Mary Ross | Site Director
When I got the chance to meet with Cassandra Caverhill, I was captivated with her story and found myself having more of a conversation with her than an interview with her while we discussed poetry. She had sent me her chapbook in advance and found I had so many questions about her inspiration, writing style, writing process and more. Many of the comments she made I found were fascinating to me. Thus, I have decided to share some of my favorites that gave more insight into her writing than I was able to capture in the article about her.
On Titles:
“I’ve always tried to put a title with poem. I don’t know if that’s just teachers being sticklers about having a title even if it’s a working title. There’s something about that that makes me feel like there’s a draft that’s close to completion. Generally I won’t title something until I feel like the first draft of it is done. Or if I feel like I know where the poem wants to go, like if I have an idea, I might try to title it beforehand to allow it to keep having that momentum.”
You don’t want a title to mislead a reader accidentally either, unless that’s your intention. For example, I have a poem in my thesis that’s called “Fifth Birthday”. And so you think when you’re reading it that it’s about being a child and having a fifth birthday party but as you get toward the end of the poem, no, it’s about somebody celebrating their fifth anniversary of being sober. In the AA community, they call that your birthday. I used the title to make the reader specifically think I’m talking about a child, but no wait, I tricked you, I’m talking about something else, and there are clues in the poem that alert the reader to that but they are still surprised when they get to the end. They are expecting it, but also not expecting it so it’s forcing them to go back and think “How did I miss that on the first read?” That’s an example. It was fun to play with the title and to set an expectation that you then altered.
On Capitalization:
“The capitalization of every line is something that Word does automatically and I really don’t understand so I’m always pushing back against it. But it’s also something you see a lot in older poetry and I’m not good at years, but I would say more classic poetry starts with a capitalization of each line, so something about that just feels weird. Like I can’t do that like I don’t have that poetic authority that these previous poetry ancestors had, so it’s partially that. But also I’m just a stickler about editing for things to be edited properly which is why you notice the [capitalization of] proper nouns and only at the start of the sentence. I’m very nitpicky about that. It could come too that it could come from drafting because a lot of poems that I draft they don’t start in any particular shape, or they don’t have particular line breaks or stanza, it’s just a blob. So because of that I’m usually writing full sentences to get the ideas out that could also influence how it is kind of influenced later.”
On Specific Poems in Mayflies
In Tandem: “I struggled with that one a lot. I can’t remember what I had called it before, but I was struggling with a title for a while, and I don’t know why I changed it, but then this idea of a tandem bicycle and being in tandem with someone, it just came to me one day and I was like that’s the title of this poem, that captures the relationship between these two people and the trajectory of where they are going in their lives. That to me felt like when I added the title, it felt like it fit.”
Pomodoro: “I was thinking about Pomodoro earlier today, like I remember that poem specifically came out of a generation workshop I took where we were focused on food — food and how it relates to memory. It was something I had never considered before. We were writing all these prompts and she gave us certain foods, so we were just free writing all these things and sharing them as a group. Something I wrote, I don’t know if we were talking about olive oil or tomatoes, but I had this idea of my grandmother and how she used to cook this sauce from tomatoes she had grown in her own garden. It just linked to this memory of being a child, and being out there with her as she was gardening.That image kind of had a life of its own. I didn’t expect a poem to come out of that and it just felt like things came together with that kind of inspiration that allowed it to happen. And something that was really interesting to me too when I brought it in to be critiqued, putting small things in there like “is someone going to like this?”, “oh I don’t know if it’s meaningful. It’s something I noticed so I’m inserting it in here, but is it a throwaway line?” This idea of my grandmother’s rows of sauce being in this closet, that I say used to be my mother’s closet because it used to be my mother’s room kind of felt like no one’s going to care about that, that’s just a detail to add. People really seized on that, this idea … that gives more dimension to the scene and this like image of time passing I guess and like knowing that. Getting that kind of feedback… was a revelation to me, like you can include things like this and these details are what makes the difference and what allows someone to see those images in vivid details. That to me was a surprise in a draft. Pomodoro was one of the earlier poems that let me feel like I had a license to do that.”
Mount Francis: “Mount Francis, I just felt that was the defining image of the poem like first of all it’s this actually visual thing — this garbage pile — but also it being named after the mayor for this garbage strike that is going on so it’s like in Windsor, there is no Mount Francis, like it’s not an actual thing. So that kind of determined that one.”
Mayflies: “Mayflies, the title poem, went through a ton of revisions. It was a little longer, it wasn’t necessarily focused, I had it more being a story of like, it was inspired by when I used to work at McDonalds as a teenager and like part of my responsibilities was when these mayflies came and attached to the side of the store, I had to go out with a power washer, so I had this description of wearing this parka in the middle of the summer because I didn’t want them flying on me and getting in my hair and on my body and then screaming as they were fluttering away, but none of that really worked in the poem when I shared it with readers who were going through the first draft. So they helped me focus on what was important in that poem.”
On Styles Choices:
“Friday I’m in Love“: Originally that poem was not a villanelle. It was a draft I had been trying to write in free verse. And a lot of the images that were in there, like this idea of church and religion and faith was sort of in the first draft, but I don’t know if it was coming through as much like you see in the actual poem as it exists now. So I was just learning how to write villanelles, this is actually my first attempt at one. For some reason, I find it’s easier to work with forms when you already have an idea. If I already have a draft of something and I feel like it’s not clicking in some way, I feel sometimes forcing it into a form helps it take shape or helps it become refined and efficient in what it wants to say because there are these limit. That one was one that the villanelle completely blew it open and made it what it was.
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