Post Poet Pop, Episode 16 features the poet Olivia Muenz. Olivia is a disabled writer from New York. She won the 2022 Gatewood Prize for the poetry collection, I Feel Fine published by Switchback Books this year and which we will be putting under the spotlight today. Olivia was an undergraduate at New York University and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where she received the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award in prose and served as an editor for the New Delta Review.
In I Feel Fine, Olivia writes: “Here is your brain on. Music. I’ll give it to you Einstein. I’ll take you on a boat and make you watch it sink. Do you believe me now. Is anybody alive out there. Can anybody hear me.” What you can’t see here is that the first sentence ends at the word on and the next sentence is just the word “Music” or at least that is how the punctuation (periods only throughout the entire book) seeks to redetermine our literacy.
There is a symbolic formation in Olivia’s poetics that doubly represents what the prose is pushing forward—namely that the life of a disabled person remains a life both equal in stature to any other human individual but endures challenges not faced by most. The period, in her sentence structure, symbolizes the multiple fulcrums that Olivia has and continues to face. You will hear today that it took Olivia years and years of a frustrating journey through a medical multiplex of doctors who struggled to get her to her more recently given clinical diagnosis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, or EDS, which generally speaking affects the body’s connective tissue but that does not at all tell the entire story. When the body’s connective tissue is affected by the mechanism of EDS it causes severe pain, frequent migraines, and in some instances can make a person’s blood vessels so fragile that they can harden and fracture or break. And this is all mostly new information (like, within the last decade). New clinical understanding also finds that EDS can potentially be tied to neurodivergence and fibromyalgia. So, Einstein, we are here to take you on a boat ride and sink that boat so you can better listen and acknowledge.
Learn more about Olivia's work at OliviaMuenz.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
