“Someday, they’re gonna write a blues
song just for fighters,” he once said.
“I’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet,
and a bell.”
—Sonny Liston, in King of the World by David Remnick
Glenn Morazzini: “I was doing research for a poem on the boxer Ali, plowing through Remick’s King of the World, when I was struck by Sonny Liston’s words and story, and in the end he came away with the song.”
Ann Giard-Chase: “The title of this poem, ‘Encephalon,’ denotes the upper part of the central nervous system that resides inside the human skull. When I graduated from college years ago, I worked as a registered EEG (electroencephalography) technologist in the neurology department of a major hospital. Patients of all ages and disease states came and went, presenting with a variety of symptoms to be analyzed by attaching electrodes to the patient’s head and recording their brain’s electrical activity. Based on this data, neurologists were able to detect certain brain abnormalities since brain waves change as a function of disease states. Being young myself, I was especially saddened when a young woman whose EEG I conducted was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I hadn’t dealt with early death or the potential for early death at this time in my life, and it impacted me greatly, and I never forgot her.”
Dick Westheimer: “Like most of the poems I write, this one surprised me as it unfolded. I began with three words written at the top of my page: ‘galaxy,’ ‘incongruous,’ and ‘cool.’ What emerged was a reflection about my father, who died almost 25 years ago. A bonus surprise (poetic turn?) came when I shared it with my sisters—neither readers of poetry. Image after image (sometime more from the universe of Truth rather than that of fact) prompted the recounting of long set-aside memories of our father—mostly experiences unique to one or another of us—which we shared for the first time.”
Zella Rivas: “The poem is inspired by my experiences growing up and living with mental illness that is incurable and has never not been part of me. It is a difficult experience to describe, but poetry allows us to share experiences of the most inexplicable and human sort even as it allows us the room to further understand ourselves, and it does so with beauty. Poetry is, to me, a beautiful and essential medium through which to participate in this world.” (web)
L. Renée: “This poem emerged while I was conducting genealogical research on my maternal family’s migration from the tobacco fields of Southwest Virginia to the coal mines of Southern West Virginia to Ohio, where I was born. I was stunned to find a photograph of my Aunt Mary inside the Gilliam Mine company store in the National Archives’ collection. I was and am taken by her gaze directly at the camera, which was attempting to capture her. Photographer Russell Lee took several photographs of the coal camp where my family lived, and I shared them with elders while I collected oral histories. At the same time, I learned about insurance policies on enslaved people that had been digitized and made available online through some local disclosure laws. While scrolling through them, I discovered a policy on a 14-year-old girl named Martha. I had a physical reaction. I thought of all the ways Black girls becoming women are surveilled and catalogued. I thought of all the ways we dream of and work toward creating our own escape routes. Then I heard Aretha telling me not to weep, though I did. I’m perpetually humbled by the sacrifice of ancestors who endured so much to make us possible. This poem is an attempt to render them, especially Black Appalachians often excluded from the narrative, visible.” (web)
Erin Murphy: “I grew up in a home where two newspapers a day were delivered to our front stoop: one in the morning, the other in the evening. I credit this with my interest in the news, which led to an early job as news editor of a daily paper and even now inspires many of my poems. Reading a business article that mentioned the technology term ‘the Internet of Things’ (or ‘IoT’) last summer, I began thinking about our other collective experiences—the natural world, relationships, death—and about William Carlos Williams’ pronouncement, ‘No ideas but in things.’” (web)
Mary Meadows: “I can’t go back and change what I said to ‘Amy’ when we were kids, but I hope it brings her solace to know that there’s a part of me that’s hated myself ever since. I think of her sometimes and I worry that this memory haunts her like it haunts me. I hope it doesn’t. I hope she was too young to remember it. And, if not, I hope it was the only time in her life that she ever had to deal with something like that. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I wish I could go back and fix it, but I can’t.”
