Advice from Winnemac Park
This was the summer of two milestones, personal and professional: I moved into the home I bought with my girlfriend and their wife, and I banished the uncredited Robert Frost quotation on every landing page of the big poetry website to the dustbin of history. I am so fortunate: safe, healthy, generally content, but also constantly wondering what now. One of the Perpetual Whats with which I answer and re-ask that question is how do I trick my brain into writing anything longer than 300-character-limited shitposts, when I could instead wander around said home picking up objects and putting them down again, reading, snacking, listening to music, etc. So I have taken myself out to a patio to listen to wind and trains and send you an email about poetry and poetry-adjacent things. It's an answer enough for today.
Two good queer poetry collections I've read lately
The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies captivated me. It's epistolary, conversational, personal and political. Here are some poems from it including birds and bones and bodies of light.
Ten Bridges I've Burnt by Brontez Purnell is a memoir in prose poems that weaves wonderfully between hilarious and heartbreaking. It makes sense that Eileen Myles blurbed it here; it reminded me a lot of my favorite lines of theirs.
One monthly reading you should attend in Chicago
I've started co-hosting Tuesday Funk at Hopleaf monthly, which means I've started cold emailing local poets whose work I've enjoyed and asking them if they'll come read their work in a chill multi-genre live lit setting. Fortunately, everyone has been rad about this. Come through this week if you can.
Some tree grief mixed with gratitude
This morning one of my regular dog walk routes was interrupted by half of an enormous tree that had fallen across the path. "Oh no," said one of the young men walking into the park behind me, "it's our favorite willow." A female cardinal dove in and out of the waving leaves and I heard someone else recalling that her sister had gotten married beneath that tree. And I remembered "what will survive us has already begun" and kept walking under a sky that will look different tomorrow when the fallen willow limbs are moved away. But of course it always does: sky every day. (Still my favorite three-word poem, a dang decade after I wrote about it).
There's a lot to hope for: wonder alongside worry. Here's to building in a wreck like the poem says, and getting wrecked cathartically with words, forever and on.
Yours,
Erin
PS - You can still get this zine I am very proud of editing from my pals at Bitza Press. You can also get chamoy peach rings at Harvestime and eat them after a sunny bike ride or in a car on the way to a campsite if you want to have a great late summer flavor experience. Peach rings can also be a poem, I just haven’t figured out how, so let me know if you do.