#sparkchamber 102119 — Cathy Colman
No better time than pre-Halloween to get a jumpstart on your holiday shopping. Here’s a tip for the top of your list: Time Crunch, a new collection of poems by writer [and #sparkchamber alum] Cathy Colman.
Cathy earned a B.A. at San Francisco State University, following there with an M.A. in English, graduating with honors. Her first book, Borrowed Dress, won the 2001 Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry and made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list the first week of its release.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, and she has won multiple awards for poetry, including nomination for a Pushcart Prize eight times. Her poems have been set to music by composer Robert Johnson and performed at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Her poem The Last Time I Saw Virginia Woolf was the only poem chosen by Susanne Slavick, Director of Carnegie Mellon Art Institute to be included in a traveling anti-gun art show [2017-present] called Unloaded.
She has been a freelance reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. She has been a freelance lecturer/reader at Cambridge University, UK, USC, The Oakland College of Arts and Crafts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Getty Museum, and many other venues. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Croatian and Russian.
But this new book, though! Published last week by What Books Press to rave reviews:
The textured and lyrically lush narratives in Time Crunch — deftly honed poems that titillate and resound long after their last lines — firmly establish Cathy Colman as a fierce and formidable voice destined to be a stalwart voice in the contemporary canon.
—Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art
Cathy Colman’s third collection Time Crunch pulses with lyric ingenuity. Deeply felt, these poems are grounded in the mythological, the literary, the filmic, the embodied & the scientific. The breadth of this collection’s wide enough to coax Janis Joplin, Samuel Beckett & Thelonius Monk into the same dance with exacting choreography. She writes ‘Because I have been so many women, none of them able to sleep’ and this polyphonic historical multiplicity beckons the reader in as we are drawn through this remarkable book.
—Sam Sax, author of bury it
You can get your copy on Amazon, or go to indiebound.org to find [and support] an independent bookstore near you. Best case, if you’re in the neighborhood, go to a reading — promised to be witty and sad, strange but fun — at Skylight Books on Sunday, October 27 at 5 pm, and again at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center on Friday, November 22 at 8 pm. Also reading at both events will be Mariano Zaro and Lauren Henley. If you’re in the area, do not miss it!
Until then, here’s a look back at Cathy’s thoughts on the creative process from June of 2017.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
My ideas can come from visual art, road signs, reading a novel or other poet’s work that inspires me, nature, politics, TV, philosophy, physics, film. Ideas can come from something I overhear in the grocery store or from listening to Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” [you should hear it!]. I like to leave the city and write in a more natural, quiet environment. I always go north. I like my ideas “on the rocks.” That is, cold. I always take Leonard Shlain’s marvelous book “Art and Physics” as well as a selection of poets’ books I haven’t read yet and something by John Berger or Gaston Bachelard.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
For a long time, I felt the sensation of wanting to create in my hands. Literally. It was a quiet but energetic pulsing feeling and sometimes I’d draw or play piano [classical] or, as a child, make things out of scraps of material like felt and cardboard I found around the house. I no longer have that feeling in my hands. I don’t think there’s any one thing that causes me to create. Sometimes it’s boredom or a kind of trance-like laziness that just ends up with me at the computer sort of channeling stuff from my unconscious. That raw “stuff” gets sieved through the grid of years of craft but each time I sit down I want to “make it new” like Pound said and I also want to make it “mean” in the sense of relevance to what’s going on in the world. I work from a random set of words and phrases, so sometimes just starting to put sentences or lines onto the page creates propulsion. If I haven’t written I feel half-gone, drifting and then a kind of divining rod in my brain? spine? stomach? leads me back to the anchor and challenge of language. The more words you put on the page the more the poem becomes a kind of labyrinth or puzzle you must write your way out of. Also, the idea of mortality births work. “Death is the mother of beauty” as Wallace Stevens wrote, and as I get older time no longer feels “limitless.”
3.] Early bird or night owl, tortoise or hare?
I have suffered from insomnia for many years and even as a child my brain began to “wake up” at night. If I’m having a conversation with someone at 10:30 at night I’ll begin to feel a rush of energy and clarity that I never have during the day. So, definitely owl. Sometimes it takes me a long time to actually begin working [so tortoise-like] but once I start, I write quite quickly. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, an entire poem will just fall out of my head almost completely realized. Not always, though.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
When it shines. I think that’s when I’ve cut out unnecessary lines and words, lineated it, and then suddenly the poem, like a beautiful fish, rises up to the surface. On the other hand, in a way, I’m never done. I go back and look at published poems in my books or in literary magazines and think, “I didn’t really need that “the” or that whole stanza!” Yet again, I think it’s finished when the meaning of the poem and my idea of what I wanted the poem to “mean” [or express] are as close to being a mirror-image as possible. When that distance is closed it’s very satisfying.
