Catherine Arnold is the author of the new poetry collection The Apple Tree. She also has written the poetry collection Receipt for Lost Words. Also a visual artist, she lives in Western Massachusetts.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?
A: These poems were written over the course of a year, from June 2023 to June 2024. They came quickly and urgently.
Q: How was the book’s title (also the title of the first poem) chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: After moving across country, I glanced out of the window of my new home and saw an apple tree, truly saw it for the first time. Memories came flooding back: the look, the scent, the squelch of rotten apples under my feet; I grew up in a house called Apple Tree House.
After that, I wrote the first long poem, which ended up introducing the collection and providing its title. Writing “The Apple Tree” allowed me to travel through the memories of childhood, tasting its yearning and uncertainty.
Q: The poet Rachel Hadas said of the book, “Over and over, these powerful and distinctive poems manage to combine a dreamy discontinuity with a fearless focus on experiences and sensations that are often traumatic.” What do you think of that description?
A: I can see those aspects in this collection; I was particularly concerned with the sensations that accompany experience—how do we process experience in the body? How do our bodies remember?
If I tried to describe what the book means to me in a couple of sentences, I’d say it explores the cost of emotional repression, of feeling trapped in a code of silence and invisibility.
Through the poems, I wanted to dive into the experience of a woman gradually discovering her creative voice, becoming an artist and learning to embrace the world of color and touch (that last part’s because I’m a painter as well as a writer).
There are so many ways of seeing, and reading, a book. The poet Heather Treseler described the book this way and this resonates with me: “Catherine Arnold’s poems perform the sensitive work of a linguistic Geiger counter: revealing radioactive elements within domestic interiors, familial repressions, acts of maternal devotion, and art’s impulse…”
Q: How did you choose the order in which the poems would appear in the collection?
A: The key was deciding where to place “The Apple Tree.” It felt like the linchpin of the book, but I hesitated to put it first, because I thought starting with a long poem might be a little intimidating, a little difficult for the reader.
But it soon became clear that this was the only honest way to do it; it had to go first. It sets the tone for the book. It’s the platform from which the reader can dive into the poems that follow.
After deciding to put “The Apple Tree” first, the rest of the sequence fell into place. The connections between the sections felt natural. After the family section that began with “The Apple Tree,” I continued with poems about the experience of awe, the intimacy of small domestic moments, and the sensation of skin-prickling anxiety—and that led to the final poems which explore the isolation and confinement of Covid.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I recently completed a novel, Hunger, and I’m working on a new poetry manuscript. It doesn’t have a title yet, the themes are still emerging, but there’s going to be a section inspired by fairytales, and another on family relationships (the two are often related!).
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m also a visual artist. I see a lot of cross pollination between painting and writing. I think that because I’m an artist, my poems tend to be very visual.
This is my second book of poetry. My first, Receipt for Lost Words, was published by Bauhan Publishing after I won the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize in 2022.
Upcoming events: I’ll be giving an in-person reading at Stockbridge Library in Massachusetts on May 10. On June 5, I’ll be doing a virtual reading with poet Dorsey Craft. On September 16, I’ll be having a virtual reading and conversation with poet Richard Smith at The Writer’s Center in Washington, D.C. Check my website for date and details at https://catherinearnold.com/ You can see my paintings there too!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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