Kamal E. Kimball: “I’ve lived most of my life in the Rust Belt, and have always been struck by its contradictions. It’s America’s breadbasket, overflowing with wheat, corn, and soybeans in the summer. I grew up in Michigan, where we spent long, refreshing afternoons on the beaches of the state’s many lakes. Yet the Rust Belt is also scarred with burned-out factories and dotted with towns that opiates and meth have ravaged. There is a looming sense of frustration, an anger at the past and for the future. This tension permeates my writing, which is at once abundant with musicality and haunted by a sense of something missing.” (website)
K. H.: “I was raised in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, went to college in Ohio, and still live in Columbus. The stereotypical writer is supposed to live in New York City, not flyover country. I didn’t always love the Rust Belt—the hint of Pittsburghese that clings to my voice, that sense of isolation that living in a town with one main street, surrounded by cornfields, fosters. But it is a place of poetry, too.”
Kelly Fordon: “Even though I spent a lot of time in the Midwest as a child, I was not truly a resident of the Rust Belt until I moved to Michigan in the ’90s with my husband and settled in the suburbs of Detroit. At that time, I was shocked by the divisiveness between the city and suburbs. I remain in shock. This poem reflects some of what I have witnessed in terms of privileged sensibility and racism in the suburbs.” (website)
William Evans: “I think being from the Midwest is a unique negotiation for a writer as I often find myself putting forth an idea that isn’t so much profound as it is making a statement of awareness for readers. I often feel that the aesthetic of many poets outside of the Rust Belt is an affirming action that confirms or reinforces what we may believe about the location already. In my part of the country, I think the writers are often defending their home. It’s a pursuit of not only relevance but of reverence of where our voice fits in the national conversation. This poem, ‘I Say Cathedral When I Mean Gunpowder,’ feels particularly Midwest when it encounters the shifting environments, hard-to-penetrate culture, and realities of what being in the middle of the country demands.” (website)
Sarah Wylder Deshpande: “I grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, the recreational vehicle manufacturing capital of the world. It’s an industrial town with two rivers, the Elkhart and the St. Joe. I spent my childhood exploring rivers and abandoned factories and riding trains. I live outside the Midwest now, but I miss the wide-openess of landscape and driving along the highway with cornfields on either side, always being able to see the horizon.” (web)
Todd Davis: “I was born, raised, and have lived in the Rust Belt for 52 years. The first eighteen years of my life were spent in the factory town of Elkhart, Indiana, playing basketball and football and dreaming about the deep forests in upstate New York where I’d visited to backpack with my father and uncle, places that seemed otherworldly, so green and with water we drank directly from streams flowing out of the sides of mountains. After that, I lived in northern Illinois for seven years, then another six years in Goshen, Indiana, and for the past fourteen years I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, ten miles north of the dying railroad town of Altoona. Because of these places, notions of decay and injury can be found in my poems, and poets like Jim Daniels and Jan Beatty have been important in showing me ways to write about what matters here. The small village of Tipton where my house sits is near 41,000 acres of game lands. I hunt and fish in what seems to be an imitation of those first forests I encountered in upstate New York, planning my escape into their creases. But even in the most remote places in these 41,000 acres I can’t escape the legacy of the Rust Belt: acid mine drainage from deep tunnel mining and strip mining for coal creates ‘kill zones’ in the forest and makes some of the streams sterile. I suppose I hope that my poems offer a glimpse of the good in these places while not flinching at the harm we’ve done to the land and to each other.” (web)
“Prodigal Son Returns to Warren, Michigan” by Jim DanielsPosted by Rattle
Jim Daniels
PRODIGAL SON RETURNS TO WARREN, MICHIGAN
The air stings but you get used to it. Were always used to it. Buried it in your lungs at birth in anticipation of today. Dark comfort. Burning oil. Leaking transmission fluid. Exploding antifreeze. A lot can go wrong and already has. That’s the darkness. The comfort’s buried behind the garage. Cigarette smoke—trying to quit. Lifetime hobby. Like collecting LSD stamps. Marking stale beer kisses on your warped globe. Thumbnail bruise slowly making its way to the top. To be released. Good luck with that bruise on your heart. Life in Warren. Backfire misfire. Deliberate fire. Shotgun arson. That hiss leaking out that globe or a spray can sending another inscrutable message. Night breaks glass. Day keeps peace. Peace on loan from the bank. Interest on a ticking clock. The bank, a robot hooker. Hydrant full of trick questions and fake water. Air stings. You sting it back. The invitation lost in the mail with the lost children. Welcome home, soldier. Have we got a minimum wage job for you! No burned bridges. Our bridge takes you to Canada, that girl you always liked that was too nice for you. Ribbons and curls and a mean big brother. Forgot to wipe your shoes on the way out of town—you follow the smudged footprints back. What were you thinking, leaving? Like the senile dog, barking at the wrong door to get back in. It happens. Night is different here, spiked with acrid fear. Fists just lumps in your pockets. Nobody’s built a hill yet—uphill and downhill, relative terms. Related by marriage. Separated by birth. Blinded by the lack of light. The absence of an acoustic guitar. The dance of electric shock. One word for gray—hundreds of shades of it. Comfort, one word for it. Rungs on the ladder: imaginary. Leak in the roof: real. Basement nightmare-flooded. Cocaine cut on a ping pong table. Behind the eight ball. Beneath the cue stick hammering down. It’s all coming back. Blood on an empty dress burned down the neighborhood, but it’s still here. Just needs a jump. Got cables? Gentlemen, start your engines. The air stings with old spit and large betrayal. Rust-mobiles rattling and mumbling their damned prayers. Transportation specials. Dark comfort dome light glow. Somebody getting in, getting out. Idling. Flashers on. Adjusting mirrors. Emergency. Waiting for someone. Maybe you.
Jim Daniels: “I have spent my entire life in the Rust Belt, born in Detroit, and living in Pittsburgh for the last 35 years, with a three-year stint near Toledo in between. My writing has always been focused on place—both the literal places of blue collar towns and the ‘place’ of social class. My style has always been straightforward and direct because of the influence of these places.” (website)
