Selected Victims of Ted Bundy: Washington State and Oregon

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Caitlin

The following blurb appears on the back of my chapbook. I am very pleased with it.

“If there ever was a sharp-edged blend of investigative journalism and poetry, this is it. The writing of these spare poems meant the reading of hundreds of pages of police reports, interviews, site visits from Florida to Washington, etc. Most poets write of themselves. Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson writes of and for others, in this case the victims, who can’t speak for themselves, of the serial killer Ted Bundy. ”

– Thomas Lux

 

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Chapbook

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Caitlin

Thomas Lux, a poet and wonderful teacher, has a wonderful Chapbook press, called Jeanne Duvall Editions. They publish an average of two chapbooks a year. They all have a similar layout, they are simple but with nice touches like vellum. They are twenty pages long, and they are limited to one edition of 500.

This year, Jeanne Duvall editions published my first chapbook, Victims of Ted Bundy: Washington State and Oregon. It is so lovely to see all those poems together in print in a nice small purse sized book. It is nice to be able to give those books to other people. To have them buy them. To be able to host a launch for it in a few weeks. To sign them with love to the people that have supported me for such a long time.

If your are interested in purchasing a copy, please email me at cthomson@gm.slc.edu.

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Their Lonely Betters

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Caitlin

Recently I taught a number of Auden’s poems to my poetry class. I was very pleased by how his work was so admired by them. One student admitted that he was looking forward to tweeting several lines. Others repeated lines and phrases with clear passion. I wish I had taught the following poem, but I re-discovered it the night after I taught the class. It has now joined the growing list of favorite poems that I am attempting to memorize.

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

W.H. Auden

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On Author Names

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Caitlin

My name in till recently has been Caitlin Thomson. “Thomson without a P.” A line I have repeated many times, and will live to repeat many more. When I was younger, people would often try and convince me that I was spelling my own last name incorrectly. Now that I am older, people instead insist on correcting my pronunciation, believing that if Thomson isn’t spelled with P, you should not pronounce the N at the end either. Often, even after spelling it correctly multiple times, literary journals manage to spell my name wrong at least once.

In Graduate school when I was a poetry editor at the literary magazine Lumina, my co-editor Megan Williams and I chose to publish a number of poet’s based only on their poems. Their names were hidden from us. We chose by complete accident to publish the work of a Caitlin Thompson. The poem she submitted was good. Our senior editor had to write a part into the introduction explaining the situation. When I started to submit my own work again that spring, I always included the Elizabeth.

In May, I got married. I chose to legally change my name to Caitlin Jans. A name I enjoy and fully embrace. However I continue to write and teach under the name Thomson. I had worked so hard to publish my work in the last year, that it seemed silly to change my pen name. Also, my parents have helped me grow in so many ways as an artists, it would be strange change my ‘public’ name away from theirs.

So I still am a Thomson without a p, in spite of Google’s best efforts.

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Places to Write: New York City (Part I)

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Caitlin

New York City has a lot of Starbucks, some of them nicer then others, but it has few good independent decently sized coffee shops. This is not surprising due to the rent and the corporate culture of some of the neighborhoods. However the following are some of the coffee shops I very much enjoy working in the city. Even though most of them are actually part of chain, to some degree or another.


Think Coffee
123 4th Avenue, and 248 Mercer Street

The 4th Avenue location is near Union Square, and while it gets quite busy during the winter due to the NYU crowd, it is a good place to go during the summer or school breaks. The light in the front of the store is good. The food is good. The coffee is good. I don’t like the Hot Chocolate, but that isn’t always a necessity. Neither location has wi-fi, but they both have a good work environment makes it easy to focus. Both locations have restrooms, although they are never very clean. However the rest of the location is relatively clean and maintained. The 238 Mercer street location has less light, but also serves wine. It is even more in the heart of NYU, but for some reason, even though it is always busy, I have always been able to get a seat there.

Housing Works Bookstore
126 Crosby St

There are so many reasons to support a charity like housing works. The Cafe, besides supporting a good cause is also a great place to work or talk. It is right in the heart of SoHo, so it does get busy, but rarely unbearably so. It is more of a calm island in a rough sea. The fact that store has such high ceilings allows it to feel peaceful even when it does get crowded. There are windows in the back of the cafe but they look into other buildings, which is a neat but eerie effect. The bookstore itself is a good used bookstore. The coffee and food is all middling, due in part to it being volunteer based. The washrooms are well used so I try to avoid them. Like most independent coffee shops in Manhattan I don’t believe they have wi-fi.

Aroma Espresso Bar
161W 72nd Street,

There are a bunch of Aroma’s throughout the city. They are an Israeli chain, that always give out a piece of chocolate with their drinks. The Upper West side location is my favorite, not just because it is in one of my favorite neighborhoods, but because it has the most space. It is two floors, with a nice upstairs back patio and several couches. Great light. The only downsides are the big screen televisions, and the thirty minute limited wi-fi. The place is clean. The bathrooms are clean. The drinks are great. The hot chocolate involves actual melted chocolate – you have to stir. It is where my writing group meets. It is where I work whenever I end up with more then an hour to spare in the city. The SoHo location also has a decent amount of space.

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A Piece of the Storm

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Caitlin

Mark Strand read at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival in 2011. I had only sporadically read his poems before, and was not expecting much. I was thoroughly impressed and soon afterwards, purchased Blizzard of One, his book of poems that won the Pulitzer Prize. Often I have been confused by the book that wins the Pulitzer Prize. This goes for both poetry and fiction, however Blizzard of One is an exception to this rule.

One of the reasons I really love the book is that Strand consistently writes about the world, in new way’s, that alter reality, giving the reader a small taste of distance, and perspective, that belongs to someone else. The following poem is a good example of his ability to re frame the familiar.

A Piece of the Storm

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.”

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Balancing Writing

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Caitlin

In literary circles, the discussion of a writing life almost always involves frustration with writing and time. Time is something almost everyone seems to be lacking in when it comes to writing, because life requires balance, but it also demands funding. It is difficult to work full time, write part time, and live a fully balanced, approximately sane life. Many writers that I know, irregardless of their genre, seek jobs that still leave them with the time and energy to write. Jobs that pay just enough, but don’t take away from the specific energy one puts into writing, are very difficult to find. When I worked as a nanny I always had plenty of energy to write, but working as an editor on a literary journal was very draining.

Presently I teach English Composition, Literature, and starting in October, Poetry. It had long been my plan, since undergrad, to balance writing with teaching college level English. I have always enjoyed teaching, and I feel very comfortable in an academic environment. It also gives you a fair amount of free time. I really enjoy my job, but early in this quarter I found myself struggling with a long commute and very little actual classroom time, so I took on a tutoring job, near my work. I really enjoy teaching one on one and my students are wonderful. However I have found myself struggling for time, waking up early to write a few lines, or writing between dinner and marking. I have had weeks like this before, but never months. Even the month before my wedding I managed to write well over twenty poems.

I’ve started to become a strategist, planning out my day’s and weeks to include poetry, to create a peaceful enough place for it to be created, to learn even better how to calm myself, and focus on words in as short a time as possible. It has been an interesting process, I really believe that writing is something you have to readjust and refocus on regularly, this is just part of that cycle.

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A City Winter

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Caitlin

A City Winter by Frank O’Hara is an unseasonal poem that i’ve been rereading lately. I don’t know if it’s helping my relationship with the city. It is a poem in part’s and while I very much like the first section (included below), I do not feel like the rest of the sections are of the same caliber. Poem’s with sections sometimes have this issue, because of that, the poems that do have sections, that all work well together, but hold there own, are truly remarkable. Mark Strand’s A Suite of Disappearances is a good example of a poem of sections, that works well throughout, and whose parts can function separately when need be.

I marvel in how O’Hara uses rhyme unexpectedly in this poem. I very much admire the strong mood and tone that lingers, after the last line.

A City Winter

1

I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money and to our sleep’s shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,
but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
where tow’rs are sinking in their common eye.

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Killer Verse

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Caitlin

Killer Verse is an anthology of poems about murder and Mayham. It was edited by the poets Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter, for Everyman’s Library, which is published by Knopf. It is a great, varied anthology that includes formal versed, rhyming poems, and free ranging, non fiction work. Parts of it are Victorian in taste, portions clearly noir, several poems are more about the words then the content, and a few are about the actual violence involved in murder. It is a great collection that includes W.H. Auden, Mark Dotty, Frank Bidart, Marie Howe, and others. It also includes two poems of mine, one about Denise Naslund, the other about Eleanor Rose Naslund. Denise was one of the victims of Bundy, Eleanor Rose was her mother. I am proud for both poems to be part of such a lovely, hardback edition. The book comes out today, September the 6th, and I highly encourage you to obtain a copy.

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Prose for Poet’s (Part 1)

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Caitlin

Even as a child, I read a lot, averaging about a book a day. Now the books I read tend to be much longer and since my time is more limited, I usually read about a hundred books a year. No less, sometimes a few more. However since I started my job in Manhattan this January, my commute has offered me new time to read. By the first of August I had read 108 books. Twenty-six of the books were of poetry, the remaining books were pretty evenly split between non-fiction, and fiction. Poetry is extremely important to me, but I do not allow myself to read whole books of it, too frequently. I get good idea’s from poets, and I take their missteps as fair warning, but what informs my poetry the most is what I read outside poetry, the lessons I have learned from non fiction, literature, and popular fiction are invaluable. I feel like limiting what you are reading to a particular genre, limits the amount of literary tools that are available to you.

One of the writers that heavily influenced all of my work is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time as a teenager, and I was very impressed by Magic Realism as a whole. I really liked the way he handled time loosely and embraced confusion. He named most of characters the same two name, teasing the reader, telling them to not take individuality too seriously. I like how he faded in and out of the narrative, focusing on what he thought was important.

Leo Tolstoy is someone else who has very much effected my writing. War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, his work as an author of realist fiction contrasts sharply with Marquez’s loose grasp of reality. However it is his grasp of people that I most admire. His characters breath, like no other individuals on the page. They can be summoned up in a few lines, and then are either dismissed or focused on. Even those quickly dismissed are for a moment fully realized. His ability to create someone in a few sentences is something I strive very hard to emulate.

I read in Cold Blood by Truman Capote while I was working on the Victims of Ted Bundy. I have many complaints about Capote’s research methods and his tendency to fictionalize minor details. I however have no complaints regarding the thorough picture he creates of a family, a town, and the murderers.  He is an excellent writer and his sense of pacing is good. His distant perspective, and tone really influenced the manuscripts I was working on.

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