys men?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basically, just taking responsibility for your actions, taking responsibility for yourself, something a lot of people quite far along in age don\u2019t feel obligated to do. It\u2019s hard to do. It\u2019s hard to be like, Hey, maybe I didn\u2019t do that right, maybe I wasn\u2019t very nice to that person, maybe I need to actually step up and mentor someone, instead of criticize them. That\u2019s something I\u2019ve come to realize, especially since having a kid, but also just because now I\u2019m in the middle of my life. I work with college students and I don\u2019t want to fuck it up for them. I remember the people who helped me and the people who did not, and how much it meant to me. So, I take that role seriously, and while I\u2019m certainly not, like, a noble person, I\u2019m sure as shit going to try to be the best person I can be. I have a lot of good examples in my life, friends with exceptional character, who I\u2019ve learned a lot from. I\u2019ve met a lot of these people through VIDA. This is a long way of saying I think everybody should try to be their best selves. It\u2019s hard. I mean, God knows, wisdom comes too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding VIDA, in what ways are women still underrepresented?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s fascinating that underrepresentation can still be so blatant, especially in so many progressive magazines. It\u2019s always been obvious, but people would get angry if anyone brought it up. I was very lucky to see Francine Prose read from her essay \u201cThe Scent of a Woman\u2019s Ink\u201d way back, maybe in 1998, when I was at Sewanee Writers\u2019 Conference. I had read that article in Harper\u2019s<\/em> examining the question of whether or not women write a certain way. Does a woman have a certain voice? Can you tell it\u2019s a woman writer? I have a lot of male friends, and I have a lot more female friends now that I am involved in VIDA. But a guy I was good friends with didn\u2019t really see what she was getting at. He just dismissed it. That stuck in my craw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a lot of dialogue with male poets. I\u2019m interested in what it means to be a man in a poem or to express masculinity in any way, because the activity of literature is learning what it\u2019s like to be someone else. So, at the time that VIDA came about, I saw the essay by Juliana Spahr called \u201cNumbers Trouble\u201d in which she looks at an avant-garde anthology and sees how skewed the representation is. And I thought, I am always counting the authors. I go down the table of contents and I count, and I\u2019m like, Oh, look, there\u2019s three women and seven men. I know other women do that, too. When I started VIDA I had a lot of conversations with a lot of female writers, and I was like, We should count everything, which struck me as funny because I\u2019m bad at math, but we started what is now known at the VIDA count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a disconnect between what some magazines produce and their readership. The majority of readers are women. Women can read men, women can read across the board, we\u2019re trained to read both genders from a very early age, because we\u2019re forced to read stuff that\u2019s male focused. Then we read stuff on our own, books that are more about women. And we are the biggest consumers of literature. So it seems misguided. There\u2019s a learning curve for these magazines to actually serve their readership; it\u2019s important that they look at the numbers. It\u2019s not a blame game. That\u2019s too easy. We all have our biases. I\u2019ve had to question a lot of my own since starting VIDA. Both Erin Belieu and I were schooled in the male canon. We have both had to look at what we\u2019re teaching, look at our reading lists and \u2018fess up. We can\u2019t blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we are not representing a diverse enough group of people in our classes. And that\u2019s about growing, about not being reactionary and defensive, but saying, Okay, we\u2019re all part of this. Why is it happening? There are going to be a million reasons. A lot of it\u2019s shaped by capitalism and what
people want to sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We did an interview with Joyce Carol Oates in which the VIDA count came up. One of the interviewers mentioned that after the count in 2012, Tin House<\/em> started digging into their own numbers and noticed an equal number of men and women submitting to the journal, but men being five times more likely than women to resubmit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women, for a myriad of reasons, are not willing to come back to the table right away. I can speak as a mother\u2014maybe I don\u2019t have time to submit like I used to. I used to submit like a man, but now I can\u2019t be bothered. I think women need to put themselves out there more. We all have to, and it\u2019s scary. But one of the great things about being a writer is that it\u2019s kind of not you, except when you publish and people know who you are. When you\u2019re starting out, though, no one knows who you are. You could be a ninety-two-year-old grandmother. That\u2019s the liberty of poetry. I don\u2019t have my body dragging along behind the poem. You know what it\u2019s like to walk around being in a body\u2014it\u2019s what W. E. B. Du Bois calls Double Consciousness, being aware of having this identity, but also being aware of your identity as a person. That\u2019s a conundrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GOTCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joyce Carol Oates mentioned a woman she\u2019d published, the first submission this woman had sent in forty years. Because she\u2019d gotten a rejection, she stopped writing. Joyce Carol Oates was like, You\u2019re a really amazing writer. Where have you been all this time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our forums for VIDA we hope women of different generations will be conversant with one another. In the older generation there are a few very prominent women and a ton of women who are fine writers ushered into this invisible realm. They feel out of touch with younger female writers. And the fact is, we all are dealing with the same obstacles. Whatever genre we write in, whatever aesthetic group we call our camp, if we have a camp, we\u2019re all facing that difficulty. Our work is not only not fairly represented, given that we\u2019re half the population, the production of our art is being hindered by the fact that our work is not represented in these venues. Because the cold fact is that publications that are anointed are often gateways. If someone has a poem or short story or essay in something or they produce a play or publish a book with a good press, they\u2019re going to sell books, a library is going to adopt that book, reading clubs might adopt that book. Maybe an award will give them a foot up to a better job. If they\u2019re teachers, they might get a lighter teaching load. Maybe they\u2019re applying for grants and the publication will provide a better chance of getting that grant. All of these things are going to give them more time to write. That\u2019s why the VIDA count is important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone involved in VIDA has their own particular reason they\u2019re involved. Mine is because I\u2019m interested in women\u2019s literature and not just the literature I produce. I don\u2019t even know half of what\u2019s out there because all these voices are being vetted for me as a reader. It makes it difficult to access people I could really enjoy. For me, reading fiction is a pleasure, like eating chocolate. I have much more access to poetry because I\u2019m in that world. But some of these boundaries between genres and between aesthetics have harmed women writers. We\u2019ve felt isolate and haven\u2019t seen how connected we are to one another. We\u2019re all disenfranchised, all struggling to find time to write, all struggling for validation. And the conversation is really going public now. I hope what VIDA can do on its website and when we have a conference (I hope in a few years), is create a space where you can learn about women\u2019s literature. That seems to me like a totally intellectual undertaking, just wanting to know that stuff. Part of this is my education and educating my students. And also keeping literature alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VIDA focuses on literary arts. We can\u2019t focus on everything. But there are a lot of organizations for women in different disciplines doing similar things. There\u2019s a woman who writes about women in Hollywood. Women are forming organizations in every single discipline, and it\u2019s not just women who are disenfranchised. I opened the Missouri Review<\/em> the other day, because we received it as part of our count, and there were pictures of the authors on the front page. They were all white. Not a single writer of color in the whole issue. As we work to diversify VIDA, that\u2019s something increasingly problematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw your Twitter conversation with Roxane Gay regarding that and was wondering how you might move forward to solve that problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know about the word \u201csolve.\u201d One person\u2019s solution might not be another\u2019s. \u201cSolution\u201d is actually sort of a scary word. But I think, first of all, we have to make space for the conversation and work practically. That\u2019s what happens in a nonprofit\u2014you think about what you can do. You start with ideas, with what you want to change, but then you have to think about action. You have to do it as a group, an incredibly collaborative project. I\u2019ve never worked like this in my life. We\u2019re having our first board of directors meeting on Friday\u2014we have a larger board now\u2014and a women of color initiative is going to be a big topic. We need to look at what it means to diversify the count. That\u2019s difficult because the whole identification issue is tricky. What I would like to do is seek the assistance of like-minded organizations representing underrepresented people. It\u2019s also an issue of class, which is the most invisible thing. Regarding solutions or strategies, you have to work with the help of so many people to get something that is really effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McCAULEY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When young writers look at the data, how should they use it? How do you consider it in your own writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a poet, I don\u2019t have to worry about this so much. I did the first count with a few people in the summer of 2010. I would use the public library and I didn\u2019t have any daycare because I was too broke. I teach sometimes at Columbia, so I\u2019d end up using their library or the New York Public Library, and it was hard work, in the trenches, and depressing when you\u2019re doing it, because you find that some information can be presented in such a way graphically that you think there are more women being represented than there are. Then you look at the numbers, and you\u2019re like, Oh. You\u2019ll think, This is a really good issue, with a lot of women, but you look and there are only four. You start to realize that \u201ca lot\u201d of women to you is actually not a lot of women. It\u2019s just what you\u2019re used to. So what do young writers, what do old writers, what does any writer do with that data? Well, no one is going to look at those charts and feel good. But it also depends on what your aspirations are. You write because you have to write. And if you\u2019re letting that tell you your writing is not important, you\u2019re going to be in a lot of trouble. It\u2019s a long, tough, gratifying life, but you already have been doing something that nobody wants you to do, if you\u2019re doing something interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways, women writers have an advantage because we write a \u201cminor\u201d literature, and so we\u2019re not so much heard. In some ways, our literature is extremely provocative, is some of the most exciting literature being produced. It\u2019s an advantage. Not having time to write, that sucks, but fighting for it and knowing it\u2019s important, that\u2019s good. And a lot of people will say, \u201cOh, you won\u2019t have time to write. If you have this job, you\u2019re not going to have time. If you have a kid, you\u2019re not going to have time.\u201d But if writing is a priority for you, you make time, whether it means you have to say no to a bunch of things or slack off in a bunch of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was trying to figure out whether or not I was going to have a kid, a friend of mine said to me, \u201cI promise you this, you won\u2019t ever write again.\u201d So I decided I wasn\u2019t going to have a kid. Then I started to think about it, and it\u2019s one of those things where you\u2019re doing that squirrely thinking at the back of your mind, mulling it over, and I thought about her photography and how she had not pursued it. No shame in that. That\u2019s her business. But I would rather be dead than not write. If I couldn\u2019t write, there\u2019s no point in anything. So I thought about it and I was like, I\u2019m conditioned to work really hard. Having a child is a lot of work\u2014in some ways it\u2019s not work, but it is work, too, you\u2019re caring for your child. You love your kid. But it\u2019s not like you\u2019re going to some fucking horrible office where you don\u2019t like the people and you have to make photocopies when you\u2019d rather be doing something better with your time. You\u2019re hanging out with a human being you love. So I was like, I think my friend\u2019s version is not my version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some male characters in your poems come across as not so great, and some people ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the deal with these men?\u201d But are men ever asked this question regarding women in their work? Is it a double standard that people ask you about the men in your poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A reviewer of my second book said that he imagined several ex-boyfriends had nosebleeds as my book went to press, a very uncool thing to say. You know from that book that there are a ton of poems that aren\u2019t about men. In fact, that assumption might have been more applicable to my first book, a book with a woman\u2019s voice in the tradition of a love poem, in the tradition of the troubadours, of Petrarch, a book about unrequited love. It\u2019s a young book, the viewpoint of a young woman. People will take those poems and use them as a mirror, and say, \u201cWhere are you in this?\u201d But it\u2019s not supposed to be a mirror. It\u2019s not supposed to look back at the woman, though that\u2019s what we\u2019re accustomed to, because typically the woman is the muse or the object in a poem. The woman is not the object in those poems in my first book. That\u2019s why she\u2019s a little unnerving, because she\u2019s strategizing. She has issues of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s thinking a lot, too, about her situation. There\u2019s one poem, \u201cMe and Men,\u201d in which the speaker says, \u201cI can\u2019t blame them for owning what I wanted back when what I wanted was had only by men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s really funny about that poem is that whole play with language at the end, where she\u2019s like, I would rather think about animals that I\u2019ve had, the idea being that men are the animals she\u2019s had. And what\u2019s really funny\u2014and this is how utterly guileless I can be as a writer\u2014when I was writing that, I literally meant, I would rather think about my pets. And then I was like, Oh, genius! I trumped myself\u2014 language did its work for me. That poem deals with what we do when we\u2019re thinking about marriage or being with someone. We see a pool of people\u2014and I don\u2019t care what you\u2019re orientation is, you think, Okay, who am I going to be with, because I\u2019m supposed to be with someone. Maybe this one or maybe that one will work. It\u2019s such a fucked-up way to go about connecting with people. The speaker\u2019s making a gross generalization. That poem is really about one person, though it shouldn\u2019t be interesting, being only about one<\/em> person. But one person in a relationship can represent a lot of people. We all know this, I think. We return to archetypes in our lives. It has a lot to do with the mythology we create within our poems if we\u2019re writing personal poetry. It\u2019s recognizing patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You ask about the men in my poems. The thing is, I\u2019m kind of obsessed with men. It\u2019s always been a struggle for me. I\u2019m heterosexual. I often wish I wasn\u2019t, but I am interested in men, and interested in how I will get a man to see me. Maybe it\u2019s a desire to be validated, but it\u2019s also a desire to communicate. I\u2019m also confused by betrayal and dishonesty, and in the landscape of relationships, that\u2019s where a lot of that shit goes down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PETERSON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you say you\u2019re confused by betrayal and dishonesty, do you mean you\u2019re confused that it happens or confused about how to react?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m confused that it happens. I know that sounds naive. That mummy poem by Thomas James has a speaker who blacks out in her father\u2019s garden and her body is being prepared to be mummified. She says out of the blue that she\u2019s going to come back to her life, back to the garden; she\u2019s going to meet her young groom. His eyes will be like black bruises. And she\u2019s like, Why do people lie to each other? It\u2019s a really good question. It\u2019s something my poems work hard against.<\/p>\n\n

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“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!\u201d declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. \u201cFor then I should know such liberation.\u201d This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin\u2019s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority. Marvin grew up in Washington, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36772,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36019\/revisions\/36772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}