NEW GUIDE TO THE QUASI-POLITICAL
—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets
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Cade Leebron: “I grew up in south central Pennsylvania, which is in the Rust Belt, and is also part of the region occasionally referred to as Pennsyltucky. Specifically, I grew up in Gettysburg, which is both a tourist town and a college town. These two ‘industries’ helped to keep Gettysburg a bit more afloat than the surrounding area, though the town still has a lot of issues with poverty (and a floundering public school system, and racism, and anti-Semitism, and misogyny, and a list that could continue on). Mostly when I tell people I grew up there, I say that there are more dead people than alive. I suppose this could be said of anywhere, though it tends to get a laugh in the context of Gettysburg ghost tours. Growing up, Gettysburg often felt like a trap (and sometimes it was a trap that I didn’t want to escape) and I think that both this sense of confinement and being surrounded constantly by death have influenced my poetry. Often when I build a poem, I’m replicating that feeling, I’m building a trap. And the speaker is stuck in there and has to somehow figure it out. Growing up in the Rust Belt also gave me a sense of awareness when writing of never wanting to make fun of people stuck in poverty, or stuck in tiny towns, or stuck in circumstance. It’s not that these communities shouldn’t be critiqued, just that having grown up where I did, I don’t think it helps to make rural people the butt of all our post-election think-piece jokes.” (website)
