Kate Cayley, Lent

 

Glasses

When I think of Anne Sexton’s glasses, I imagine then not on her face but in the collection of the American billionaire who purchase them after she gassed herself in her garage. He keeps them in a temperature-controlled case like an artifact, a page from the King James Bible, a torn strip of papyrus, bitten with hieroglyphs. I saw a photograph of this man once: innocuous, sweating like over-risen dough. Full of unambiguous goodwill, but something else there, something hidden, the way the desert in Texas where he lives might hide things. Does he gloat over the glasses, think about the woman in her car? Does he sometimes, alone, convince himself he sees her eyes in the frames? I imagine he sleeps in a temperature-controlled room, his white bed square and hostile as a glass case.

Toronto-based poet and fiction writer Kate Cayley’s third full-length poetry title, following When This World Comes to an End (London ON: Brick Books, 2013) and Other Houses (Brick Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], is Lent (Book*hug, 2023), a collection constructed as a quartet of suite-sections, furthering her ongoing exploration of slow, unfolding lyric attentions. Cayley’s poems are almost structured as acts of unwrapping, or as working a particular kind of puzzle, each line inching closer towards a particular solution, discovery or revelation. “And if repetition could itself be / a form of attention,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “Attention,” “folding along the crease / until the crease finds itself / hollowing out the groove, as in marriage, / studying the same face, the same / permeable body […].” As overused as the descriptor “unfurls” is for discussing poems, this single-sentence lyric poem does exactly that, moving resolutely across the page and through myriad line-breaks to question, open and reveal. It is curious that Cayley mentions repetition without specifically utilizing repetition through the collection, instead allowing each poem an echo of tone, rhythm and, yes, attention, as a way of garnering alternate perspectives. “I sit from time to time in empty churches,” she writes, to close the fourth and final poem in the short sequence-cluster “Dutch Masters,” titled “Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde, Church of Saint Cecilia, Cologne, / about 1670,” “not knowing how to pray. Hoping for belief / the way a tree might for the axe: show me / the pith of my own heart.”

Lent exists in four sections—“Interior,” “Art Monsters,” “Sixty Harvest” and the title sequence, “Lent”—the second of which includes a handful of poems and sequences, including the eight-poem sequence “Assia Wevill Considers Herself,” writing, as Cayley offers in her “Endnotes,” of the German poet who was “[…] the partner of Ted Hughes towards the end of Sylvia Plath’s life and after her death. Wevill committed suicide by the same method along with her young daughter in 1969.” There is such heartbreak in the straightforwardness of Cayley’s lines for Wevill, offering a clarity for a figure who became but a footnote in the larger narrative surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. “She closes / her eyes.” the sequence ends, “The animals gather / around the lake. The lake is on fire.” The section also includes the four-poem “Dutch Masters,” as well as shorter poems such as “Mary Shelley at the End of Her Life, Recalling the Monster” and “The Light in Vermeer.” Her attentions are fascinating through their precision, collecting details with the eye of an archivist and the heart of a poet, and one might wonder if this collection, on the surface, seeks to reference the Christian period of fasting and remembrance, or as something offered in loan to another. Perhaps neither, or perhaps both, although the opening of the second poem in this particular prose sequence offers: “There were people in the church today and I went in. I like the melancholy of churches. There is a spaciousness in failure. The minister, breaking the bread, wears a small smile that suggests he knows the futility of what he does and does it anyway, out of love, out of habit, the way the two are, over time, indistinguishable.” There is little that Cayley sees that is not allowed to completely remain on its own terms, collected within her lyric through through a deft hand, attentive eye and open ear. Or, as the poem “The Light in Vermeer” offers, to begin:

It pours the way milk pours. The sky hard as porcelain. The woman
reading her letter, instructing her maid. The maid, pouring.

The blue of the sky and the bowl means forgiveness, a hint of Madonna
crouched at the manger. Where is my mother?

Kate Cayley, Other Houses

A Partial List of People Who Have Claimed to be Christ

Ann Lee, 1736-1784

I will not sit in your presence, persecutors. Bare-headed

before you I stand examined, men of English church, men of

holy cloth, but I was a seamstress, snipping lives in my fingers.

I could rip a seam like the ocean, which I aim to cross, leading

my women and men, who sweat alike and walk together, for only

by the sameness of men and women shall either be redeemed.

When I shudder, you will say the fit is on me, and mock me,

but I say you are filth, to see filth. I shake with the Word, myself

Mother Ann, female form of Christ. My babies dead, my womb

blasted, God knew I was for other offers. Not for me

the spindle, the bed. Shake your heads, churchmen. I see

you titter as the rabble does. Do not touch me. I will burn

your hands with holiness. Ask me any point of theology

and I will answer you in tongues. Cut mine out, I will speak.

I will inherit. I will turn the world upside down.

I am intrigued by the narrative precision of Kate Cayley’s lyrics in her second collection, Other Houses (London ON: Brick Books, 2017). I was initially struck by a series of poems that thread through, each titled “A Partial List of People Who Have Claimed to be Christ.” Four poems in all, each poem writes a kind of case history on different historical figures who claimed, in their own way, some version of the divine: Ann Lee (1736-1784), Arnold Potter (1804-1872), William W. Davies (1833-1906) and Laszlo Toth (1938-2012). There is something quite sympathetic in her sketches-as-case-histories, blending elements of irrationality with their own relationships and awareness of the divine, as she writes in the William W. Davies piece, “Everything comes // again, and what is, was.” Cayley’s lines are incredibly precise, pointed and sharp, carving metaphysical queries into character studies, and short sketches that encapsulate the entirety of human history. Utilizing historical research and figures, Cayley’s short narratives write out an exploration of fissures, breaks and even collisions between mythologies and reality, searching throughout the past few centuries for examples of those who broke through to the other side, or were broken in their attempts, and even, occasionally, both. As she writes in the poem “Hans Christian Anderson Becomes Acquainted with / His Shadow”: “There must be a light / somewhere.”

Item 368444, Category 4, 1877

Map

This map is unfinished.

There are no people on the map. Maps are adept at inferring that the people who inhabit a land matter less than the map itself, and so the map aids in the project of disappearance.

It is not known how this map is connected to the disappearance of a specific person, but as the map must have had an owner, we may assume a missing person (or missing people) that the map does not indicate.

There are tooth marks in the map, which may have come from an animal, or, possibly, indicate the cartographer’s foolish wish to eat the world. The attempt was unsuccessful. (“The Library of the Missing”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kate Cayley

Kate Cayley lives in Toronto. Her first collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End, was recently published by Brick Books. She is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre, and her play After Akhmatova was produced at Tarragon in 2011. She has also written a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press). Her poems and short stories have appeared in various places including CV2, Descant, Event, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly and The Literary Review of Canada. Her first collection of short stories will be published next fall.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was a young adult novel called The Hangman in the Mirror, which was published in 2011. Before that I was a playwright who’d published some stuff in literary magazines. It changed my life in the sense that I had my name on the spine of a book—something I’d wanted for years. Having my first book be a novel, and a novel for younger readers, was not something I’d ever planned, and it happened somewhat by accident—it grew out of a play and used the same source (a woman in 18th century Montreal who’d been sentenced to hang for stealing, and saved her life by persuading the soldier in the next cell, who’d never set eyes on her, to become the hangman and marry her). I’d always imagined that my first book would be poetry. So it felt different as an interesting and enjoyable side-step. But I suppose it’s all riddled with the same preoccupations—history, the unbelievable accidents of history, storytelling as a kind of life-saving measure, the storyteller with their back to the wall.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I found it easier to conceive of poetry. Poetry could happen in this state of excitement and clarity—fiction is a much longer road, and while of course there’s craft in poetry, I find the craft more subjective. As for non-fiction, I would love to write essays if I had any idea how, but it never even occurred to me as an ambition originally—and besides, non-fiction needs a certain level of personal exposure, you don’t have the excuse of a “voice” which is easily understood as not your own. I was always interested in poetry that took on a character separate from the character of the author—which of course isn’t really possible, but you can pretend it is.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I usually begin a project with a different project which turns out to be the wrong one. On a grand scale, I spent ten years focusing on being a theatre director before it dawned on me with anything like finality that I wanted to be a writer, even though I was writing as much as I could manage. Scares me a bit that I’m that slow on the uptake—what’s going to dawn on me next? Similarly, I get very excited about something and spend a lot of time working on it, before eventually realizing that there’s a kernel of an idea there that is meant to be something else. And then the real project becomes clear.

My initial writing comes very quickly. If I can’t finish a first draft of a poem at a sitting, or maybe two, it’s unlikely to get finished at all. But the rewriting is a much longer process. The shape of the first draft—that depends. Some things have only a word here and there altered, others are tinkered with for years until they are something else. Though the more I write, the more likely it is that the first draft will be closer to the last one. This is heartening.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem begins at random—I have trouble sitting down with the idea of writing poems because it all flies away when you look at it straight on. So I often end up writing poetry when I’m supposed to be working on something else. This collection wasn’t conceived of as a collection. But that might change—I’d love to work on something with an overall theme, poems that had a kind of narrative arc to them the way a novel would, poems that culminated like a story.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t have a lot of experience with readings. When I do them, I hate the idea of them and everything about them and dread them for days—and then I have a really good time and wish I could do more, because it’s so lovely to feel that someone is out there listening.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Oh boy. Yes. And no. I suppose the concerns of history, of our place in time, not just of our own moment and our own life but in relation to the past, personal and political past, the sense of history as a tragic condition, and the forms of mythology. I would like to pose some questions about time and death and memory, I don’t know about answers. I’m not sure what the current questions are. There are too many and I’m not educated enough or attentive enough at the moment to know what is most pressing and what is just headlines from the culture war.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I used to want art to be political in some obvious way. Now I’m afraid it’s not, and this makes me very nervous. But I think the role of the writer is to express, to the best of their ability, the absolute specificity of where they are placed—to be most fully and purely an individual voice. Context makes this a political act or a trivial one—everything ranging from totalitarian states in which the “voice” of the writer is a stance against the monolith, to, more immediately, our own glib relationship to language in a culture in which language is cheap and plentiful. Writing can be a serious encounter with words when we bleed words out of our eyes. We’re drowning in wordiness, so writing is particularly problematic right now—why say more? But on the other hand, maybe good writing can rescue the sacredness of words, just a little bit.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am just starting to gain more experience working closely with editors, as I publish more. And I love it very much. Even when I disagree, it makes me think about why I’m doing a thing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Do not hurry. Do not rest.” –Goethe.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to plays)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s been fairly easy, or at least one protects the other. As in, the poetry has a place to live, so it doesn’t screw up the plays (hopefully) and also the other way round, though I think poetry can accommodate more, is more flexible. Plays are (to me) probably the least flexible form of writing—the rules of classic dramaturgy are really pretty good and to deviate very far from them you have to be wildly and boldly original, which I’m not. I find poems much more forgiving.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write in set hours, very scheduled. I have two young children and my incredibly helpful and supportive partner also works so writing happens in specific times. If anything the pressure of having a family has been very good for me—there’s nothing like a school pickup to get something finished in time. I impose deadlines on myself and I love deadlines, possibly to a fault. I feel like I’ve won if I “finish” something early, even if it isn’t really finished just hurriedly patched up, and besides I’m the only person in the world who cares I’ve finished.

On a typical day I sit down in the morning with an idea of what I will work on and hope for the best until around mid-afternoon. I have a certain number of pages or words or a certain amount of revising to do, decided the previous day. On a good day I do it. The internet is the major enemy, and my own anxieties. Post-it notes above the desk are helpful.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I walk around. I buy groceries. I give up in disgust. I read—it’s better than giving up in disgust.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Ground coffee. Herbs. A slightly musty smell our house has, coming up from the basement.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I agree with McFadden. Yes, there are some other inspirations, but if I was honest I’d have to say that for me books only come from books. There’s an element of one-upmanship to writing too—you read something perfect, you want to measure yourself against it, to try it yourself.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Munro, W. H. Auden, The T. E. Lawrence Poems by Gwendolyn MacEwen, Possession by A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Chekhov, The Broken Estate by James Wood, William Trevor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Brodsky’s essays, Anna Akhmatova, Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, The Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price, White Stone by Stephanie Bolster, The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard, Philip Larkin, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, Lion in the Streets by Judith Thompson, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Anne Sexton, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law by Adrienne Rich, very recently the poetry of Wendell Berry, who is a voice crying in the wilderness.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a novel in fragments that appears to be isolated stories and yet forms a coherent narrative. Write novels generally.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I have no idea. Probably a professor of literature. I would have hated it though. I’m not rigorous or systematic enough to be a good academic.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Not being good at very much else. I was a decent theatre director but the life is too absorbing and obsessive—aside from wanting to write, I also wanted to have a life that was concerned with more than the black box.

19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander. Lifted the top of my head off—you think you know what he’s doing, and then he changes the rules completely. Amazing. I haven’t stayed awake for a whole good movie in a while. Probably The Lives of Others.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A play about art forgery and war crimes. A book of short stories. Some poetry that I hope will be the start of a new collection.

[Kate Cayley reads in Ottawa with Paul Vermeersch as part of The TREE Reading Series on Tuesday, June 25, 2013]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;