Interview with Publisher, Editor, and Poet, Emily Vogel: Cat in the Sun Press

Michael: Hello, Emily.  Thank you for agreeing to an interview. 

Cat in the Sun Press is a new press.  Its first book, Micah Towery’s collection, Whale of Desire, was published only at the end of last year.  I’m interested to find out why you and poet Joe Weil decided to start a press.  What need did you see that prompted such a large undertaking?  What void do you hope the press will fill?

Emily: The original idea for the press arose when Joe and I were visiting with our friends Lucas Rivera and Sharon Zetter. We wanted to launch an online journal and also each Joe and I and Sharon and Lucas a kind of consortium. Sharon and Lucas named their press “Called Back Books,” and we named our press “Cat in the Sun” because I kept thinking about our cat, Pushkin, languorously sleeping in the sunlight. Joe had always wanted to launch his own press. He was the editor and publisher of the journal “Black Swan,” and also one of the founders of Monk Books, as well as various other low budget journals over the years. One of the original intentions of the press was to curate “art books” by painters or photographers that were also poets in their own right.

 

 

Michael: What in particular about Micah Towery’s work drew your attention?  What singled it out as a good book for the press’s debut collection?

 

Emily: We had been wanting to do a book of Micah’s for a while. This was his first book, and we liked his poetry and thought it should be recognized. We wanted to do first books as well as the books of well-known poets with extensive publishing histories.

 

 

Michael: What are your plans for the press?  Do you foresee Cat in the Sun Press publishing a certain number of books per year or only as you come across those you want to publish? 

 

Emily: We’re planning to publish two a year---one in the spring/summer and one in the fall/winter. We’ve just completed an art book (with poetry) of Maria Gillan’s which will be made available on Amazon very soon.  (Since this interview, Maria Gillan's book, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, has been published.  An image of her book is at the end of the interview.  You can click it to be taken to Amazon.com where it can be purchased.)

Poet Joe Weil, cofounder
of Cat in the Sun Press

 

 

Michael: Sorry to ask what may be rather pedestrian questions, but I think it might be interesting to see what a poet and publisher thinks on these things. What do you think is the role of poetry in American society?  Are our poets doing their part?  If not, what should they be doing differently?

 

Emily: I tend to consider poetry that is being written today as being circulated only amongst other poets. It feels very self-contained to me (and almost “incestuous”) because from what I’ve seen the only American citizens that actually read the work of living poets are other poets, who are ambitious perhaps and seeking to emulate their work. I don’t see a lot of people other than “poets” who are reading poetry. And if they do read poetry, then they seek to compete with the poets that they are reading. Poetry has lost its purpose in being an exclusive art that ordinary citizens admire and appreciate. If my students (who are not English majors) have read poetry, it is the work of dead poets, like Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, and Emily Dickinson. Good poets, and rightfully so---but in my opinion poetry has become a “scene” which every aspiring poet wants to leap upon. It has, in my opinion, become more of a business than an art. There are more MFA writing programs than I can count on my fingers, toes, and my children’s fingers and toes (and furthermore) and it seems to me an industry. Some even call poetry a “career.” I write poetry, so I can tell you just how much I loathe the utilitarian “ins and outs” of the poetry biz. Because I am a writer myself, I can tell you that I do everything I can to stay away from this nonsense. Sure, everyone needs a publisher, but in the meantime I’d like to muse upon the trees without contingency and write well, and write out of something rhapsodic and holy. America prides itself on trophies and awards, and everyone gets one because this is an equal opportunity society. But which poets do we remember from the past who are now dead? I can tell you from the romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, Keats, and Blake. That’s six. And how many so-called “important” poets do we now have swarming our nation?

 

Michael: You say that “poetry has lost its purpose.”  What is that purpose?

 

Emily:  When Shelley said "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his Defence of Poetry---I think he meant something quite different from the way that poets see themselves in today's world. I think he may have meant that there are (or were) very few poets that could rightly refer to themselves as "poets." Wordsworth said something similar in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: something along the lines of the poet "being a very particular kind of person." There are so many poets who are publishing their books now that I think poetry has become too commonplace and ordinary---maybe even mainstreamed? Poetry was once written by the drunks and madmen---eccentrics and recluses. Now it seems to be written by any academic that writes well enough to be accepted into an MFA program. When the business of submitting work online, filling out applications for residencies, and collating manuscripts becomes just as important (if not more so) than the actual art, I do think at least some of the purpose gets lost.

 

 

Michael: What American poets do you see as great voices that aren’t being acknowledged or, perhaps, even published?

 

Emily: John Richard Smith, a poet from New Jersey is one of my favorite poets. Also Adele Kenny (another NJ poet), and Nicole Broadhurst, who writes this really wacky and almost religious poetry, which reminds me of Ginsberg.

 

 

Michael: What are the press’s current plans and projects?

 

Emily: For the fall and spring, we’re looking to do a couple of art/poetry books, or collaborations. We also want to do conversation books. We’re eclectic. We want to tailor our press to those voices of artists who are damn good and sometimes don’t get the credit they deserve. We want to do beautiful books that you wouldn’t dare leave under the passenger seat of your car.

 

 

Michael: Thank you, Emily.  It will be a pleasure to see what poetry comes out of Cat in the Sun Press. 

 

Please click the image to be taken to Amazon.com
where you can purchase Maria Mazzioti Gillan's book
The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets

Interview with Poet Micah Towery

Michael T. Young: Thank you, Micah, for agreeing to an interview.  

 

Your new collection of poems, Whale of Desire, has such a wonderfully provocative title.  I wondered if you could comment on the title itself and the significance it has for the collection.  What is it meant to suggest? 

 

Micah Towery: I misremembered a line from my own poem, but it stuck. It also seemed to evoke the whole gist of the book, the idea of largeness, the appetites. Also, I like whales. 

 

 

Michael T. Young: The poem “It’s Not That I Don’t Like Charlton Heston,” says, “who among you/would rather be understood than//thrown over my shoulder/and hoisted to/the highest point in the city/with the thrilling fire of bullets/from jealous fellows following?”  This suggests that being desired is greater than being understood.  Do you feel this is true?  How do you see this as significant in the collection?

 

Micah Towery: Well, certainly that line tugs at those two possibilities. I want to say that what we often desire when we desire is to be known. One could differentiate mere understanding from fuller knowledge. In that sense, desire is bound up with true knowledge. In most theistic traditions, bliss is the fulfillment of the desire to know, to be mystically unified with the source of being.

 

 

Michael T. Young:   Your poem “On the Closing of the Coca-Cola Plant in Binghamton, NY,” seems central to the collection, bringing together both spiritual and economic realities.  In fact, the end of the second section where the milk men say, “You Coke guys eat more shit//than my dog,” made me think of near the end of “To Elsie,” where Williams says that we are “degraded prisoners/destined/to hunger until we eat filth.”  Your poem somehow seems to be the belly of the whale: where we descend into the murkiest depths to recover that little bit of light.  Could you comment on its place in the collection and its importance: what it addresses in the arc of the book?

 

Micah Towery: Those 5 poems took me several years to write—most of which was not spent writing but processing those feelings and experiences. In one sense, they layer together various parts of my life and unify them in a way that I can’t do outside of poetry. It catches the kind of strange feelings of how I related to the other men at the Coke plant and how, in them, I saw the ghosts of my family history. The connection with “To Elsie” is perceptive because the whole series is unified around working with America’s best known “pure products”: Coca-Cola. 

 

 

Michael T. Young: The poem “Poem in Honor of My Own Birthday,” says, “I think it’s clear I like/cold things, like the chilly offices/of love.”  There is also a series of love poems in the collection.  What do you see as love’s place in the collection’s progress and development?  

 

Micah Towery: Most of the love poems are pretty personal in the sense that they arise out of personal experience. Because the book spans some 10 years, it’s hard for me to not feel there is some deepening/development of my idea of love in the book itself. Yet on the more ‘cosmic scale’ of love, as a Christian, I believe that “God is love” and, therefore, love animates the universe itself: the awe of being, the unfathomable diversity of it and the almost terrible creativity—unaccountable and unable to be accounted for—the kind of thing that mystics speak of as both God’s darkness and light. I hope there is an arc in the book in which the personal experiences and that cosmic sense begin to meet.

 

 

Michael T. Young: Roethke said, “I believe that the spiritual man must go back in order to go forward.”  I was reminded of this because so much of your work engages the past.  I wondered if you could comment on the importance of engaging the past within the collection, referencing or engaging everything from Psalm 39 to Miles Davis.  Do you feel a spiritual journey must engage the past in this way?  If so, why is it important?

 

Micah Towery: I think it was Faulkner who said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I am a little obsessed with understanding how different peoples conceive of time and what that says about their aspirations, their sense of history and memory. We use the past, in combination with our aspirations for the future, to construct our present. And poems are nothing if not an attempt to be present, to present and make living a self for the world. This is a spiritual act, a tradition of speech you learn from other poets. The biblical Psalm writers, as well as contemporary writers like Michael S. Harper, are powerful models for these modes of poetry.

 

 

Michael T. Young: Your poem “Image of a snake striking the eagle while being carried away,” ends saying “In this way/we rescue the light/from the darkness.”  Much of the collection seems to be an effort to do just that, dive into the dark areas where light has been stolen away and bring it out.  It reminded me of the old Gnostic view that the serpent was the true god who stole into Eden to free Adam and Eve from the false god that kept them enslaved.  Do you see this as an element in the arc of the collection?  What do you see as its significance in the collection or in a spiritual journey?

 

Micah Towery: The telling and retelling of stories creates an interesting space for the exploration of truth and human recognition of it. What I think is interesting about the Genesis accounts is that, taken on their own terms (literally), they are pretty clearly redacted versions of polytheistic creation accounts. In it, the divine figures are petty, jealous of their prerogatives. Yet, at some later point, they became the cornerstone of the major monotheistic religions. In that sense, the redactions are not a flaw, but rather the very integrity of the text: evidence that people over time have ‘sat with’ the elements in the text and tested them against collective knowledge and experience, recognizing what they saw as truths. I reject gnosticism generally, but insofar as I think humans generally seek the truth, there must be some genuine truth. I do think the ‘slow emergence’ of truth is a theme in the series you mention.

 



Click image to be taken to Amazon.com
to order Whale of Desire

 

Michael T. Young: The spiritual yearning of the collection takes place in contemporary America with gas stations, a Coca-Cola factory, Jazz, etc.  What do you see as a particularly contemporary problem in man’s spiritual needs?  What do you see as the solution to that problem?

 

Micah Towery: For some time, art denied the spiritual aspirations of ‘low’ art, art that didn’t fit class or race assumptions. Now we tend to embrace low art but deny spiritual aspirations. I see this true in a broader sense as well: the inability to recognize something as a spiritual need, generally. So, for example, we look at unemployment as a social or economic problem, but we don’t recognize that it’s also a spiritual problem. I think our common discourse suffers from this flattening. We live in “a secular age,” it’s true, but I believe we need to find a way to bring spiritual needs back into the discussion. We can probably start by acknowledging that even in our diverse and divided society we hold a lot more in common than we acknowledge. 

 

 

Michael T. Young: This may seem a rather pedestrian question, but what American poets are most significant for you?  I’m curious especially because of the spiritual engagement in your poetry.  What American poets do you find important for that spiritual engagement?—maybe poets you feel are important not just for you but perhaps for our larger cultural growth.

 

Micah Towery: It’s a really important question to me, actually. I have to acknowledge some of my teachers--Joe Weil and Tom Sleigh, as well as Christine Gelineau, Donna Masini, Jan Heller Levi--these folks put a mark on my poetry because they actually explored it with me line-by-line. They also had a profound impact on my spiritual outlook. In the scope of larger American poetry, though, Eliot, Williams, Bishop, Lowell, and O’Hara, as well as Michael S. Harper, Allen Grossman (at least as a poetry ‘theorist’), and Frank Bidart. Anyone with a knowledge of American poetry will see a pretty clear lineage in that list. I can’t deny it. To me, these poets model not just voice and style that I find engaging, but also a way of being in the world and manifesting that presence through poetry. Eliot really sparked my love of poetry. For a while I drifted away from him, but after many years I’m coming back to him as a touchstone. He expressed such strong critical opinions, and I suspect that people assume a similar stance underneath his poetry (especially his post-conversion stuff). But I find a profound ambiguity in a poem like “Ash Wednesday” that doesn’t cut corners.

 

 

Michael T. Young: What is your favorite poem in the collection?  Which is it and why is it significant for you?

 

Micah Towery: I’m really proud of some of my poems--like my Horace translation--as personal poetic accomplishments. But the poems I enjoy returning to are some of the love poems to Jill. In my humble opinion (!), the second is probably one of the best poems I’ve written.

 

 

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet?  What are they?  Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your poetry?  

 

Micah Towery: Definitely Augustine’s Confessions. That sense of inwardness, but also his willingness to use personal events to explore profound philosophical issues. I love that he shifts from his last memories of his mother into his deep meditation on the nature of memory, time, and creation. When I first read these sections of Confessions, I felt like I was seeing into the heart of the universe itself. Further, Augustine is such an amazing writer that his ability to craft a sentence comes through even in translation! I think his prose style probably did impact my poetry on a stylistic level as well.

 

 

Michael T. Young: What do you like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?

 

Micah Towery: I enjoy fantasy baseball. I also like to make wine & beer and roast my own coffee. Cheese making is next on my list.

 

 

Michael T. Young:  Thanks for your time, Micah.  Let’s close with your favorite poem from Whale of Desire.

 

Second Love Poem for Jill
. . . . . . . . . . . In Idaho

Down at the boat launch, on the river that feeds
. . . . . . . into Lake Pend Oreille,
the slanted concrete slab still warmed us where
we sat, and the mountains faded into the sky
. . . . . . . as the train went by
. . . . . . . to Coeur D'Alene.

I stared into the clear and moving water
. . . . . . . at the rocks
until I saw how full the water was of fish--so full--
such as the light--after a while I saw only
. . . . . . . the fish after the rumble
. . . . . . . passed away.

On that evening when we'd spent the day
. . . . . . . negotiating, careful,
you said to me, I'm figuring out marriage
and you and figuring out me, and the river
. . . . . . . in its wisdom
. . . . . . . said nothing wise.

And the water glinted with the last light of the bugs
. . . . . . . that broke
the surface, and it sounded with the fish that ate them.
And the mountains kept fading into the sky.
. . . . . . . Then you said,
. . . . . . . I love. . .

and didn't finish.  So we left the launch
. . . . . . . and drove
away, and the river echoed that I love.  And
afterwards, a moose began to wade across
. . . . . . . the water
. . . . . . . slowly.