When I read a poem by Caitlin Doyle, I’m drawn back into my first childhood encounters with poetry and nursery rhyme—the way language is, for young children, a spell before all else, a material for play that creates both meaning and song. But Doyle’s poems are, decidedly, not “children’s poetry.” What at first sounds simple hides darker, more complex tones. Doyle’s poems are deeply attentive to the valences of meaning and sound in each word, giving them almost magical power. Upon repeated readings, they flower. It is as if Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience have been braided together, so that the child cannot escape the looming dark, just as the adult remains lulled by the sounds that first ordered their world.

I have known Doyle and her poetry for nearly a decade, and I’ve always thought of her as a “pure poet.” Of the many poets I know, she is one that, it seems, loves poetry most. She breathes it, lives it, is an initiate in its church. This comes through in the combination of precision and joy in her lines that make even nightmares sing. For this feature, Doyle has agreed to share a new poem, “The Extraction,” to accompany “Not It” and “Flannery at Andalusia” from Issue No. 40. Read these poems, friends, then read them again.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Caitlin Doyle is a poet, essayist, and educator whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Best New Poets, American Life in Poetry, the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She has received awards, scholarships, and fellowships through the Yaddo Colony, the MacDowell Colony, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, among others. Caitlin has taught as the Writer-In-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Emerging Writer-In-Residence at Penn State Altoona, the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School, the George Starbuck Fellow in Poetry at Boston University, and the Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati. Most recently, she taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at Washington & Jefferson College. Caitlin is a faculty member at the Frost Farm Poetry Conference, and she is working toward the completion of her debut poetry collection.

Poems:

“Not It” (from 32 Poems #40)
“Flannery at Andalusia” (from 32 Poems #40)
“The Extraction” (featured below)

Interview:

SRN: Caitlin, When I read your poems, I’m often struck (as by the clapper of a great bell tolling the hour) by the strong sense of inevitability therein. I see this as a feature of both the formal structure—you get on for the ride and it carries you through to the foretold end—and, topically, the fact that your poems often engage with the march of time: coming of age/loss of innocence, and mortality. Can you speak a little about time and fate in your poems, and perhaps how they connect to your use of poetic form?

CD: I love the connection you’ve made between the passage of time as subject matter and the use of poetic form. For me, the two are closely related in a way that gets to the very core of poetry as an expressive medium. Poets have long wielded elements of form, including rhyme and meter, to build poems that stick in the human memory, both the memories of individual readers and our shared cultural memory. They have sought to construct works of art that simultaneously capture and outlast time’s limitations. I’m captivated by the fact that a poet can use sonic patterns to make poems that echo in readers’ minds far beyond an initial encounter with the words on the page. When I sit down to write, I’m interested in discovering how repetition and variation can either create or subvert the sense of inevitability you’ve described. I’m compelled to set up certain expectations, sonic, narrative, and imagistic, while taking readers on a journey that by turns fulfills and disrupts those expectations.

As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to poems that explore, in form and content, the crushing vertigo of time’s passage, as well as those that capture how the past, present, and future blur together in our minds. Among the poems that I return to most frequently are “As I Walked Out One Evening” and “Lullaby” by W.H. Auden, as well as “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas, “During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy, “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and “11:00: Baldovan” by Don Paterson, all of which examine time’s complexities through language crafted to endure beyond our bodies. It’s no accident, I think, that those poems also happen to be ones I first discovered in childhood, so they are rooted inside of me in a way that resonates with my personal experience of temporality. I see this resonance as connected with another reason I’m driven to read and write poems that engage with the relationship between time’s passage and poetic form. Through the use of rhyme and meter, both of which evoke soundscapes that we commonly associate with childhood (nursery rhymes, lullabies, and playground songs, for example), I often strive to return readers to their earliest pleasure in words. I love to play with what happens when a poem’s sonic atmosphere exists in productive tension with its subject matter.

SRN: Yes, the connection and contrast between the children’s world of rhyme and song and more adult ways of knowing and being are part of what makes your poems so powerful, and also create that sense of vertigo and disorientation that you mention. I think your poems often exist at the point where experience teeters between dream and nightmare—I’m thinking here of “Not It” and the laughing-gas induced extremity of “The Extraction,” as well other poems of yours I know such as “Carnival,” “The Doll Museum,” and “Cradle Thief.” There’s a sense in which childhood fears, the ones that grip us in the night after the lullaby is over, turn out to be true, though perhaps not in quite the way we first imagined. Do you consider fear or doom to be a major subject of your work?

CD: As I was reading this question, the following lines by Lewis Carrol floated into my head:

We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

The lines appear in a poem titled “Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow” in Through the Looking-glass, and they are among a handful of poetry excerpts, fragments, and quotes that I keep thumbtacked to the bulletin board above my desk. The poem’s adult speaker addresses the “child of the pure unclouded brow” directly here, and I feel as though the nursery-rhyme quality of the language, combined with the eeriness emanating from the various nuances of “bedtime,” resonates with some of the effects that I find myself exploring in my own work.

I’m drawn to reading and writing poems that, as you’ve said, look closely at the fears that “grip us in the night after the lullaby is over.” For me, an important part of examining human experience after “the lullaby is over,” maybe especially because the lullaby is over, involves gesturing toward the aural cosmos of the lullaby while probing the adult world on the page. In both art and life, because we’re navigating an existence in which “the lullaby” continues to haunt our ears long after it has ended, we can’t fully evade the fear and doom that you’ve described. I see this inescapable darkness as both a prime reason that we make art and an essential element at play in the most powerful works. I don’t mean to suggest that happiness, contentment, joy, and other sunny aspects of human life can’t comprise a rich source of inspiration and subject matter, but in my own experience as a reader I have never fallen in love with a poem that doesn’t have at least a few shadows lurking at its edges. The last two stanzas of Robert Frost’s “To Earthward” come to mind as a description of what I’m seeking when I embark on reading a poem:

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

The speaker, rather than craving relief from suffering, hungers for more hurt, and we can even hear a potential hint of longing for death in his wish “to feel the earth as rough” to all his length. Though the speaker isn’t talking here about his appetites as a reader, I think of these stanzas as encapsulating what I hope to feel when immersing myself in a work of literature, which relates to your sense that fear and doom frequently linger under the surface of my own poems. I’m compelled to write about the spaces left in human life by losses, wounds, rifts, and silences, and I’m galvanized by the many ways that both lyric and narrative impulses can reach toward filling those spaces.

SRN: Among those darker elements, I’d love for you to elucidate a particular line in the final stanza of “Flannery at Andalusia.” O’Connor’s sense that “no sin was more original than hers” seems to indicate a feeling of doom and fear within her, perhaps in relation to both her life as a writer and her spiritual life. Would you talk more about that line in the context of the poem?

CD: My hope is that the statement “no sin was more original than hers” evokes the notion of original sin while prompting readers to contemplate the implications of a parallel between artistic creation and the acts of creation associated with God in the Christian tradition. Was O’Connor in a sense “playing God,” as the expression goes, by inventing characters over which she possessed absolute power? My wish is for that query to extend beyond O’Connor, of course, to writers and art-makers of every kind. If an artist’s creative abilities can be compared to God’s powers of creation, should that comparison be viewed as a positive one that confers honor on both God and those who make art? Or should it be viewed as a fraught comparison that casts art-making as an attempt by humans to equal, and maybe even usurp, the power of God, similar to what happens in the Tower of Babel parable?

In the context of Flannery O’Connor’s life, given that she was both a devout Catholic and a sufferer of chronic illness, one of my aims is for the line “no sin was more original than hers” to stir up the following question: Is it possible that her writing, whether consciously or not on her part, was at least in some ways a subversive act (thus the “original sin” comparison) that allowed her to claim powers she wouldn’t otherwise possess? Another goal of mine with the line “no sin was more original than hers,” is to evoke Adam and Eve, and to gesture toward the fact that their own act of subversion against God results over time in the creation of many things, not the least of which is new human life.

There are additional readings of the line that I haven’t articulated here, but in the interest of keeping my answer a reasonable length, I thought it would be best to mention just a few potential approaches to understanding the line. I’m struck by your observation that “no sin was more original than hers” may indicate a feeling of fear and doom within O’Connor. I agree that, whether or not one regards “no sin was more original than hers” as an expression of O’Connor’s conscious internal experience, the line contains shades of fear and doom because of the association between “original sin” and punishment. In this sense, “no sin was more original than hers” relates in salient ways to your thoughts about the role of darkness in my work.

SRN: Could you share a little about what you’re working on right now? What is exciting you in your poetic life, what problems are you working on, and what are you looking forward to?

CD: I’m delving into a variety of subjects, themes, and questions these days, some of which I’ve touched on previously in my poetry and some that are entirely new. To offer a few examples, I’m working on deepening my exploration of the way that artifice in our media-based world so often seems more authentic than reality, and I’m drafting a series of poems about how language can register (or fail to register) the human costs of environmental degradation. In addition, related to my fascination with looking closely at the relationship between artifice and reality, I’m continuing to use poetry as a means of examining what popular culture reveals about our inner lives. I’m also trying to find ways of writing about a handful of difficult topics that possess personal urgency for me, including the experience of losing a loved one to COVID-19, the role of socio-economic realities in shaping every aspect of an individual’s life, and the epidemic of school shootings in the United States.

To highlight another significant area of focus in my work at present, I’ll point to a quote by Robert Penn Warren: “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” As someone who shares this belief that historical sense and poetic sense complement each other, I’m intrigued by the fact that both historians and poets must reconcile two paradoxical identities when they put pen to paper: myth-maker and truth-teller. In my work, I have often felt drawn to consider the complex interaction between myth and truth in human life, and now I find myself particularly invested in traversing the intersection between the personal and the historical. A central question at the heart of that intersection, an inquiry that calls me back to the page over and over again, is this: How and why do we tell ourselves stories, both as individuals and as a society, in order to make sense of reality?

Another defining aspect of my approach to poetry at present is a strong resistance to any single topic, stylistic approach, or tone dominating my work. Likewise, when it comes to the poets I’m currently reading, I’m more excited by those whose poems avoid treading the same territory with too much frequency. I’m interested in the way that a distinctive voice can manifest itself between the lines of a poet’s work rather than primarily through overt similarities in the subject or style of his or her individual poems. Having said that, my current writing certainly possesses some continuities with my past work, and I believe this will prove true in my future writing as well. These continuities include an emphasis on writing about the push-and-pull between binaries of human experience, and a calling to echo and magnify the voices that initially hooked me on poetry.

SRN: Could you say more about the relationship between the continuities you describe and the calling you feel to “echo and magnify” other poets’ voices?

CD: The way that people might revisit the place where they fell in love, I am driven by a desire to recreate for myself and others the kind of pure addictive pleasure that an unguarded reader experiences when encountering a poem like Poe’s “Annabelle Lee,” MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music,” or Kipling’s “Mandalay.” A part of me will always remain rooted in the incantatory pull of rhymed and metered poems, enthralled by language’s powers of echo and refrain.

I feel compelled to add here that I read, write, and teach free verse just as often as I engage with the traditional tools of the English-language poetic lineage, and I believe fervently that it’s a fool’s errand to designate either “formal verse” or “free verse” as superior to the other. I’ve put the phrases “formal poetry” and “free verse” in quotation marks because, though they indicate a general distinction between two kinds of aesthetic approaches, I share the view of many poets that the terms lack sufficient nuance. The best “free verse” possesses formal limitations and governing principles, just as the most gripping “formal poetry” contains freedom and innovation. There are many tools beyond rhyme and meter that a writer can use to create poems that reverberate in the reader’s aural consciousness. My goal is to remain devoted to reading and writing poems that create such reverberations in as many different ways as possible.

Essentially, going forward as a poet, I hope to continue honoring the art form’s age-old emphasis on sonic memorability, while probing subject matter that feels both timely and timeless in our contemporary context. I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about a statement by Dylan Thomas:

“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.”

I am eager to persist in discovering new methods of courting mystery on the page, seeking to create ever-deeper portals that allow the unexpected and the unaccountable to creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. My belief is that sound comprises one of the most potent means of opening the portals that Thomas describes. Through the making and breaking of sonic patterns, and the interplay between repetition and variation, a poet can prompt readers to let down their defenses so that the poem has a chance to do its full work on them.

When describing the role of “plot” in poetry, T.S. Eliot referred to it as the bone you throw to the dog while you go in and rob the house, and I often think of sound as what a poet does in the house while the dog chews on the bone. In other words, while the reader is taking in a poem’s images, narrative elements (overt or implied), similes, metaphors, and potential meanings, the poet uses sound to access the reader’s inner world in a way that creates the possibility of real transformation. Ultimately, what I wish to do is write poems that connect readers with language’s capacities as a form of enchantment beyond full analysis. I’m humbled by the fact that developing a mastery of sound is the work of a lifetime. It may not be the kind of work that pays particularly well, as poets have always known, but it offers rewards beyond money’s most extravagant imaginings, and I’m passionate about spending my time on earth dedicated to it.

Featured Poem:

THE EXTRACTION

The dentist runs a finger, gloved,
          along her gums.
She’s old enough by now to know
          his needle numbs
the pain, but she still grips the armrest
          when it comes.

She’s almost twenty-one, in fact,
          and late to get
her last two wisdom teeth removed,
          their roots deep-set
in cradle-bone, a bedrock hold
          too tight to let

them loose. Abscessing in her sleep,
          their fevers grow.
The kind of pain they promise, she’s just
          begun to know,
still raw from her first broken heart
          a month ago.

The holes they leave will stew and burn,
          the swelling peak
so sharply she’ll call out for her mother,
          her stitches leak
a clotted sludge, but now she hears
          the dentist speak

and can’t (she tries) resist his voice
          that floats inside
a tide of laughing gas, his needle—
          “Open wide!” —
against her gums again, this time
          on the other side.