Eratosphere - Introducing Catherine Tufariello

Catherine Tufariello, in the short time since her first book was published in 2004, has established herself as one of the leading writers of poetry in form. That first book, Keeping My Name, not only won the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition, but also was a Booklist Editors' Choice recommendation, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and winner of the 2006 Poets' Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Dark Horse, The Hudson Review, and many other journals. A dozen of her poems will appear in an anthology scheduled for release late in 2010 by Anvil Press. It's a selection of work by six American poets who are not yet known in England. She estimates that she has about two-thirds of the poems written for a second book.

Catherine Tufariello is currently an associate editor of River Styx (which, she mentions, is very welcoming to both free verse and poems in form). She also is the associate director of communications at the Project on Civic Reflection (www.civicreflection.org), an organization at Valparaiso University that supports reading and discussion programs (often using poems as texts) for a wide variety of civic organizations.
She was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1963; grew up in Buffalo; got her B.A. from SUNY Buffalo (where her father was a chemistry professor); and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Cornell University. She has taught literature and writing at universities in New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Oregon, and has led workshops on Writing and Revising in Form at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. She lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, with her husband Jeremy and daughter Sophie. More information about her background and writing can be found in the following interviews, by Kathleen Mullen for Valparaiso Poetry Review and by Leslie Monsour for Eratosphere:

http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/tufariellointerview.html

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5779

What is striking about Catherine Tufariello’s writing is its versatility and range, in form and in content. Blank verse, rhymed couplets or quatrains, sonnets, heterometric and nonce forms, pantoum, villanelle, and epigram—each is fitted to its content like a skin it was born with. Even her translations of Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and Guinizelli, in which the strain of fitting content to form is most likely to show, have a smoothness and finish that belie the effort that must have gone into them. Whatever she turns her attention to—whether it is a stray cat, a painting, a walrus, a Biblical character, or an incident at a museum—receives the same attention and sensitivity that she brings to autobiographical poems, such as the sequences that deal with the end of her first marriage or her struggles with and eventual triumph over infertility.

Though one of the things I like best is her wide range of forms (some of which can be seen in the Monsour interview in the link above), since this is a sonnet competition, I will focus on a few of her sonnets from Keeping My Name. Here is one about a painting, part of the group of poems based on Biblical stories:

LORENZO LOTTO’S ANNUNCIATION

Other approaching Gabriels offer the lily
In a ceremonial hush to humble girls
Who bow their heads or touch their breasts. She whirls
Away as the angel runs in willy-nilly
And sinks to one knee, hair streaming—as if he hurries
To get there ahead of God, who stretches His arm
From a cloud in the doorway, while the striped cat scurries
For shelter, its tail an elongated S of alarm.

Hands raised protectively, she turns to look
Straight out at us—in shock, or mute appeal?
Forgotten behind her lies the open book.
In the tumult of the divine turned terribly real,
Only her face is strangely still, the eyes
Wide with apprehension and surmise.

The next one is from her sequence “No Angel,” which retells the Biblical story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz:

NO ANGEL

I

The story’s strange. For once, God wasn’t talking,
Busy with some sacrifice or slaughter
Somewhere else. No plague, cloud, gushing water,
Dream, omen, whirlwind. Just two women, walking
The dusty road from Moab to Judea,
One, the younger, having told the other
(Not her own, but her dead husband’s mother)
That she would never leave her. But they flee a
Famine for what, at first, seems something worse:
To come as widows to a teeming city,
To men’s appraising stares, and women’s pity.
Ruth, the pagan, heard Naomi curse,
Cringed and scanned the sky. No fire or stone
Came crashing downward. They were on their own.

The next is from her sequence on infertility:

FRUITLESS

Now oleander flames along the beach
And tart green sea grapes ripen one by one,
While inland, warm and heavy in the sun,
The rosy mangoes dangle out of reach.
Along these languid afternoons, I teach
Myself the names of trees. We’re overrun
With litchi nuts, and then, their season done,
Pick sapodilla, sweet as any peach.

A mass of tangled green, the lawn’s gone wild.
Another friend has had another child,
This one (she’d laughed, embarrassed) a surprise.
Small lizards, lithe in torrid silence, dart
Beneath beseeching sprays of bleeding heart
And blue and orange birds-of-paradise.

There is much that one could say about each of these, noticing the various rhyme schemes used and how each fits the content; the way each sonnet suggests a whole narrative in a very concise way; the way the story is told partly through strong images and organized around a guiding conceit. Each of the poems is part of a larger sequence, so its full impact is reduced somewhat when it is taken out of context. Yet I think each still has a satisfying shape and impact on its own.