Poetry About Cats

A few years ago my husband accidentally ended up at a poetry reading. This was unpleasant for almost everyone involved, since my husband doesn't much care for poetry and poets tend to be scared of large angry men wearing camouflage. Also my husband is something of an asshole. This was a reading that featured poetry of the more deplorable sort, all flow and form and no content - the kind of reading where the audience snaps their fingers and nods, full of insight and benevolent enlightenment and benign sneers, as poets read about their exes and stare at their shoes.

After hearing about the depth of someone's soul for the umpteenth time my husband got up from his work (the reading had appeared around him while he was working on some technical drawings) and approached the microphone. He cleared his throat and this is what he said:

 "My cat peed in the corner.
Poor Kitty.
Poor Me.

My dad told me to clean it up.
I hate you dad.
Bad Kitty.
Poor Me."

He sat down to thunderous silence broken by nervous shuffling and a few half-hearted finger snaps. I was horrified.

"They were just reading their poetry - getting up there and making fun of them was mean," I said.
"But their poetry was awful," he replied.
"They weren't very good poets, but they were talking about things that meant something to them - they were sharing their feelings."
"So was I," he said, "I shared my feelings of annoyance with their bad poems by sharing a bad poem that I had written."
"But you invaded their activity, you broke the mood."
"Good," he said, "when they invaded my coffee shop they interrupted my mood. Why am I the bad guy?"
That did bring me up a little short. I tried one more thing: "but why did you have to make up a poem about cat piss?"
"Maybe cat piss is important to me. Maybe my cat is really important to me. What's wrong with a poem about a subject like cat piss if that subject speaks to the poet?"
"Well there's nothing wrong with it if you MEAN it, but you didn't mean anything there, you just wanted to make fun of them."
"No, I just wanted to let them know that their poetry was cat piss."
"You're an asshole."
"No, I'm a Dadaist and that was performance art. My medium was angry poets."
And I laughed. He may be an asshole, but at least he's a funny asshole.

But I was thinking about the whole episode recently and wondering why it still bothers and amuses me: I came to the realization that it sticks in my memory because poetry about cats is uniformly awful. I've been running into a lot of cat-based poetry recently and I'm sick of it.

We've had submissions of cat poetry for the magazine. My cat-obsessed friend wanted to know what I thought of her poems about her cats, and then wanted to know what I thought about her cats. At work we recovered a file for a client - it ended up being two-hundred pages of a prose-poetry novel about a cat with a Ph.D.

Fuck poetry about cats. Fuck cat people. On the way home from work today I saw a Prius with the license plate "MY2CATS". Hey cat people, let me let you in on a secret: nobody wants to hear about your cats. I'm sure they're adorable, I'm sure you love them, I'm sure they're little ladies an prim little gentlemen with the oh-so-tidy way they clean up after themselves, but no one gives a shit. Want an example? Go to Cracked.Com and look up Christina H. - she's a comedy writer whose column is called "Let Me Tell You About My Cats!", which is funny because she understands that no one ever wants to hear about anyone's cats. Want another example? Wordsworth was a really good poet, and here's a pretty goddamn bad poem he wrote about a cat:

That way look, my infant, lo!
What a pretty baby-show!
See the kitten on the wall,
sporting with the leaves that fall.
Withered leaves - one - two and three
from the lofty elder tree.
Though the calm and frosty air,
of this morning bright and fair.
Eddying round and round they sink,
softly, slowly; one might think.
From the motions that are made,
every little leaf conveyed
Sylph or Faery hither tending,
to this lower world descending.
Each invisible and mute,
in his wavering parachute.

But the Kitten, how she starts,
crouches, stretches, paws, and darts!
First at one, and then its fellow,
just as light and just as yellow.
There are many now - now one,
now they stop and there are none:
What intenseness of desire,
in her upward eye of fire!
With a tiger-leap half-way,
now she meets the coming prey.
Lets it go as fast, and then;
Has it in her power again.
Now she works with three or four,
like an Indian conjuror;
quick as he in feats of art,
far beyond in joy of heart.
Where her antics played in the eye,
of a thousand standers-by,
clapping hands with shout and stare,
what would little Tabby care!
For the plaudits of the crowd?
Over happy to be proud,
over wealthy in the treasure
of her exceeding pleasure!

You can find "The Kitten and the Falling Leaves" in lots of places, but I found that particular version at catquotes.com, which includes pages like "Cat Quotes - Several Hundred Quotes by Famous, anonymous, and other cat lovers" and "Famous Cat Lovers - NEW" and is where the Internet's nightmares come from.

Long story short, cats are like any other subject - if it gives you a noticeable erection you probably shouldn't write a poem in which the reader can sense that erection. Stop drooling over your subjects, it grosses readers out.

As a counter example, subtlety is a frequent component of strong poems.  Here's a Carl Sandburg poem that is not about cats:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 "Fog" is about fog but touches on fog using imagery we all understand as it is associated with cats. Carl Sandburg's cat-boner is not visible here, nor is a fog-boner or any other kind of engorgement. See? Subtle.

 So anyway, shut up about cats, chill out about your subject, and aim for subtlety. Sorry to derail you all from my normal series (we're on to voice right now) but my cat died today and I wasn't feeling up to writing a thoughtful, considered blog. Coincidentally, if you've got a moment to spare you should totally google "I'm sad because my cat died today" and enjoy the unintentional hilarity.

Later dudes. Be excellent to each other.

Cheers,
      - Alli

Just When I Thought I Had Outgrown You

This Thanksgiving break I had the pleasure of visiting my family in Northern California. We ate turkey (too much), caught up on each others' lives, and, most importantly, got out the Christmas decorations. All of these events where fun and memorable, but, now that I have returned to Southern California, the experience that I find myself returning to most during the break was a run in with one of my old high school teachers; the teacher who inspired me to become an English major.

Here is a bit of back story before we begin: Up until junior year in high school I hated writing. It was tiresome, burdening, and restrictive. Now let me explain. Before junior year the majority of English classes which I took where pre-examined, predefined courses, and the essays which were required in the courses revolved around proving a theme that the teacher had already picked out for you. I was not prompted to think critically, I was not asked for my own opinion, I was just asked to think as my teacher did and demonstrate why my teacher's said theme was prominent in the story. Well, needless to say, I did horribly. Why? Because I was bored.

Junior year, however, was new. I decided to take honors English that year and, even though I begged my mom to let me drop the course, it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. This teacher didn't like to hear himself reiterated in the essays which he assigned. In fact, he hated it so much that he would mark us off for doing it. I can remember thinking after receiving the first blog prompt that the printer must have failed. The prompt was much too short. It merely stated something along the lines of: pick a theme you feel prominent in Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot” and reveal how this theme functions throughout the story. I was inspired. My boredom was over and I felt a sense of freedom which I never before had felt in school. That quarter I fell in love with writing, I fell in love with reading, and I fell in love with literature. That love has only continued to bloom as I have furthered my education into college.

But that is the past. Moving forward, I had a run in with this teacher, and this run in was something that I had wished would happen for some time now. I had imagined that the greatness I had seen in him was due to the lack of knowledge that I possessed, and, like most aspects of life revisited after growing up, I expected to be let down. I was not however. The education that I have received thus far in college only spurred our conversations further. As we navigated from Wordsworth to Whitman, from Ovid to Arthur I now found myself keeping up. Picking up on things that he would say that I would not have during my high school years. It was a great experience and made me realize that certain aspects of life, such as a conversation with a past instructor, are only made better with the more knowledge that we possess. Though I was able to have much more involved literary conversations with this teacher, I was still impressed with the amount of knowledge that he possessed and I continued to learn from him throughout our interaction.

It seemed that fortuity was on my side that day. As I came home my mom was digging through an old box of books so I sat down next to her and helped her look through them. During our dig I came across my childhood favorite book: The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm by Nancy Farmer. Seeing that I had just had the recent run in with my high school teacher I took my finding of the book as more than coincidence and decided that I would sit down and read the book to see if I would still find it great, though I had not read it in over ten years. And let me tell you, it was. My love for this book could have possibly been driven by the nostalgic euphoria that fell over me as I soared through the pages, but I would like to believe that it was more than that. The entire experience was unique and new because, though I found myself enjoying much of the same parts of the book that I had when I was a child, I also found myself intrigued by so many new sections that I had not fully understood as a kid. I picked up on allusions that I was not aware of and found meaning that was not apparent during my readings ten years before. During this reading, the book morphed into something new, while still preserving the roots that the 11 year old version of myself had grown so close to.

So what am I saying? I am telling you to try it. Think back. What was your favorite book as a child and when was the last time you read it? Go and find this book and reread it and decide for yourself if it is still worth the praise it received from you as a child. So take a step back and give it a try. You never know what you might find.

-Nick