As American as...

Hotdogs, selfies, store-bought cake for breakfast...

Selfie as broken window.

Edification – Newsletter #105 – April 24, 2022

Dear Reader,

Happy Sunday! Happy Earth Day, Easter, Spring, National Poetry Month (truly the cruelest month).

Whatever you celebrate, I hope you have something worth celebrating. Hell, I’m eating cake from the Kroger bakery for breakfast because I’m a 44-year-old shamble of a human and I do what I want.

This week is abundant with personal significance: my youngest child turned two (hence, cake). This week also marks seven years since I ran away from a bad situation up in Michigan back down to Appalachia to be with the man I love.

It’s also the two-year anniversary of my first meeting with my writing group, a friendship and collaboration that means the world to me. They’ve not only helped me develop as a writer, they’ve kept me sane. My god, these past two years.

Good stuff, all of it.

I’m a big fan of reinvention. Change is the truest method of consistency!

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A bit of spring cleaning: I’ve updated my website’s publication page, which has grown mainly in poetry links, and I even sprinkled in a few original photos to boot. Tinkering makes a heart happy.

I’m excited to share my poem “Sometimes Love Looks Like” in The Normal School, a wonderful publication from Fresno State University’s MFA creative writing program.

It is the love in pinched to-do lists
on the backs of hospital bills, debt
they must not forget to repay.

(more…)

The poem’s a tribute to ordinary expressions of love, drawn from my lucky life. It got so many rejections I began referring to it simply as my “hotdog poem.” Get an email, tell the husband, “Oh, the hotdog poem got rejected again.” He is a long-suffering soul.

It began to look as though nobody wanted my hotdog poem. (And yet she persisted!) I’m really pleased it found a good home.

It’s not the only one of my poems where hotdogs make an appearance, to be honest, but maybe the hokiest. I don’t know, are love poems out? There are a lot of lit mags begging for the dark and dysfunctional. I get that people are bored by functional relationships or quiet domestic moments; they like explosions and reinvention – maybe more than ever right now. I know how it feels to be stir-crazy, too. Tear the whole thing down and start over!

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I had several other poems published in March, including two in the new Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati-based literary magazine Many Nice Donkeys. Living less than half a mile from the Ohio River myself, I know kindred spirits when I see them. One of my poems is even called “A Friend in Cincinnati”.

Cincinnati ducks through our Kentucky side, our wild
rose, our kudzu, everything sacred kept hidden
even from ourselves. Cincinnati peers up in rivershine
to find us digging, mounding ourselves over mounds
of that clean gray mud, throwing spinning baking
mud? Do you remember the way, dear friend,

we pressed lips

of stolen clay

into all the things I still hold on to?
Move after move, caressingly swaddled
in the newspapers of far-flung escape attempts.

Why I don’t know. Meaning hides what remains
sacred. Return in a thousand sips of habit
of reverence; I bring this
to my lips in the cool. Heat
transmits, permits me to make it mine.

So still, our Ohio.

[Read the full poem on page 50.]

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Lately I’ve been tinkering away at “American sentences,” the Allen Ginsberg-innovated, seventeen-syllable constructions that give a good cadence for observations and detail.

I like this description of American sentences by poet John Olson:

[American Sentences are] extremely vivid & detail-oriented, a la the haiku. Emphasis is on the image, rather than rhetoric, or lyricism. Unlike the haiku, however, which is a highly bastardized form in English, they’re more suited to the American idiom & so allow a greater range of natural expression. They don’t have the aesthetic stiffness of the haiku as they are practiced in English.

It was really Dianne Seuss, who blew my socks off with a recent talk about sonnets, that opened my eyes to this form. (Her collection frank: sonnets employs American sentence-length lines assembled into sonnets – it is a revelation. Get it.)

My recent poems have been strings of American sentences, slice-of-life and epiphanies from the dead of night. I feel like I’m getting somewhere with them, their rhythm and attitude.

With April being National Poetry Month, I’ve indulged in jotting a little junk-pile down every day and letting it do what it may on the page. It’s given me a lot of material to work with in my other writing, as well as my ongoing adventures in songwriting.

Poetry is so freeing and generative.

The other day my husband wondered if we’d run out of songs. If we just keep writing, won’t we run out of chords or things to write about?

Long story short: no. We won’t run out of ideas. Art’s like an artesian well. Tap it, and in the drawing of the water, more will come.

Originality is a tyranny. And a myth. I guess that’s why I’m a little annoyed by all the lit mags calling for dark and dysfunctional. “Give us your weirdest, shock us with the new!” (What if I were to suggest that all artistic invention is reinvention? That all imagining is reimagining? That’s how brains work.)

Anyhow, that’s enough out of my cakehole.

Tell me what’s new in your neck of the woods! What are you reading? How’s Maude and the kids? Stay safe out there.

Talk soon,
 
Edie

Connect with me. (p.s. - I brushed up my links, so please do connect with me if you are on Instagram etc!)