Cate Marvin Quotes & Sayings

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor. — Cate Marvin

When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'" — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all. — Cate Marvin

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

I think with my blood. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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!" — Cate Marvin

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author. — Cate Marvin

We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over its
unsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,
but the brack of wanting what's physical
to help us forget we are physical. — Cate Marvin

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there's always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student's poem is terrible or quite wonderful. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

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 grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever. — Cate Marvin

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one's writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people's lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision. — Cate Marvin

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot. — Cate Marvin

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. — Cate Marvin

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer. — Cate Marvin