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This is the third installment in a series of articles highlighting works published by faculty from the Rhode Island College English department in recent months. The first two books covered were novels by Professors Thomas Cobb and Joe Zornado. The third, Prof. Cathleen Calbert's, Sleeping with a Famous Poet (CustomWords, $17), is a book of poetry. Hey wait, come back here. You don't have to run away just because it's poetry. Calbert has written an accessible and sometimes very funny book.
Visiting her office on the third floor of Craig-Lee, the first question I asked was "Why write poetry?" "For the money," she laughs, "for the adulation!" Prof. Calbert knows her book will never sell as well as its prose brethren, will never become a film (Professor Stephen Brown told her, "Well, maybe an experimental film."), so the question remains, "Why write poetry; what can you say in poetry that you cannot say in prose?" Prof. Calbert responds that while she writes in other genres, poetry remains her first love. "Poems are focused, the canvas is small and one can work the words, work with them." She revises and revises her poems up to 30 times sharpening the images, looking for fresher language. "I usually write in free verse and my students ask, 'FWhy do revisions if free verse can be anything?'" Prof. Calbert tells them that she writes "reader directed poetry; something that someone else can read and appreciate."
The poems in Prof. Calbert's volume reflect both her personal history and her feminism. San Francisco provides some settings-both the bridges and the fog. Her poetry also investigates with humor and with pathos women's roles (wife, mother, lover, and daughter) and how those roles change with time and as society changes.
Some of the poems in her new volume have distinctive shapes, either zigzagging or stutter-stepping across the page. When asked why, the poet laughed again: "just for the hell of it." She then offered that poetry can comprise sight, sound, image and metaphor and that a changing shape can signify just as words can. Her poem "Like," for example, cuts back and forth across the page following its young male protagonist's fortunes in love, while "Listening to My Mother in the Alzheimer's Wing" fragments as do her speaker's conversations with her mother.
Talking with a writer about her poetry is a different experience from talking with one about his novel. For a novel, one generally sums up the plot and contemplates the actions of the main characters and your done. Designed to be consumed in small doses, poetry holds different challenges. Prof. Calbert says, "I don't go home at night and read poetry for three hours. Poetry is like double chocolate cheesecake; a little goes a long way." She also quotes Joseph Conrad who thought that art should deal in the "truths for which you forgot to ask."
Prof. Calbert came to RIC 17 years ago after earning her doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She received her Master's from Syracuse and did her undergraduate work at UCal, Berkeley. She serves RIC in dual roles as a Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Her previous books of poetry are Lessons in Space and Bad Judgment. The jacket to her new book states that she now lives in Conn. with "a tall man and two small dogs." The tall man, she revealed, is "Christopher Mayo, Assistant Professor at Adelphi University and an eighteenth century scholar. Well, a scholar of the eighteenth century. And the small dogs are very bad Papillons." He got the dedication over the dogs. Prof. Calbert will read selections from Sleeping With a Famous Poet on March 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bannister Gallery. Prof. Maureen Reddy, the Chair of the English department, calls her "one of the greatest poets of her generation." Her reading will be an opportunity to find out what you think. Refreshments will be served; I bet it's chocolate cheesecake.
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