If every cat is a poet (and this is self-evidently the case), Tabby’s Place is an anthology of great excellence.
CAT is our freewheeling Ferlinghetti, caught in a Coney Island of the mind.
CAT is magnificent Maya Angelou, challenging and comforting and commanding hope.
CAT is gentle John O’Donohue, strewing blessings like shamrocks.
And CAT, of course, is Emily Dickinson.
CAT, as subtle as a sand dollar, has no aspirations to awards. She pshaws the thought of publication, preferring to tuck her poems between the pages of paisley stationery on which she writes CAT and CAT long letters about life and liverwurst and Longfellow and Lizzo (her favorite poets).
But CAT, who knows she is worth infinite dollars, is a poet as wise as whale-song. She has sat along the shores of sadness, sifted the salt from her tears, and chosen, with great deliberation, to proclaim life…fun.
This was no foregone conclusion, no piece of predictable prose. CAT, after all, is the cat who lost all her notebooks in the fire, all the secret novellas and buttery lyrics she’d hoped would be her legacy. When her people pitched her out like a yellowed paperback, she could have stopped writing entirely.
But every cat is a poet, and no cat writes for anyone but herself.
So CAT wrote her way out, through the tunnels of sadness and the thick mud of DISEASE. CAT saw syntax and stardust in the simple sawdust of her very ordinary life, even before life got lovely.
But since life is always working very hard to get lovely (life itself being a poet, too), CAT’s efforts were about to be answered in exclamation points. CAT was coming to Tabby’s Place. CAT was being written into the great poem with no beginning and no end (and no punctuation, either; CAT, who is our e.e. cummings, insisted).
CAT was coming home.
Which was very good news for a cat whose entire body of work details the bliss of being a homebody.
When you’re a poet-cat who has decided, once and for all, that life is fun, you don’t need the fiery fun of the fearful. CAT did not need to be published or praised; CAT did not need to howl like our Ginsburg, CAT, or prowl like our Byron, CAT.
CAT, standing securely atop the starfield known as The Humdrum, could delight, like Dickinson, in all the no-big-deals that dappled her days.
The quiet meal (bonus points if our Whitman, CAT, stopped pontificating about his multitudes for a moment). The soft strokes upon her forehead (the better to stimulate her gigantic creative mind). The way the light falls across the SUITE ramp when all the angels dance and all the people leave.
The pleasures of being…a nobody.
Now, in a certain sense, nobody is a nobody at Tabby’s Place. It’s simply not permitted. You surrender your right to be rejected, ignored, and unseen the day you become a Tabby’s Place cat of any species. (This includes you, shy reader.) In these stanzas, everyone is a somebody, the homebodies and the busybodies and the celestial bodies alike.
(Every cat is a celestial body, but this is as obvious as the fact that every question mark is a cat tail.)
But in a deeper sense, some of the most delightful poets and persons of assorted species are the nobodies.
Free to fly below the radar, brave enough to write for themselves and each other, priceless enough not to overcharge their egos on strutting sprees, the nobodies know that the quiet life is the rich life.
The unshouted joys are the deepest.
The boastless nights are the starriest.
And everyone from our Kahlil Gibran, CAT, to our Billy Collins, CAT, can agree: it’s frankly fun to be fully yourself. Your audience is the angels, not the aesthetes; your manuscript is mercy, not merit. Your words and your worth will not return void. You have claimed the right to enjoy the lines of your life.
CAT may never be published in this lifetime, but that was never the point. She writes what she knows, which means she tells the truth. She treasures the ordinary, which means every word shines like a seashell when the light hits it.
And at Tabby’s Place, the light hits everything and everybody.
Including noble nobodies like CAT and you and me.
I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)
Emily Dickinson – 1830-1886
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!