Meet Catherine Arnold

Q: Your book The Apple Tree is split into five distinct parts. What differentiates the poems in each part? 

A: First, it’s the difference in the subject matter, but also—and I’d say this is just as important—it’s the emotion that surrounds them. While it’s not something I can exactly put brackets around and say, “this is it, this is what the mood is”, it forms a natural division. Most of the poems in “Perishable” came early on, and to me that’s the section the others revolve around. I hesitated to put “The Apple Tree” right at the beginning, because I know some readers can be a little put off by a long poem, but that’s the lynchpin of the collection. It tells the reader what they need to know before they plunge into the rest of the book. The “Awe” section comes next, and that was a surprise to me. I wrote each of those poems separately thinking, “Wow, that’s a poem that seems to be about awe…wow, now I’ve got another…and now another…this is strange”. After that, it was clear that they all belonged together.

Then, “The Small Domestics” section started to write itself. That was surprising too, because the first book I wrote, Receipt for Lost Words, is pretty serious. I mean, I hope there are moments of humor, but it’s largely about grief and loss, so there weren’t many poems in it about small domestic themes, about finding pleasure in the moment, poems inspired by something quite modest, quite small in scale, and familiar. The first one in that section, “Little Gratitudes”, that was a sweet poem to me, nostalgic. It was about living in Chicago as an art student and someone who had newly arrived from England, and just how different and new everything was. And then the next section, “Anxieties”. I think those poems, even though they’re about different subjects, all have a sense of growing anxiety, unease.

I wasn’t expecting to write the poems about Covid. They came together quickly as a group, and it felt natural that they’d go after “Anxiety”. So, you have the buildup of anxiety, and then anxiety explodes during Covid.

Q: How do you balance working on your paintings and working on your poetry? 

A: That’s always been a struggle, as long as I can remember. It’s hard to do both equally, simultaneously. I hate doing things superficially. I hate jumping from one thing to the other—I really can’t do that. I can’t do a painting one day, poetry another. When I work on paintings, I work from the beginning to end of that painting, straight through, whether it’s a one-day painting or it’s a big composition that lasts six weeks. So, it’s a big allowance of time. For many years, I decided I had to concentrate on painting. I wanted to do that intensely, with total dedication. Then, when my daughter was born, that changed everything. It does for everybody, of course, but especially in my case because my daughter has special needs. I couldn’t paint anymore, because I didn’t have long periods of time without a break. Six hours is good, eight hours is terrific, but anything less than four is, for me…well, I’d rather not bother. It’s too frustrating. So that’s when I made the switch over to writing; I was compelled to. And that’s also the time when my daughter began gradually losing her ability to speak, so I started to write poems about that. It was unavoidable, because that was the world I was living in.  It’s been the same while working on this collection [The Apple Tree] – I’ve only had time to write. I hope I can go back to painting again soon. I miss it.

Q: How do your different mediums influence one another? 

A: That question intrigues me. I think there’s the obvious influence of painting; as a writer I’m naturally concerned with images, the visual side of things. Most writers are, but for me that’s really in the forefront. I often start off with a visual image. For example, with the first poem, “The Apple Tree”. We had just moved across the country, and I was looking out of the window of the new house, and I noticed an apple tree. I had such a beautiful view of the apples, which are incredibly beautiful fruit…and that brought me back to my childhood, the fact that I grew up in a house surrounded by apple trees— so that’s where the first poem came from.

Then there are poems that are specifically inspired by paintings. The one that springs to mind is “Life Jacket”. That was inspired by one of my favorite painting experiences. For maybe eight years, I’d go to Ireland every summer and do a combination of landscape and portraits. I was fascinated by the sea and the rocks. One day I found this beautiful place on the coast of Donegal, with caves running along the edge of the beach. I sat in the cave with the canvas on my lap, and painted, just as it’s described in the poem. I had a life jacket with my brushes stuck in it, and the tide was gradually coming up, lapping the walls while I was painting. It was an extraordinary experience.  And then there’s a poem in this collection about a sculpture in wood by Donatello of Mary Magdalene. When I was in graduate school, I was sitting in an art survey class, which I think most people found pretty boring. Then, like a revelation, this slide came on, this raw, very modern-looking sculpture, even though it’s 500 years old: Mary Magdalene. It’s nothing like the traditional rendering of Mary Magdalene. She looks like a person who is suffering enormously; her cheeks are caved in, she looks like a cadaver, there’s a desperate expression. And so, in that one (the name of the poem is “Hurt”), I wanted to get the feeling of what it’s like when you are really hit, confronted, by a work of art.

So, to get back to the question, I think being a painter influences me a lot. I naturally generate images, and I think about everything in terms of color. I have a degree of synesthesia, so I tend to think of words as having certain colors, that sort of thing. There’s one poem, “Butter and Milk and Sugar”, which describes driving through Vermont when some jazz music comes on the radio. I’m driving past a graveyard, and there’s a long note on the saxophone that sounds like magenta. That note gets pulled out at the same time as the names on the gravestones I’m passing—they get pulled out and blurred and jumbled together. I like that kind of thing, I like to think simultaneously in words and pictures.

Q: You reference different paintings, sculptures, and poems in your work. How has the work of other artists influenced you? Who would you say are your biggest influences as a poet? 

A: Let’s do poetry first. I’ve come to poetry quite late; I didn’t take an MFA in creative writing, so I never went through that formal introduction to poetry. My personal bent was always to read fiction: that’s where I come from as a writer. When I was writing my first book, Receipt for Lost Words, I was reading about ninety percent fiction, ten percent poetry. I was putting my feet into the water in terms of poetry, just discovering writers, particularly American writers, that probably anyone who’s gone through an MFA program would have known much earlier. The poets I was familiar with tended to be people like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, other nineteenth century poets, definitely more British than American. I also knew a little about Elizabethan poetry; in “The Apple Tree”, there’s a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage”. So, for a long time my influences didn’t involve much contemporary American poetry.

Then, between finishing Receipt for Lost Words, and starting this new book of poetry, there was a ten-year interval. During that time, I read more poetry, started to educate myself. And I would say the two poets I admire most currently are Anne Sexton, who I find unbelievable…I mean every single poem she wrote is so explosive and so original that it really just – it’s hackneyed phrase, but it does blow me away. The other—very different—contemporary poet is Mark Doty. I love his poetry. I’ve read three of his poetry books in the last few months, and one of his memoirs, Heaven’s Coast, which is very powerful. I’m also reading his book about Whitman. He’s wonderful too. There are a lot of other poets now, but I’d say those three: Sexton, Mark Doty, and Whitman—they’re all so different! I don’t know how much my work is like theirs though. I mean I can see some crosscurrents, but I don’t think my work resembles theirs all that much.

Q: What are the themes you find yourself coming back to as a writer? How has that changed over the course of the books you’ve written? 

A: That’s something I find interesting, how each writer has their themes. It’s so involuntary. Even when I try to avoid a subject because I think, “I’ve written about that before”, it’ll come up again and again. An example is writing about my daughter. In the first book, she was inevitably the focus. Although there were other themes too: what does it mean when someone loses the ability to communicate? What does it mean in terms of how that changes a relationship? How central is language to a relationship, to bonding, to love? And what is the nature of maternal love anyway? They’re the sort of questions that I hope are universal, even though most people don’t have a directly parallel experience to mine. The specifics of what I went through are unusual, but most people have some kind of profound sorrow in their lives, they’ve lived through that grieving process.

In this new collection, I made up my mind that I was not going to write about my daughter and yet she kept cropping up. And the theme of language in general kept appearing. Now, it’s poetry, so that’s not surprising; you’d expect a preoccupation with language, what it can and cannot do, but in my own case, it’s a visceral concern. I think that started very early for me because I was Dyslexic—there are a couple of poems in this book that refer to that—so, I didn’t learn to read or write until I was almost eleven. I spent several years feeling excluded from this world everyone else had access to. I think that because I was excluded for such a long time, there was a sense of mystery and magic connected to words, and when I learned, finally, it felt like an incredible revelation.

There was another experience that made words a profound preoccupation for me, and that was the subject of the first book: my daughter was able to speak fluently, and then lost that ability slowly, over two or three years. That made me hyper-aware of language, because I could see her losing it gradually in stages, and then there were ten years when we did not have any form of functional communication. So, it was ten years of silence, and that made me very, very aware of words, of the language we were missing. Then, after that, she learned to type with me during covid, so words were appearing where they’d disappeared before. That was another revelation, and it mirrored, a little, what it felt like when I’d learned to read and write years before.

I didn’t go into a lot of detail, but I mentioned my daughter’s typing in “Two Figures on the Path”. The final poem “Bears” also mentions it. So, actually, it’s in the first poem and the last poem. And it’s in some of the poems in the awe section—in fact, it might be the inspiration for the awe section. So, language is one of the things that keeps raising its head. But there are smaller things too, like foxes, and fairy tales; they have a habit of appearing in everything I write. The unconscious feels the need to push them to the top. It’s funny how these things find their way to the surface.

Q: Do you have a favorite poem in The Apple Tree? Why is that your favorite? 

A: I don’t know if I can pick a favorite, but I think that the most important poems to me are the first one, “The Apple Tree”, and “Bears” which comes at the end. In terms of the sections, I’m very attached to the “Awe” section. That’s partly because I think awe is such an interesting emotion. This is totally coincidental, but during the last few years, there’s been a lot of research into awe. What do humans experience in the brain when they’re feeling awe and wonder? And how does it differ from other emotions? I also feel attached to “Life Jacket”, and “Two Figures on the Path”. That doesn’t mean they’re the best poems in the collection, just that they mean a lot to me; I feel very close to them.

Q: What are you reading right now? 

A: I just finished A Tale of Two Cities. I love Dickens. In terms of poetry, at the moment I’m reading Ann Sexton and Philip Larkin. I hate some of Larkin’s poems, some of them I think are incredibly good. I also just started reading The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon, and then I’m working my way slowly through Mark Doty’s book about Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As for fiction, I’m about 100 pages into Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. The writing’s very rich, very powerful, there are some amazing descriptive passages.

From an interview with Moses Fisher on March 13th, 2025.