Nine Books About Your Life:Catherine Rockwood

In our Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their lives. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In this installment, we speak with Catherine Rockwood, author of And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death (Ethel Zine Press).

First Book
Would You Rather Be A Tiger? by Robyn Supraner, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney. Four things about it stood out. First, it offered children a very freeing what-if question: would you like to live otherwise? Otherhow? Second, it took that question seriously. Third, the illustrations were terrific…a blend of cozy and wild that supported the book’s thought experiment. Fourth, and very importantly, the verse scanned!

Writing this reminds me to order a used copy of the book. I don’t think it’s in print anymore…I’ll have to re-read and see if it holds up. Not everything we love, as kids, does.

Most Cherished Book
My best friend and her mother got me a leatherbound blank journal while they were on a family trip in Italy, pre-COVID. It has my initials stamped on the spine, and the dark green binding is very smooth and resilient. It almost feels like it was poured on. The book is a little smaller than trade-paperback size, so it fits comfortably in your hand. I love it, and of course I love that they thought to get it for me. The journal tells me I’ve really been seen by people I care about deeply.

Most Perplexing Book
I don’t think I understand Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In my experience it’s a mess, it falls right apart. That’s what that play feels like to me. Just kind of…whoosh, where did the pieces go. Over and over students can’t find their way into it, Miranda is boring, Ariel leaves folks cold, no one understands why we’re supposed to be so emotionally invested in Prospero’s various machinations. Maybe I just don’t see what the play is trying to do and how it’s trying to do it. But overall, I think the impacts of European colonialism are better taught using other early-modern works more fully engaged with the subject.

Life-changing Book
Aaargh. Okay. I am embarrassed by this, but aaaargh, it was Joyce’s Ulysses. Here’s why: I was dead set against reading it at all, as an undergraduate. It seemed oversold, and kind of a boys’ club thing.  Also, back then I was deeply committed to the idea that modernism was dumb and uninteresting. (Back then!)

But in graduate school, I was assigned to teach a course that had Ulysses on the syllabus. I was also in the throes of writing my dissertation, and could not have had fewer brain cells available to read Joyce…an effort I was convinced was a personal insult in any case…but then, guess what? I mean, you probably know what, but I didn’t…

Ulysses is an astonishing novel. So readable, so optimistic about its readers. Generous, stylish, courageous. My students and I had a time, that semester. We learned things together. And I changed as a reader in the process. I became, I hope, less suspicious — more flexible — more interested.

All that said, I’m not sure the book in question had to be Ulysses! I think any book that completely bowled me over when I was expecting the opposite might have had a similar effect at the time.

Most Underrated Book
I don’t know why everyone isn’t constantly yelling about Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems. I mean, a lot of people love her poetry – so it’s not like her work doesn’t get attention – but I just think it should get more. She wrote about all the subjects and ideas a lot of America still needs to catch up with, all the places so much of the country is still and always behind – she lived with and through them and wrote about them. And she was such a beautiful weirdo! Read her stunning poems about inherited polydactyly and magic-working and you’ll see what I mean. There’s so much else, too… You should read Clifton’s Collected Poems for its prescience and presence, for poems to Job and poems to Eve and even poems to Clark Kent, whom the poet addresses blisteringly and compassionately. Here’s one poem for you…you’ll want more. Go get them!

note, passed to superman

sweet jesus, superman,
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories

but not you, not with

the metropolis to save

and every crook in town

filthy with kryptonite.

lord, man of steel,

i understand the cape,

the leggings, the whole

ball of wax.

you can trust me,

there is no planet stranger

than the one i’m from.

(Clifton, Collected Poems, 449)

A Surprising Book
So many romance novels are super smart. I guess I have strong pro-romance feelings in general. Of specific recent books, I liked The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen a lot. It deals elegantly with family businesses, grief, and the funeral industry — a supernatural version of the funeral industry — and of course all the hot sex scenes between living people didn’t hurt! I suppose in the dislike column some folks might be surprised to learn I don’t love Philip Pullman’s work, and particularly not The Amber Spyglass. I thought it was hastily put together and irritatingly didactic. I haven’t felt compelled to keep reading him since.

Your Most Recent Book
I recently published a mini-chapbook with The Ethel Zine Press, And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death. It’s just six poems, with Sara Lefsyk’s amazing cover art — all inspired by the world and characters of (you guessed it) the first season of the HBO Max show Our Flag Means Death. I wrote it because I was fascinated by the storytelling possibilities the show opened up, which were sad and weird and bloody and romantic and funny, all at the same time. And queer, did I mention queer? Yeah. And there’s parenting stuff! It’s just delicious.

The experience of writing these six pieces – which vary in length quite a bit — was stressful at the beginning. I was desperate to do something with the material, but could I? Then I got two poems down, then three, and kind of hit my stride with a longish gay love poem in heroic couplets, which is when things started to be fun. You have to get some road under you, and then you’re like ‘oh, okay, I can still drive.’

If people read And We Are Far From Shore…and it’s really a companion piece, you probably need some familiarity with Season One of the show to unpack and enjoy the book…I hope they get a sense of new possibility, from the poems. So when they finish one poem, there’s either a sense that the person whose POV they’ve shared for a while has newly understood something, or had their horizons broadened in some way – or (on the other hand) that the poem offers a different angle on the characters and world from what’s provided in the original ‘text.’ It would make me very happy if the chapbook did that for some readers. Blew a little salt breeze into their lives for a minute, you know?

Your Next Book
I’m putting together a full-length poetry manuscript. That’s more a process of collation and ordering and revision than fresh composition, but it feels like part of a continuum. Eventually, if you spend enough time writing poems, you feel compelled to print out a stack of your work and go “now. how does this fit together?” It’s interesting to see what no longer corresponds to your idea(s) of what you’re trying to do…and what early pieces seem to have really gotten things started.

Plug a Book
I think you should read Stephanie Burt’s After Callimachus —

for technical achievement

(the meter!)

for formal variety

for humor

for gently conveyed

factually scorching

observations

on tourism and empire

and airport-naming

for the eerie pleasure of encountering Mysteries

(do not make Athena mad on her bathing-day!)
through the life-preserving veil of

what’s oblique

guessed-at

yet certainly

improbably

possible.