How to Be, Whole

Issue 2016 by Catherine Shubert

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A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Residential and Honors College Programs, Catherine Shubert holds advanced degrees in Urban Education, English Literature, and Creative Writing, respectively, from the University of Pennsylvania, Middlebury College, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is the winner of Flyway's Sweet Corn Contest in Poetry for "How to Be, Whole".Her writing appears online and in print at a variety of publications, including the Madison Review, CBSnews, and the Ploughshares blog. A former non-fiction editor of Ecotone Literary Magazine, Catherine is also the proud recipient of writing awards such as the Robert Haiduke Poetry Prize and a Hopwood Award in non-fiction. A Midwestern Michigoose at heart, she loves travel, yoga, animals, satire, and pimento cheese.

The poem grew out of a workshop wherein Ruth Forman (beautiful teacher/poet I highly recommend to anyone) asked us to pay attention to sensory details and to how we marry our verbs to our subjects/metaphors. I originally had in the first line “my breath bobs like a buoy,” an image I loved, but one that she pointed out seemed out of place in the desert landscape of my setting of the poem (Santa Fe, NM, where I was spending a summer studying poetry after suffering through a traumatic break up that involved a lot of back and forth and culminated in my then-boyfriend calling to end things on the phone on Fourth of July). In revising the poem, I thought not only of trying not to mix my metaphors, but also of my research into feminist poetics and activism. I read an article by Adrienne Rich wherein she lamented that most of her poetry from her 20s dealt primarily with men—unrequited love, longing, romantic interludes. She came to a point in her politics and her poetics (which for her were always intricately intertwined) where she urged herself to spend more of her mental and emotional energies on other things. Upon reflecting in that way, then, I chose to include the final line “where mothers and cacti know better than to cry”—since it is usually (but not exclusively) women who undergo the pain, beauty, and joy of birth that begin to realize there is more than one way to suffer a broken heart—it needn't be heteronormative/Disney-fied or otherwise restricted to the relationships women enter into with men. Adding that dimension of maternal love in the poem was also quite healing for me personally as a young woman dealing with perhaps my first real broken heart.