About the Poems - CP
About the Poems
by Cate Peebles After a period of not much writing and feeling bad about it, I decided it would be helpful to relieve some pressure by a) not taking myself so seriously, only sometimes, and, b) giving all of my poems the same title. This second idea was stolen from a friend (who probably stole it from someone else), the first, from Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler. I latched on to the title "This Is the Life" because it seems that anything I could possibly think or not think falls under this heading, so there was no need to think of other titles ever again—though this ended up not being true, as some poems later suggested other names for themselves. The series has grown to about 30 pages. In these poems, I hope to offer a space to the reader where transparent emotion coexists with fantastical high-strung imagery—both mundane and far-flung. All but "Yore" in this selection were originally called "This Is the Life." "Yore" is for a friend who wears pastels with reckless abandon.