Cate Marvin - Fragment of the Head of a Queen

Author Asks

1. As a book, Fragment of the Head of a Queen is split into two sections, so as to give the effect of containing two, sequential volumes. Do the poems in the respective sections share similar motifs? What is your sense of the transition between the first and second volume? If there is silence between the two, what inhabits that silence?

2. “She Wishes Her Beloved Were Dead” adopts and repurposes the title of a William Butler Yeats’ poem, “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead.” What effect results from reversing the pronouns in this title? What purpose does this juxtaposition serve?

3. In “Azaleas,” the speaker mediates on the town of her childhood. The “place” in the poem, however, is not literal but figurative. What are the connotations of the town? Urban, rural or suburban? What is it the speaker finds in the final lines that makes her “smile” grow?

4. In “Lines for a Mentor” what words of the mentor’s advice does the speaker adopt and reiterate? What sort of attitude does the speaker express toward the teacher: one of gratitude or displeasure?

5. Who is the speaker of “All My Wives”? How do you relate this poem to “Muckraker”?

6. What is the attitude of the speaker toward the addressee of “Your Childhood”? Does she express empathy for his misfortunes? Is the “childhood” a specific person’s or that of a collective consciousness?

7. “Little Poem That Tries” has an interweaving, italicized lyric that runs between/interrupts the primary stanzas. What purpose does it serve the overall poem? What is your sense of the tone of these lines; are they whispered, incanted, sung?

8. In “Lying My Head Off” the speaker reveals that she would have sued herself if she “could”. What written or unwritten law has she broken? At what point in the poem does she become lawless? What, in your reading, is the catalyst that forces her become “an other self”?

9. In “A Brief Attachment” the speaker addresses another poet. What characterizes and differentiates the two poets (speaker and addressee) in the poem? While the speaker insists on constantly criticizing the “you” of the poem, do the final lines suggest faint (and damning) praise?

10. “Practically An Orphan” performs a sort of exorcism. What relationship is the speaker attempting to put behind her? Why is the title of the poem in quotation marks?

11. The closure of “Poems That Wears Your Scarf” arrives back at the exact place the speaker’s positioned herself at the start of the poem. What has occurred in between? What sort of story do the flashbacks tell and why do you think the speaker is meeting the “you” in the “peopled square”?

12. The speaker of “Stone Fruit” returns obsessively to “a long ago”: a situation in her past. What is important to her about the details she continually reweaves and interjects throughout the body of the poem? Why did the speaker think she was “important”?

13. Several poems in Fragment of the Head of a Queen do not have stanza breaks. How are these poems different from those that are more preoccupied with formal constraints? How does the lack of stanza breaks influence your reading?

14. How does the continued focus on the speaker’s head tie into the overall metaphor of the book? In which poems is the speaker fragmented? In which poems is she whole?