Catherine Wagner
Profile
Cathy Wagner, a poet, was born in Burma and grew up in Baltimore. She is the author of three books, My New Job (Fence, 2009), Macular Hole (Fence, 2004) and Miss America (Fence, 2001). She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Utah, Boise State University, and now Miami. Her students have gone on to pursue MFAs and PhDs, to publish books of poems with Blazevox, Fence, Otis Books/Seismicity Editions and other presses, and to run small presses of their own.
Of My New Job, Eileen Myles wrote, “Catherine Wagner’s “new job” might be the last great book of the oughts. Part of its delight is that it is not constant. Its eyelid adjusts and flutters throughout. It’s three books at least: fuzzy portraiture of energy and thought like early moderns: Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe—and even like Pound, in Wagner’s familial way of tugging at language. It’s also a bit Don Juan (as in Castaneda). It’s a new age book: searching, awkward and useful too—a momentary sex manual for girls—then a dirty adult notebook. My New Job is physical, a shucking work. One picks up some spin on Sylvia Plath but what I truly felt was Frankenstein. My New Job is tinkering with life. I found myself imagining Wagner wondering what else Plath might have done—not instead of killing herself but what if she just wrote something different. Frankenstein kept Mary Shelley alive for a very long time while Ariel simply pointed to Plath’s own demise. In My New Job ‘The women step out, the men go in’ and the edifice C. Wagner’s made seems an increasingly wider and wider kind of turning—colossal and somatic—through her own body & the bodies of others. Cathy’s Job is a joyous multiple. It’s a lift.”
Wagner’s chapbooks (pamphlets) of poetry include Bornt (Dusie, 2009), Articulate How (Big Game Books/Dusie, 2008), Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha, 2008), Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (Bonfire Press, 2007), Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004), Exercises (811 Books, 2004), Boxes (Seeing Eye [now Mindmade] Books, 2001) and Fraction Anthems (811 Books, 2001).
She has written essays and reviews on Alice Notley, Lev Rubinstein, Harryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, Barbara Guest and experimental and traditional form, among other subjects. An essay on creative writing pedagogy will appear in the anthology Poets on Teaching (Iowa UP, 2010). With Rebecca Wolff, she co-edited the anthology Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (Fence 2007). For a special triple issue of Chicago Review on Barbara Guest, Wagner edited and wrote an afterword for a selection of Guest’s previously unpublished poems.
Wagner’s poems have appeared in anthologies including State of the Union: An Anthology of Political Poems (Wave, 2008), The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner 2008), Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, (Iowa UP, forthcoming 2009), Gurlesque: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry (Saturnalia, forthcoming 2010), A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (Fence, 2009), and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse, 2004). A chapbook-length selection of poems from her latest project, an epic romance, appeared in Verse in 2009.
More information and links to online publications are here: http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/People/Faculty/Q_Z/WagnerCatherine.html