Prophetic Fire: an Interview with Catherine Theis
Interviewed by b mossotti

b mossotti: Your forthcoming book, By a Roman (Antiphony, 2025), is a bold, inquisitive collection that operates in multiple ways: it is an act of witnessing, an attempt at placing yourself between various temporalities, of writing yourself into myth, philosophy, religion, and desire. Could you talk to me about the inspirations and processes for this collection?

Catherine Theis: Many of the poems in the book are inspired by my love of language and my desire to remember a fictive imagining of myself in different places, in different times. I’m very much taken with this notion of poetry as a transportive experience. I want my readers to be travelling inside the poem, because of the poem, as much as possible. Sound is very important to me—rhythm, affected with its own kind of logic, drives many of my lines. Essentially, By a Roman is a collection of love poems. Longing is a big part of how I access some “other self” that writes the poems. The poems cover a long compositional period. They are not all of one time and place, so to speak, but that’s what I find endearing about our obsessions. They’re timeless, right? And relentless, I might add. 

BM: Yes, relentless. Tell me more about your specific obsessions within this manuscript; how the page works to nurture them.

CT: I’m obsessed with inanimate things speaking: rivers, haunted piazzas, typeface, drunk people, people who seem drunk but are not, letters, gold jewelry, sex, prophecy, delay, books, Sicily, magic, Greek tragedy, Roman retellings, fire, ruins, poet-sailors, Shakespeare, babies, statuary, snakes, rumors, drama, vibrations, flowers, nuns, aion (spirit / essence / life-force), Art, volcanoes, overheated conversations, Naples, blood, angels, rocks, endurance, and Death. 

I use the page like a rockface, a tombstone, to inscribe all the voices, all the blown-out instruments and sounds of the world into language, my favorite beast. Because I’m interested in endurance, delayed gratification, and origin, momentum is a force I reckon with because I seek convulsive beauty. Like Andre Breton said, “La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.” (“Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”)

BM: Your poem “Various Instructions for California,” takes the shape of California, from border to border. Throughout the collection, too, you reach into poetic placemaking. How would you describe the ways in which borders and place inform your poetics?

CT: Yes, I’m happy you mention borders. I think a great poem is always testing its limits—to the breaking point. Many of my poems consider how far I can extend the line, the image, the feeling, the moment before breaking into distortion. I’m fascinated with endurance, which might be why I’m captivated by the serial form. Sometimes I think about a poem like a person I’d like to listen to, you know, someone with an interesting story to tell. Other times, I think about a poem more like a voiced landscape, a container holding various systems of thought and feeling. But always, there are voices. People, objects, plants, animals, or even language itself. I also subscribe to this idea of poems as echoes, as vibrational sound—might we even call this a song?—that needs a physical plane to bounce off of. Poems need the artifice of a container, a vessel. I’m honored I get to carry around vessels from one place to the next. Transport indeed! 

Of course, I can’t help but be influenced by places in my childhood: European countries, the suburbs of Chicago, my parents’ yellow kitchen, ballet studios, theater spaces, Lake Michigan, Mount Etna, Catania, the palm at the end of the mind. 

BM: As a note to your recent publication “Passages” in Alta you say, “In a poem, fire is lit by language’s imagining; it breathes destruction and creation in equal parts. It takes everything down to the beginning.” I’m curious about this poetic imagining you write into; opening By a Roman, you write “Only in disintegration do we see // true form:” (from “On Not Visiting Keats’ Grave). How does fire help you reach your “true form” as a poet, as a human? 

CT: Fire is the unconscious, right? The fire of thought, the heat of the intellect. Forbidden knowledge, Prometheus-style, or sexual desire as a purifying flame. Or, fire as rebirth, the Phoenix rising from the flames. (See Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire.) For me, true form is being able to hold both life and death in the same line, or breath, or feeling. Of course, I want a beautiful painting or a beautiful body, but I also want poems that meditate upon the individual flecks of rough paint, or a lover’s skeleton. I like seeing beyond the surface of appearances. That ashy skeleton at the base of a mountain, the mummified liver in a clay pot, the tuber root growing in the basement. 

Fire is transformative. It’s life-giving, and life-taking. In destruction, creation. I’ve always been fascinated with the ferocity of fire’s elemental imagination. I’ve written about fire as an important element in Greek and modernist tragedies and have used it creatively in my adaptation of MEDEA, where my Medea burns down a historical lodge outside of Missoula, Montana, and a Chorus of Flames appears as a character. As a young writer, I resonated with Rimbaud who told me that the poet is the thief of fire. I’ve never forgotten that. In 1871, Rimbaud writes to his poet-friend Paul Demeny:

The poet is really a thief of fire.
Humanity, and even the animals, are his burden; he must make sure his inventions live and breathe; if what he finds down below has a form, he offers form: if it is formless, he offers formlessness. Find the words. (1)

BM: Much of this collection utilizes serial form; long sections sometimes act like serial sonnets, such as in “A Whole Army to Feed.” As a reader, I am reminded of the epic—which feels close to your approach in a few pieces. Tell me more about this formal choice and your inclination for it.

CT: Yes, I do love a serial poem, a conceptual art project, an ongoing form that captures all the highs and lows of everyday living. I think the serial form has a lot to do with this earlier question about fire, catching sparks, catching wind, the way the serial poem moves like animating entities of its own design, devouring and remaking everything it encounters in its own kind of life cycle. You’re right, I admire sonnets and poets who can think sonnetically, but I just can’t do that. I have a lot more to say! Sonnets are too elegant for me, and I prefer “elegance” so that’s saying a lot. Maybe sonnets seem too mathematical to me. You’re spot on, by the way, what I wanted to do with “A Whole Army to Feed” was to write something like a crown of sonnets, but reconsider what the call and response of my sonnet sequence might be. You’ll notice that each section is seven lines long, the first part of a sonnet, but no answer comes in the next seven lines, just the next seven lines of a new section.  And I like the talkiness, the conversation, that comes with the serial form. One of my favorite poems is James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem,” a fantastic poem that builds an entire universe from practically nothing. That’s the real alchemy of poetry. Many of the poems I first encountered were epic (The Aeneid, The Odyssey, and Beowulf) or epic-like (Divine Comedy), so I’m forever influenced by that. As a child, I always chose the longest story because I never wanted to go to bed. Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester was my absolute favorite, initially, because of its length. In time, I grew to love that story because of its message of generosity and magic, but really I just wanted to stay up late. It got to the point where my parents made a tape recording of the story from a record we found at the library. I used to listen to that tape recording when I went to sleep. I can still recite the entire first paragraph.  

BM: In your poem “Transfusion”, the body is reckoned with: St. Agatha’s breasts, the womb, the Mother, the baby. Talk to me about this thread throughout the collection, both the body and the m/Mother subject.

CT: Oh, yes. The compositional period of these poems included a real-life pregnancy I underwent. There are glimmers and hints of my real life in my poems, but I prefer to work with the constraints of impersonality. “Transfusion” meditates on the violence in physically delivering a child to this earth, and how that terror radiates backward into history to find similar instances. The poem isn’t about me, but about Saint Agata who never became a mother, though nursing mothers can pray to her for help. Victims of rape, those with ailments of the breast, and victims of fire and other natural disasters can also pray to St. Agata. More than anything, motherhood has reminded me how much cruelty and barbarity the woman’s body has suffered over the centuries—physically, metaphorically, psychically, historically, medically. Saint Agata is the patron saint of Catania, a city in Sicily where I’ve spent a lot of time, and where I’ve eaten many of the cakes shaped in honor of her sliced-off breasts. Agata didn’t want to marry Senator Quintianus because she took a Christian vow of virginity, so he persecuted her, and she died a martyr. It’s wild to me how much violence I’ve simply internalized—as tradition, as religion, as song, as story, as convention. Many of my poems speak with a familiarity of the Catholic faith, but I think they sit uncomfortably within the tenets of that Catholicism. Certainly, the last three lines of that poem point to a speaker who questions divine existence, at least the way the Bible tells it. 

More than anything, my status as a mother has changed the way I look at the world, decipher the world, how I regard language. Motherhood has brought me closer to the magic of life, as well as to death. I’m grateful for the ability to see things beyond this lifetime. My child will be my legacy, just like my poems. 

BM: You write into fate and futurity often in your work, placing yourself “as oracle.” What is the relationship between the poet and the future? The duty of fate and prophecy?

CT: I heartily subscribe to the idea that the poet is a prophet who testifies, prophesizes, and remembers. Of course, no one bothers listening. Like Cassandra, the poet senses the shape of the future but cannot do anything to change the outcome. I like thinking about how a Reader comes to the poem and activates its spell from the present moment. The poem is a living thing. I also think a great poet has the sensibility (and responsibility) to track both invisible and visible forces in the world. And, of course, this idea of anonymity comes into play—both in the reception of invisible forces or voices, and in the reimagining of them. 

BM: You write, “From the location of my heart, I ask for mercy. / Forgetful, I reinvent myself in revision, /” and later, “This confession will be my last.” These utterances, sharp in their attention to the line itself, call forth mercy and confession. How do these devices scaffold your understandings of truth/fact and your interiority? 

CT: Great questions. Something I am forever ruminating and playing out in my poems. To be a poet is to be deceptive, to be involved in acts of trickery and thievery. Even in the above lines you quoted, the speaker says, “from the location of my heart,” which is a very funny thing to say as it implies that she doesn’t have a heart. It’s just an empty place. The request for “mercy” is therefore rhetorical. You’re right, my poems are preoccupied with the waywardness of one’s interiority. In a poem, I’m not pursuing facts per se or answers, I’m running down the feeling of a memory or the sense of a place. Lines shift, landscapes shift, nothing is as it seems. 

I value artifice and impersonality in poems. Poems for me are largely rhetorical—they allow me to logically make sense of my emotions, but they don’t seek a direct answer or describe real events. I’m interested in creating atmosphere, tone, or an impression that the reader can follow or track in their own thinking or experience of the poem. I consider my poems to be versions of me, or different imaginings of self. Partly what I’m talking about is the estrangement from self. Can I start with something from my life, but then defamiliarize it? The lines may start in my waking life (in my notebook, with my morning coffee, when I’m reading other poets), but then they travel elsewhere. I’m not sure exactly how it all happens—and I really don’t want to know—but writing from a place neither wholly biographical nor fictional brings me the most joy and inner knowing. 

My real life is the starting point, which I am forever writing away from.

(1) Rimbaud A, Mason WA. I Promise to Be Good : The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud. Modern Library; 2003.
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random045/2003051036.html.

*

By a Roman by Catherine Theis is now available for pre-order from Antiphony: a journal and press.

Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep, the play MEDEA, and translator of Slashing Sounds, the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English.