“This Fabulous Century IV”, “How to Butcher a Pig”, and “Cost Analysis” by Caroline Chavatel appeared in Issue 29 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
“This Fabulous Century IV” is part of a larger working series. “This Fabulous Century I” appears in Poetry Northwest and “This Fabulous Century II & III” appear in Birdcoat Quarterly. I love the idea that they are spread across various pages and audiences because the series, as a whole, really is about disparate ways of knowing the same thing—how distance can manipulate truth. “How to Butcher A Pig” originated from a time I was working at this restaurant in Phoenix and witnessed a whole pig loaded into the kitchen in a clear plastic bag. To this day, I can’t eat pork. I think just including that memory wasn’t enough for the poem, so I ended up doing a lot of research on how hogs are raised then killed for consumption. I learned that the sound of a pig being slaughtered is one of the most viscerally stunning shocks to the human ear (hence why American Horror Story uses it in their intro). I’m never trying to be didactic or to preach in my poems—I’m not a vegetarian by any means, and so the poem isn’t a virtue signal toward that. I think I just became really obsessed with the process that led up to me seeing a skinned pig in a plastic bag only a few feet away from dozens of people on date night. I think I am always writing about loss whether I know it or not. And I think the common denominator of these three poems is exactly that. “Cost Analysis” was birthed from a memory I had of losing a hat on vacation and the childhood logic I used to justify and explain the loss—that it had to be worth something. John A. Nieves has developed a lot of excellent exile theory and, following his logic, I think my attempts to mediate the lack or loss of the thing became a fetish in the poem—something that attempts to fill that empty space, to define through absence.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
The most difficult part of all three of these poems was trying to skirt that aforementioned line of not being too sentimental or precious, considering they are all working with memory.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I can’t choose just one, so here are three: Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson, The Wise and Foolish Builders by Alexandra Teague, and Churches by Kevin Prufer.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Don DeLillo. My chapbook, White Noises, is in conversation with his novel, White Noise and I think he’s brilliant.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m currently in a PhD program at Georgia State University, so a lot of my recent work has been adhering to coursework requirements—reading and writing according to syllabi and what not. I did finish a full-length manuscript that I am currently sending out and trying to home, and for the last couple years, I’ve also been developing a new manuscript about the circus called Late Stage, but there is a lot more research to do and there are several holes to fill.
Our thanks to Caroline for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Caroline’s poems, “This Fabulous Century IV”, “How to Butcher a Pig”, and “Cost Analysis” , here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-caroline-chavatel.
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Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, AGNI Online, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and The Journal, among others. She is editor and co-founder of both Madhouse Press and The Shore and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.