Grace Cavalieri \u201954 is rarely at a loss for words. But when the Maryland poet laureate was recently awarded an alumni membership to The College of New Jersey\u2019s chapter of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society, it gave her pause. \u201cPhi Beta Kappa is a treasured institution in our culture and I never dreamed of being so honored.\u201d<\/p>\n
A prolific poet, writer, and teacher, Cavalieri hosts The Poet and the Poem, an interview show presented by the Library of Congress through National Public Radio, where for more than 40 years she has been talking to America\u2019s most adored poets about their art. Taking a page from her book, TCNJ Magazine <\/em>spoke to Cavalieri from her home in Annapolis, Maryland, about her life, her poems, and how her words are about to land on the moon.<\/p>\n TCNJ Magazine<\/em><\/strong>: Was there a moment in your life when you knew you would be a poet?<\/p>\n Grace Cavalieri<\/strong>: I think poets are born. We\u2019re wired a certain way. I think writers, before they even go to school, are fascinated with the hieroglyphics on the page. We want to decode it. We see the world through language, then, as we learn more about it; it\u2019s the way we clarify the world. I think every poet I\u2019ve ever interviewed has always said she or he wrote as a child. In junior high, I had a teacher who said, \u201cWrite a play.\u201d And I thought, \u201cOh, somebody\u2019s giving me permission to write a play.\u201d<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: You\u2019ve written dozens of plays and books and thousands of poems since then. What makes poetry special?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: Poems are about feelings. They can do anything they want. They can tell a story, they can just be language on the page, they can be fireworks, they can be an utterance. It is a wonderful thing for a poem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A FIELD OF FINCHES WITHOUT SIGHT STILL SINGING<\/p>\n That song comes from sorrow\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0there is no doubt.<\/p>\n Bullfinches in ancient times\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0had eyes put out<\/p>\n so they would\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0sing more sweet.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Think of<\/p>\n those black beads\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0dropped to earth\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0coming<\/p>\n to seed\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0flowers\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 turning inward\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0every single<\/p>\n one of them\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0without its sight.<\/p>\n Stories say\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0that\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0moving\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0in the wind\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0they<\/p>\n made up song\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0as if nothing\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0had been lost and<\/p>\n this rings\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0long into the night. Every\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0sound<\/p>\n we hear\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0turns\u00a0 \u00a0to\u00a0 \u00a0a bigger one\u00a0 \u00a0and\u00a0 \u00a0each is<\/p>\n true. We add our own until it is the first<\/p>\n din\u00a0 \u00a0 ever heard, the way\u00a0 \u00a0 poetry\u00a0 \u00a0 begins.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: In \u201cA Field of Finches,\u201d you played with space. Why did you choose to write it that way?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: That\u2019s a very enlightened question. I think the aesthetics on the page are very important and space says a lot. To me, this poem was about breath and sound. And the birds singing. But also, it was about loss. They gave their eyesight so they would sing more sweetly. I found that penetrating. And there\u2019s just something about those spaces that honor that. Like stopping a moment and saying a prayer almost.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: Tell us about yourself. You are a Jersey girl, right?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I was born in Trenton, yes, 1932. We lived in the western part of Trenton, not the Italian section. That was unusual for a native-born Italian. We lived in the more Jewish and Anglo area. I never knew why until after my father died and I found out he was Jewish.<\/p>\n My father\u2019s side, they were very intellectual \u2014 doctors, lawyers, and physicists. My mother\u2019s family, they were all from Sicily, and they were entrepreneurial because people had to make a living. So there was a class difference in a way.<\/p>\n My grandmother owned The Venice Restaurant on Warren Street. It was the first Italian restaurant in Trenton. So there was all our Italian-ness.<\/p>\n Every word in \u201cTomato Pies\u201d is from my blood. My grandmother was the first feminist I ever knew. She had seven children and started the restaurant in a man’s part of town. She never held me on her lap or baked a cake. But look what she did.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TOMATO PIES, 25 Cents<\/p>\n Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, <\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: You like to capture women in history in a unique way, it seems.<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I do. I always give them a good pass. That\u2019s where the power of the writer is. Women in history \u2014 they\u2019re a part of us.<\/p>\n I learned poetry by reading Rudyard Kipling in the Heritage Library. I learned from white male poets because no women were published.<\/p>\n My first love for poetry was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I have all of her first editions. In college, we ran around campus quoting Millay.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: At TCNJ, Herman Ward, an English professor, had a big influence on you. Tell us about him.<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: Ward was a Princeton graduate and came with his tweedy thoughts, you know, with his Cambridge\/Oxford attitude. He brought that to New Jersey State Teachers College and we were his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s. He took us under his wing for four years, and he introduced us to the best. We knew the canon and every great author: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert.<\/p>\n He handed me a magic baton of poetry that has lighted my life. I was always kind of in love with something that I didn\u2019t know I was in love with. I would say he presented us with the key to the door and then gave us the canon to study. It takes just one person.<\/p>\n Herman Ward taught my soul. When you practice an art, that is the closest you are to discovering who you are. I wanted to be that person. And I am.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n THE LONGEST STORY IN THE WORLD The longest story in the world is Sunrise to yellow Once 71 years ago For this is the heart\u2019s motion Sunrise to yellow <\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: Do you model your own teaching after how Ward taught you?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I always say I teach people, not poetry. And so that says it all. It\u2019s always a good journey.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: How do you do that?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I have a prompt that is a killer.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: And can you reveal it?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: It\u2019s like a recipe [laughs]. My prompt is: Our lives are buildings and each floor is a different year of our lives. So I\u2019m a skyscraper, because I am old. But if students are 18 years old, they have 18 floors, and every floor has a story. Accessing the story is really important, that makes them realize their power. If they come and go and don\u2019t tell their story, we will never know them. And I talk about how to make that story into a poem.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: Do you feel you\u2019ve transformed, or are you still in motion?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: Oh man, I\u2019m just beginning. I have three books coming out.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: And then what\u2019s next for you?<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: The moon.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: What?!<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I am poetry editor for a magazine called PoetsArtists<\/em> and the curator, Didi Menendez, has been invited alongside 1,200 other curators to gather material [for the Peregrine Collection, a project scheduled to launch works of art to the moon in July 2021]. So she will send some of my poetry to the moon.<\/p>\n TM<\/strong><\/em>: Wow.<\/p>\n GC<\/strong>: I really just wanted to go back to Trenton. But I\u2019ll go to the moon instead. Listen, for someone who didn\u2019t have TV as a girl, for her poetry to go to the moon, it\u2019s significant.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n VIEWS FROM THE WINDOW My sacred space, a bird flying to the feeder <\/p>\n Photo: Mike Morgan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meet Grace Cavalieri, TCNJ’s stellar poet alumna. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":11746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11743"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11761,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11743\/revisions\/11761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\nbefore Pizza came in,
\nat my Grandmother\u2019s restaurant,
\nin Trenton New Jersey.
\nMy grandfather is rolling meatballs
\nin the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but
\nsaved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy
\nby coming to America.
\nUncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce.
\nUncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean,
\nsobered up, in a white starched shirt, after
\ncops delivered him home just hours before.
\nThe waitresses are helping
\nthemselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer,
\nplaying the numbers with Moon Mullin
\nand Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942,
\ntomato pies with cheese, 25 cents.
\nWith anchovies, large, 50 cents.
\nA whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm).
\nHow the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix,
\nwould stand outside all the way down Warren Street,
\nwaiting for this new taste treat,
\nyoung guys in uniform,
\nlined up and laughing, learning Italian,
\nbefore being shipped out to fight the last great war<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\nFor Phi Beta Kappa Induction, 2021
\nAnd for Herman Ward<\/p>\n
\nTransformation<\/p>\n
\nRushing waters to waterfall
\nSeeds breaking earth
\nBird\u2019s beak breaking seed
\nAll in service to the earth<\/p>\n
\nThere was a professor
\nWho without having to say
\nShowed us how
\nTo rinse off language
\nStudy nature\u2019s magnificence
\nNotice everything
\nSlow down because
\nNo one can dream in a hurry
\nDiscover others
\nBy finding out who we are
\nAnimate imagination
\nReread books and then write new ones
\nTell everyone a poem
\nMake the world less lonely<\/p>\n
\nAnd our deeds are all we can own<\/p>\n
\nRushing waters to waterfalls
\nSeeds breaking earth
\nBird\u2019s beak breaking seed
\nAll in service.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\nA COVID-19 Poem<\/p>\n
\nthe shade of a tree, berries in the forest
\nheat from the sun on the pane
\nflames of experience
\nlashing on glass
\nthe clear path of vision
\nthe straight edge of sky
\na parting of water
\npicking us up placing us exactly there
\nhistory has been shattered into pieces that will not fit together
\nhow large is loss
\nhow much does it take to fill
\nhow do we gather it in our arms
\nwhen the city was destroyed with illness there was a place I could not reach
\nright now a small animal is breaking free in the woods
\nthe milk of the moon is shining on these words that come from me
\nand do not return empty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n