Rachel Custer: “These poems are part of a collection of ‘rural voice’ poems on which I’m working. The Rust Belt is, in some ways, the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, married to rural America as an identifying philosophy. These voices are so often overlooked for big-city slick and the fashions of the day. There is a sense about rural America that nothing ever changes, and simultaneously that everything is always changing elsewhere. That we are losing ourselves. We are grounded by earth, the change of the seasons, and by work. In this sense, Rust Belt is an apt name.” (web)
Rachel Custer is this week’s guest on the Rattlecast! Click here to watch live or archived.
Nic Custer: “My hometown, Flint, Michigan, is verdant and brownfield, a city of ghosts, bars and church folk. It’s a tough place that built unions using stubborn Southern pride, a town disowned and turned into a punch line. My poetry aims to make sense of the simultaneous push and pull of living in a place that defined the blue collar American Dream but now could be mistaken for a nightmare. Although it has fallen from national headlines, Flint is still experiencing a water disaster. One hundred thousand residents negotiate daily challenges using bottled water for nearly everything from baby formula to brushing their teeth while paying the highest water rates in the country to avoid shut-off notices and Child Protective Services. The multi-generational effects of this unsolved crisis coupled with a continued lack of political autonomy and decades of unemployment, arson, and violence are central themes in my writing. As a poet, I often explore balancing frustration at bleak futures with a resistant call to action. I experiment with deconstructing official government and media narratives to better reflect how it feels to live in a city forced to poison itself by a revolving series of state-appointed Emergency Managers. My work at times personifies the physical environment to explore how it informs residents’ self-image. Although my experience is one out of many, it attempts to empower residents by giving voice to our hopes and trials.” (twitter)
Eric Chiles: “I’m as Pennsylvanian as scrapple, soft pretzels, and pierogis, and have spent my entire life in the Rust Belt—college at Penn State, grad school at Indiana University—and I’ve seen Bethlehem Steel employ tens of thousands and then crumble. The Lehigh Valley is the geographic center of the Megalopolis, and is the keyhole of the Keystone State. Today our cornfields sprout mile-long freight warehouses because much of what goes north, south, east, or west funnels through here.”
Sarah Carson: “I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, in a family of autoworkers. I moved away to Chicago after college and have since struggled to reconcile my identity as a daughter of the Rust Belt with my new life in the urban middle class. As I look forward to having a daughter of my own, this poem wrestles with that identity—and what it will mean for her to be the first generation removed from post-industrial life in the Midwest.” (website)
George Bilgere: “I’ve lived here in the scenic Rust Belt for 25 years. Not half my life, but long enough to have seen a lot of rust. Although I grew up in California I was actually born in St. Louis and lived there until I was ten. St. Louis is just as ‘Rust Belt’ as Cleveland. So I guess that yes, I self-identify as a Rust-Belter. But the fact is that I really don’t write much poetry about that.” (website)
Milton Bates: “I’ve lived for all but a dozen of my seventy-plus years in the upper Midwest, most of them in Milwaukee, the self-proclaimed Machine Shop of the World. Like most Rust Belt cities, Milwaukee has had to re-invent itself since the days when my father and grandfather worked in its machine shops. That evolution, together with the city’s history of absorbing wave upon wave of immigrants, makes it a stimulating place in which to live and work. And we do work, whether making heavy machinery or poems. In few cities is the work ethic so revered and so strictly observed, even by artists and writers.”
Cameron Barnett: “I’ve lived in Pittsburgh ever since my family moved here in 1996. My parents grew up here but my siblings and I were all born in California—but I credit being raised in Pittsburgh with turning me into the person I am today. Pittsburgh is often associated with blue collar grit, and this still rings true though our steel mills have fallen silent. For me, grit is an ancestral quality of this city. I come from a lineage of black Americans who escaped slavery and Jim Crow and made it to Pittsburgh, only to fight and desegregate and integrate this city during the Civil Rights era of the ’50s and ’60s. In particular, my grandfather Bishop Charles Foggie stands out as a fighter and champion of liberty. I take his legacy as a family torch to be carried, and this informs my writing. My poems largely have to do with race and family, as well as how those two things intersect in my own personal relationships. Pittsburgh is a city that is at once progressive and antiquated, and this is indicative of the Rust Belt—always seeking to get ahead, but hesitant to cast off the past too quickly. This struggle shaped my family, my childhood, my education, and shapes my poetry today.” (website)
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