Local Lyrics hosted by John Wojtowicz appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, John features the work and musings of a local poet.
“I’m finding myself most wanting the company of many poets I already know and who, in ordinary times, it would be no miracle to spend time with … I’d honestly trade a chance to lay in a meadow with Emily Dickinson for it.”
Stephanie Cawley
from My Heart But Not My Heart
Does your mouth go wreath
when you want warmth?
Do you say fallen instead of
fallow? Does your tongue get stuck
in the gap between is and was?
There is an actual shrinking.
List all the animals you can.
Echo back these fifteen words.
You are a thin glass of water.
You are a cold wind and a field.
Don’t make them a story.
Q and A
How would you describe your poetic aesthetic?
I aspire to being a poet who is not loyal to any singular aesthetic, style, form, or mode of writing. I hope to continually reinvent myself, to find the forms and modes that a given subject or project requires and to always remain interested in trying something new with my work. I guess that is a kind of aesthetic or tendency in and of itself, though! And all that said, I recognize that I’ve been pretty dedicated to the prose poem and to poetry/prose hybrid forms for quite some time now. My first book My Heart But Not My Heart is an extended sequence that is mostly prose; I have a chapbook A Wilderness that is almost all prose poems; and my second book Animal Mineral will contain prose poems, a kind of lyric essay, and a long poem that rewrites a short story by Clarice Lispector, in addition to some standalone poems.
If you could spend the afternoon with one poet living or dead, who would it be and how would you spend your afternoon?
I haven’t spent an afternoon with any person other than my partner in about two months now, so I’m finding myself most wanting the company of many poets I already know and who, in ordinary times, it would be no miracle to spend time with. I’d love to spend an afternoon with my poet friends, maybe writing together, or reading poems to each other, or maybe just sitting outside having a drink. Right now, I’d honestly trade a chance to lay in a meadow with Emily Dickinson for it.
Is there anything unique about your process? Do you have any advice for writers struggling to find their voice?
I don’t know if it’s unique, but my writing process relies a lot on intuition. I generate work by dropping in to a space where I’m as unconscious about what’s happening on the page as possible, freewriting, writing while looking out the window, sometimes incorporating elements of chance or outside inspiration (eavesdropping, observation, grabbing bits of text from another book, drawing a tarot card). Then I come back later (sometimes much later) and read and shape and refine and rearrange and remix and apply structure. I am trying not to think of that second step as “cleaning up,” but as a process of reflecting on and bringing more intention into a work.
In your new book, My Heart But Not My Heart, you write about your experience with grief. Did you have a specific strategy when traversing the line between the personal and universal?
Writing the book began with a need to document and make space for my personal experiences of grief in the aftermath of my dad’s sudden death. It feels like American culture is pretty uncomfortable with death and with real grief, so writing this book became a way to make space for thoughts and feelings that felt unspeakable and unbearable in my daily life. I don’t really believe in universality or in striving towards it, but I did find myself curious about how my individual experiences connected to others’ experiences and connected to other bodies of knowledge. I wanted to try to understand what was happening to me, so I found myself turning to philosophy, neuroscience, and other cultural texts about grief and depression, which then made their way into the writing.
In this book, you seamlessly move between prose and poetry. Can you tell us a little about the decision not to box yourself into one form?
The book began with the sections that are in prose, which I started writing around the one year mark after my dad died. For that first year after he died, I was in graduate school, and I muscled through continuing to write kind of musical, lyrical poems, but it felt like I was going through the motions. Then, eventually, it felt like I couldn’t bear to write like that at all anymore, like I couldn’t approach my actual experiences with that kind of writing. So, after a while of not really writing at all, I started writing into a Word document in prose. I didn’t think what I was doing there was “real writing,” writing that would become anything or that anyone else would ever read, but it was the first time I felt able to actually arrive on the page. I wrote into that document every day for about a month, and then showed a bit of it to my teacher and mentor Dawn Lundy Martin who told me this was my book and that I had to keep writing it.
When I began to shape the book manuscript, I knew that by then I did also have some more “poem”-type pieces that were in conversation with the prose, so I spent a long time playing with order and structure before arriving at a kind of architecture that holds all these pieces together. It felt right, for a book about an experience of grief, for there to be aspects of the form that felt disorienting (the shifts between poetry and prose, the fragmentation, the pieces that occupy different parts of the page) and aspects that evoked an enduring sameness (the long prose sequences).
Where can readers find more of your work? Where can we buy your books?
You can get My Heart But Not My Heart right from my publisher Slope Editions (slopeeditions.org), from Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org), or from Bookshop.org. You can also buy it from Amazon, but you shouldn’t! Even setting aside Amazon’s horrific labor practices, for small press books like mine, if you buy from the press or from indie retailers, more of your dollars will go back to support the press, which runs on a shoestring budget and volunteer labor. I also have a chapbook A Wilderness which you can get from Gazing Grain Press (gazinggrainpress.com). I also have work in various print and online journals which you can find links to on my website stephaniecawley.com.
Stephanie Cawley is a poet from southern New Jersey and the Director of Murphy Writing of Stockton University. She is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart, which won the Slope Book Prize chosen by Solmaz Sharif, and the chapbook A Wilderness from Gazing Grain Press. Her poems and other writing appear in DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, TYPO, The Boston Review, and West Branch, among other places. Her next book Animal Mineral will be out from YesYes Books in 2022. Learn more at stephaniecawley.com.
Catfish” John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he serves his community as a licensed social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured in the Philadelphia based Moonstone Poetry series, West-Chester based Livin’ on Luck series, and Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM. Catfish John has been nominated 3x for the Pushcart Prize. He has been a workshop facilitator for Stockton University’s Tour of Poetry at the Otto Bruyns Public Library of Northfield and will be facilitating a haiku workshop at Beardfest Arts & Music Festival at the end of August. Recent publications include: Jelly Bucket, Tule Review, The Patterson Literary Review, Glassworks, Driftwood, Constellations, The Poeming Pigeon, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Find out more at: www.catfishjohnpoetry.com