Quotes from Cate Marvin

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it's fallen in love with the floor.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it's fallen in love with the floor.

I think with my blood.

We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over its unsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing, but the brack of wanting what's physical to help us forget we are physical.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.