Edison Jennings: “I live in Virginia at the pointy end where it slides like a scalpel into the interstices of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, with West Virginia nuzzling all cozy to the north, which is to say, I live in Appalachia, coal country, hill country, MAGA country—bigotry, fundamentalism, meth labs, and guns (lots of guns). It’s also beautiful, and its people are tough and weathered victims of predatory capitalism who have suffered scorn and ridicule. I write about it because, as Maurice Manning put it, ‘aesthetic value is not simply the stuff of high art, but a feature of all human vitality—even the commonest among us has an idea of art, because … it is always a human expression.’” (web)
Edison Jennings: “I live in Virginia with my two sons, and none of us are sure why I persist in writing poetry. But sometimes I tell my sons that maybe I write poetry because of a desire (a need?) to take part in an age-old conversation. In other words, I want to respond to a call, as in call and response. The bard calls and I squeak out a response. There are many calls and many responses, stretching back millennia. It is a communal and constantly evolving conversation. At least, that’s what I tell my sons.”
Edison Jennings (Virginia): “My interest in poetry began by happenstance in middle school. I began trying to write it in high school, but I wasn’t committed. Twenty-four years ago, while serving in the Navy, I got serious. When I separated from the Navy, I enrolled in the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and I have been trying to write poetry ever since. I’m not sure why. Poetry is hard work, and I’m kind of lazy. However, I am also often confused. Maybe that’s why I continue to try and write the stuff because poetry might be a type of ‘broken drinking goblet,’ to borrow from Robert Frost, that I fill with water, which, when drunk, makes me ‘whole again beyond confusion.’” (web)
Edison Jennings: “Though my relationship with poetry is, as they say, complicated, its origin is simple enough: Mr. James Harrington’s seventh grade English class. We were reading Julius Caesar, and my attention perked up when we got to Act III, Scene 1, the assassination scene. But what really hooked me was when Brutus and Cassius leave Marc Antony alone with Caesar’s mangled body and Antony asks the corpse to forgive him: ‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth …’ The description of the mangled corpse as a ‘bleeding piece of earth’ floored me, but when Antony addresses the gory knife wounds as ‘ruby lips’ that ‘beg the voice and utterance of [his] tongue,’ prompting him to ‘prophesy’ war and destruction, well, that was my first experience with the soul jarring impact of great poetry. By the time the school year was over, I had decided that maybe I wanted to be a teacher and a poet instead of a Cy Young Award winning pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles.”
