November 27, 2017
WEED WHACKER
—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets
__________
Nancy Krygowski: “I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where I came to consciousness as the steel mills closed and the downtown emptied and boarded itself up. I moved to New England (because, I thought, that’s where poets come from). Then San Francisco (again, poets). But those places were too easily, too obviously, beautiful—blue skies and candy colored houses, little bakeries with happy hippy-haired workers. I missed having to search for beauty, missed, also, how emptiness breeds, needs creation. So I came back—to buildings that still hold the mills’ smoke, to potholes and aproned church ladies who sell pierogis during Lent. This sensibility—how to find the beautiful in the grit, in the destruction—guides my writing.” (website)
The Fall 2017 issue is dedicated to poets of the Rust Belt, a region of the United States stretching from the Great Lakes to the upper Midwest. The name refers to the deindustrialization, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector. One explanation for the results of the 2016 U.S. elections was the shifting political attitude of this region, and we thought we’d check in and find a first-hand account of what’s going on through the poet’s eye. Twenty-one poets contributed to this feature, chosen from over 2,000 submissions. In the conversation section, editor Timothy Green—himself a Rust Belt poet—talks to Detroit-based psychotherapist and poet Ken Meisel. Having lived in the Rust Belt his entire life, Meisel offers deep insights into the region’s psyche, and discusses a range of other topics, from marital love to a model for turning his art into charity.