i turn on the tv and everyone i see is fat
the sports star spokesperson; he’s fat.
a famous comedian is fat and glamorous
in her spot for a vacation booking app.
sauce dribbles sensually down the double chin
of the woman in the hamburger advertisement.
the beer commercial, a thick-wristed hand
holds a cold glass. everyone dancing on tv
is fat. they’re selling fashionable denim.
the basketball players are fit and also fat.
i assume the announcers are fat,
even though i only hear their voices.
a fat boy-band performs for a stadium
of screaming fans, all fat. an ad runs
with two fat actors i haven’t seen much
since their show ended half a decade ago.
i love these familiar, beloved, fat faces.
a fat family eats dinner together. i think
nothing of it. the people on a date are fat
and in love. because why wouldn’t they be?
the people in the haunted house are fat
and terrified. there is no punchline.
the politician is fat. the newscaster is fat.
everyone i've looked up to my whole life
has a body. all of them are shaped like mine.
Catherine Weiss
Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist from rural Maine, living in Western Massachusetts. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Passengers Journal, Fugue, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the author of the Smash Mouth-inspired chapbook-length golden shovel FERVOR, as well as pro-wrestling themed tête-bêche poetry chapbook WINNERS & LOSERS. Catherine's full-length poetry collections are titled WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS and GRIEFCAKE, with third full-length collection BIG MONEY PORNO MOMMY forthcoming from Game Over Books in 2025. More at catherineweiss.com.
Why this poem knocked Martheaus out:
Catherine answered my call! For those of you who haven’t found it, there's an additional NSFW list where I ask for poems that are "as true about your body as you need to be." This is exactly that poem.
I read this piece and it allows me to be confronted by the psychological warfare (I hope that's not too dramatic of a term, it just feels right) that the media perpetrates on the speaker and all of us through its depiction of bodies. This is a different experience, but Catherine’s poem reminded me of what it was like as a young Black person to see tokenization, to not see myself reflected in the "desirable" imagery of the TV. But I don't want to talk around the poem's message, it is about the depiction/lack of depiction of fat people. It's a poem that, for me, asks for us to pay attention to the purposeful othering/avoiding of a fat body. It's a poem that walks us through almost every avenue of TV media and asks where I am here.
Regarding the number of times the word "fat" comes up, it displays what Aubrey Gordan talks about in Glamor when she says, "For me, and for many other fat people, reclaiming the word fat is about reclaiming our very bodies, starting with the right to name them. Fat isn’t a negative aspect of one’s body any more than tall or short. It can, and should, be a neutral descriptor." I'm not trying to prop Gordan up as the most important voice on this or make fat people a monolith, but I do think her words do a better job of articulating why the poem can be healing/revealing on multiple different levels.
I always feel strange talking about technical elements in poems with this much social resonance, but we're poets; craft is our armor, our paint, the way we howl our beautiful songs. From the start, the sonic work grips me with this poem. Just look at all the hard consonance and assonance sounds launching us in: "sports star spokesperson; he’s fat./ a famous comedian is fat and glamorous / in her spot for a vacation booking app." Further, the lines are written in a very honed way. It uses this very straightforward voice to take us across so many medias, and I think that contributes to the ease of the line-to-line motion.
Interview:
When we write poems about our identities, especially identities that are under social attack, I sometimes worry about the mental effects on the poet. Is this something you reflect on? How can we safely be bold about our identities in an environment that questions who we are?
I do think about this. I started out writing poetry in open mic and slam communities, where it's pretty obvious that trauma as a topic can be rewarded. On one hand, this reframing can be a place of power and discovery for a poet. On the other, it can feel awful to write and share about something personal and then start to feel like you're doing it for the "wrong reasons." Like, questioning, am I putting my own vulnerability on display for some kind of status, whether that's winning a slam or publishing a book? Is that icky? Or is that my right as an artist? I go back and forth but I do think there's a line, and it's different for everyone. So I always want to think about why I'm sharing a particular poem with the world. What do I expect back from the world in return? Knowing that it's possible to write and publish about topics I've felt shame about, like fatness, and I won't be banished from society or something similarly drastic, has helped me learn to talk back to my own shame. Writing about fatness helps normalize fatness for myself, and that's what this poem is about.
Bit of a smaller question coming after that one, but I am interested in how you wish the tone to be conveyed through this piece. I hesitate to call this an "angry" poem, a "serious" poem. Past the labeling, what is the emotional sound of this speaker's voice?
For me this poem is both sad and hopeful. It's sad because I'm remembering how tough it was to be a kid where my body type was rarely seen as worthy or beautiful enough to put on TV. How media portrayals contributed to an eating disorder in my teens and 20s, which left me with a lot of hurt and shame. I think the poem wants to just visit this hypothetical world where that never happened. I really feel for my younger self who was filled with so much self-loathing. I think this poem is hopeful, too, though. It's hard to put into words why, but I think it has to do with reshaping my own interiority through the process of writing. This poem exists now, because I was ready to write it.
I want to draw specific attention to the lines "the people on a date are fat / and in love. because why wouldn’t they be?" Can you talk about the resonance of this kind of love? This was one of the big personal punches of the poem: I couldn't immediately recall a depiction of two fat people in love from any media I have seen in recent years.
This makes me think of a time when early on in my poetry slam "career", I was given some advice by a more experienced slam poet. He said, "You should always start with a body poem, to get the audience past how fat you are." That has been clanging around in my head for almost a decade now, because it's so telling. There's this expectation, that if we see a fat person, we have to address their fatness--we have to "get past" the fatness to see any humanity that might be hiding in there. So to bring it back to the fat people on a date in love--I want to see fat people on TV who are living their lives, without the expectations being different from a straight sized person doing the same thing. Sometimes that means dating and falling in love and having sex! So maybe this poem is a little angry too--I don't want to coddle anybody about their fatphobia. (I am reminded again that my word processing software doesn't think "fatphobia" is a real word and puts an angry little red line underneath it. Maybe that's a whole other poem to write.)