ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Catherine Daly 
Interview Questions for Catherine Daly
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, "pride of the prairie," soybean capitol of the world, geographical center of Illinois. I love reading and my Dad taught me how to research, so I ferreted out odd stuff. I got some books of poetry from my uncle my first year in college (Yeats, Moore). I was an editor on one issue of the high school newspaper that came out and on yearbook, but, hardly any writing, and a lot of miserable required journaling.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Information informs my work: it is made out of information in some way. I like Marianne Moore a lot, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon. I have thousands of poetry books, and I read them. I turn a lot of my reading into poems. I love "junk books": library used book sale books, coffee table books, etc. I like visual art a great deal and took tons of art courses growing up. I don't like to re-read. I used to have a very, very good and photographic memory.
3) When did you 'become' a poet when did poet become part of your everyday life?
I wanted to be a writer. I took a poetry class first and stuck with it. I suppose when I went to graduate school I became a poet, except I pursued coursework in other genres, theory, and literature. I figured being a "poet in New York" would be cool degree zero.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
Yes. I went to an experimental kindergarten, but then to catholic school. Sr. Victorine yelled at me for being out of uniform the first day of first grade because I had lace on my socks and collar. Then I was out for a month with mono, and still skipped second grade, so of course everyone (I went eleven years to school with the same 80 kids) hated me. I went to Trinity in Hartford because they had a full ride for a poor kid from Illinois to "add diversity to campus." When I graduated with a writing major by default (my "main" major had been religion), I had a writing job that paid just enough to live at home. I applied to every mid-year admitting grad school in New York, and Columbia let me in.
5) You are a Midwesterner by birth, a New Yorker by education and now an Angelino. How important is place for your work?
I am a city person. Place is important to me, because I’m from an unsympathetic place. I chose New York, so moving to LA was a setback. I do what I can so that my writing won't be hurt too much by being in the wrong place, and that has included making it and myself more “location-independent.”
5.1) You are a prolific writer and business person. How do you do that? Are you tired all the time?
Yes. I also have these weird "nervous breakdowns." I haven't worked full time for a year (tech bust). My husband is good at keeping my stress level high. A teaching job isn't going to happen, so I'm going back to work as soon as I can find something to do. I do write a lot, but I started relatively late. Still, I've been writing twenty years. So am I more prolific than the average writer with twenty years experience? I have one book out. Also, my husband, who works just as hard as I do (we are a two-writer couple), taught me how to sit down and write. I can just sit and write. That's one of the reasons I can't journal. I can just sit there and fill up notebook after notebook. He is still a, "I don't need any experience, I can make it all up" type, while I like to KNOW, as if that would prevent me from exercising my prejudices.
6) What is your favorite food?
I have five food groups: peanut butter, cheese (or "dairy"), chocolate, red wine, and pasta. I recently had to give up caffeine, which had been one of my food groups, and in support of my husband, who has had a restricted diet recommended to him, I am trying to eliminate salt, sugar, yeast, and fat. That sort of inanity happens to you if you're in California for any length of time. It is not our fault!
7) Sports Team?
My husband is a HUGE LA Kings hockey fan, and I did grow up watching a lot of minor league and youth hockey. I'm more of a football fan, but a fan of the game. My dad was a high school All-American, captain of the last team at Marquette, coach, and worked for the Packers for a while, but my Dad and I have been known to root for the Bears or even the Vikings when the Packers suck and the Bears or Vikings are good. I prefer not to watch too much basketball, due to the other sports-watching. I played Midwestern girls’ basketball, rather poorly.
8) Vacation Spot?
Vacation? We haven't even been able to take a honeymoon.
9) Curse Word?
I like short words with Anglo-Saxon roots.
10) What is your Spiritual Position?
I was raised very, very Catholic (charismatic movement, prayer and Bible meetings, my father was in the seminary briefly), and felt I had to at least pursue some sort of religious “journey” (religion major, study in India in a buddhist vihar) before I freely admitted to my family that I hadn't ever had, and couldn't imagine ever developing, any sort of religious or spiritual belief or practice.
1) How do you form a poem?
I think right now I have five ways of writing. I suppose you want the ways. Well, if it is part of a series, I say, well, haven't written one of these in a while -- and go. Or, if I’m combing over my giant scrap heaps of notes and bad poems, I "save" it. I find something, and think -- well, I can use that. I have a strong emotional reaction to something (usually this is anger for me). Or I have a plan, a devilish scheme, a CONCEPT, and I execute it.
2) Do you always use collage?
Nope. In fact, I would say I’m not really doing collage outside some of the aestheticians “lives,” and then, I think that the ultimate purpose is developing the same sort of tautologies as in, say, “Desert Paradise” or “Mistress Plot,” which are the result of procedures designed to reach a desired end. OOD: Object-Oriented Design has more collage than this trilogy.
A good deal of the final result twists the sourced bits out of recognition, to my own purpose.
3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
Poetry is a thing and a process for me, but I hadn't distinguished between types of processes.
4) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
Black ink, or, if I can't find anything else, red ink. I hate blue ink and pencil. I think it was the all-blue high school uniform and the math (I have an undergrad concentration in Mathematics). I wrote some notes for my recent Belladonna reading in New York on a printout in eyeliner pencil, because I'd lost my pen on the plane.
I used to hate quiet but now I feel so much noise as I write or type that I don't listen to music. I had to teach myself not to have to write in public for that not-quite distraction, almost-inspiration of being in a busy environment.
5) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?
I launched language play off findings (same word is for jewelry hooks & bits -- I used to design jewelry, had a small business before all my findings were stolen(!)) so much in Da3, in OOD (the unpublished as-of-yet trilogy sequel), and in the nearing-completion Addendum (there's still another trilogy volume to be written, too, tentatively titled All the Angels and Saints – the whole 1,000 page thing is called CONFITEOR) that I am pushing myself to consider the admissibility of etymology or history of usage and in the way the creative has a source. Similarly, I avoid certain types of syntactical patterns I find are habitual. I write in different modes which are recognizably mine, but have, to me, key differences. These include collage, or lack of collage, or... lack of source outside myself. A lot of the earrings I made were fashioned from found objects. I took a lot of design classes where we made collages from Life magazines. Mine were almost always better upside down….
6) Catholic images and fragments are really part of the later part of the work, in fact liturgical language along with mystical language fill the section Heresy. Why did you choose this language? Do you find it comfortable to work in this milieu?
I felt that much of the religious writing of women has not been treated as (creative) writing (by women). I was interested in the coupling of the idea of literary criticism as heresy, historically and in the current age of fundamentalism and theory, with the fact of the extreme risk and duress – the stress -- under which the majority of this writing was written. I think that post objectivist, process-and-procedure oriented writing has a lot of unspoken common cause with baroque poetry, and recognize that the Inquisition and the baroque period overlapped. So much like today. I wanted to try to write a book in full light of my theories, with as full an understanding as possible of what my writing meant. I wanted to take as much responsibility for the poems as I could.
7) In Desert Paradise you create a poem that is unlike your earlier work- it is partially narrative with historical references and an obvious knowledge of Desert Father/Mother Mysticism is this a Feminist critique or is it satire?
“Desert Paradise” in the last section answers “Mistress Plot” in the first section. “Mistress Plot” is all the (mostly B plot) female figures in part of the first volume of Masterplots rearranged so that the female nouns and pronouns formed a survey of rhetorical figures. It is also narrative, with reference to reference work about “classic” narratives.
I had an artist residency in Joshua Tree National Park that didn’t work out as I had hoped. I had hoped to read and think about the desert mothers, and basically I ran around trying to make sure I had enough water instead.
The last poem in Da3 I wrote is “Palm Anthology.” When the book was published, only Chris Hamilton-Emery (my editor) and myself had read it.
8) You fuse cliché with insight. Is irony central to your work?
Yes, but I wonder how much the importance of irony is overstated as a part of twentieth century poetry. Irony was in nineteenth century poetry as well, right? I am also a wise ass trying to write with sense and humor in an ironic age.
