When Marion pops up on Zoom with her curls blown out to smooth newscaster perfection, it’s a hot topic and one that offers a perfect lead-in to the first poem up for discussion, “Your Hair Wants Cutting” by this episode’s featured poet, Michael Montlack. The three poems we’re considering take inspiration from the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We discuss, Slushies, how much, if any, contextual framing is needed to guide the reader when poems refer to a character who resides in our collective imagination.
We also talk about local and regional idioms, and for Kathy, how difficult they are to unlearn (shout out to Pittsburgh!). Marion accidentally bestows a new nickname on Jason. Dagne has an opinion about how speech is rendered within a poem: italics or quotation marks. She’s team italics, Slushies, which are you? While thinking about the line in these poems; Marion refers to Jason’s excellent essay on the history and theory of the line from his book Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Another poem in the batch has Marion recalling Jason’s poem “Wester.” As always, thanks for listening!
At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Lisa Zerkle
Michael Montlack's third poetry collection COSMIC IDIOT will be published by Saturnalia. He is the editor the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe and other magazines. In 2022, his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Contest for LGBTQIA+ poets. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry at NYU and CUNY City College.
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(website) https://www.michaelmontlack.com/
“Your Hair Wants Cutting”
my grandmother would say, sitting there at her window,
monitoring the restless crows. Her robe nearly as ancient as she.
Since when are you concerned with fashion? I once dared to ask.
I was seventeen, restless as those crows. I knew she wasn’t talking
about my curls. Plumage, she used to call it when I was a boy.
Sit down, little peacock—your hair wants cutting. Even then I knew
it was a cutting remark. Laden. Throwing cold kettle water on my fire.
I reminded myself that she was a widow. And was glad that at least
I would never cause a woman to suffer such grief. I reminded her
how I donned a hat most days. She stared me up and down, her eyes
like the ocean’s green cold. Clever. Your kind seems to have a clever
answer for everything … I swallowed the indictment. Why not make
yourself useful, she said, putting down her tea cup, eyeing the trash
on her tray. I was glad to oblige, happy to depart before she could
notice the low waist of my trousers, let alone the height of my heels.
Muchier
Picture me on a grand terrace, tipping my hat.
Crossing a bridge over the river of defeat—
it’s definitely a state of ascent. Being owed
rather than owing. A blatant triumph against
the conventional. A la Lord Byron. A monocle
without glass, worn for style. It’s an advance
for a memoir about a life you haven’t yet lived.
Bound to be lost on some but admired by all.
Likely absent during the lessons on common
subjects: Algebra, Classic Literature, Biology.
More devoted to the mastery of the quaintest
arts: Porcelain, Calligraphy, Tapestry Weaving,
Drag. As ephemeral and ethereal as a bubble.
It’s not something you adopt. It’s something
that abducts you. Enviers call it utter madness,
but the muchiest of the muchier won’t even
fathom the phrase.
Inheritance
There wasn’t much to leave—my sister,
also suspiciously unwed, took the cottage
and the wagon. But our mother had insisted
that the tea set should be mine. “It’s dainty
and a bit chipped. Like you,” she chortled
on her deathbed. I failed to see the humor
but took it just the same. Knowing my sister
would likely surrender it to the church, where
the nuns might put it to good use but never
appreciate its finery, as that would be vanity.
I much rather hear my motley chums slurp
from it as they sit steeped in my ridiculous
riddles. I never admitted how I crafted them
at night, alone in bed, in the quiet twilight,
the hour I imagined reading bedtime stories
to the children I never had. An apprentice son
would’ve been nice, to hand down millinery
techniques. Instead I had the ghost of one,
there in my workshop, where imaginary fights
erupted over whose turn it was to sweep up
the felt or sharpen the scissors. Of course,
I appeared mad, a much better impression
to leave than the riddle of my bachelorhood.
Sometimes I wanted to smash the porcelain
cups, chuck them at that bloody caterpillar
stinking up the forest with his opium. Why
not? There was no one to inherit my pittance.
No one to be trusted with my legacy… until
the appearance of this girl, at once strange
yet so familiar. I quite liked her. The way
she held her own with me. If ever I had
a daughter, I would have wanted her to be
as brave as she. Defending the poor Knave
of Hearts, accused of stealing the Queen’s
tarts. There in that courtroom, I almost lost
my head but finally found a beneficiary.
