Yo…
Welcome: April is National Poetry Month.
It’s 2024 and nothing still rhymes with orange.
I’m surprised Poetry doesn’t have a bigger affect on our lives. Especially considering the technologically driven way we live. You’d think Poetry would be bigger than it is.
I mean it’s quick, it’s fun and when done well it’s packed with artistic goodness. Like a literary vitamin for those that don’t have the time or the attention span of a novel. Or even a short story.
Poetry can be fun. A strange truth, yeah?
Somewhere along our journey clumsy burnt out English teachers made poetry dry and academic. TV sitcoms ridiculed the spaced out hippie beatnik. There just didn’t seem any space or room in our lives for serious legitimate Poetry.
The best Poetry accurately captures a moment. Frozen in time you can get the luxury of self reflection which granted not many people want. Especially if it’s a regret or a mistake.
No matter what the moment may be…it happened. We’ve all said words we wish we could take back. We’ve all had moments of pure and utter bliss (some even with our clothes on).
The trick is to aim on getting it right more often than not.
I’m glad we have a month to celebrate poetry but really it should become a lifestyle. Valentine’s Day is nice but romance is a full time job, not a random date in mid-February.
I wish I brewed some seriously serious tea more often; to sit down with a dog eared copy of a poetry book.
So: won’t you celebrate with me National Poetry Month? For that, I recommend The Music Was Just Getting Good by
. Published this past January.“I noticed that I was leaning more into grief which makes sense because I started writing this during the start of the pandemic.”
~ Alicia Cook said this to me about writing The Music Was Just Getting Good
If I ask you about what comes to mind when I say Edgar Allan Poe you’ll probably conjure up Goth images...an obsession with death and darkness, black cats and ravens.
And sadly, that’s not a correct Poe shorthand, rather that’s an inaccurate perception.
Okay, yes he wrote The Tell-Tale Heart but Poe also wrote science-fiction as well as lots of journalism and essays for literary journals and periodicals. In his time he was known for his own style of literary criticism. Poe was Rotten Tomatoes; the go-to-guy for criticism on books and writing.
Poe also wrote a substantial number of satires, hoaxes and humorous pieces. Yeah, Poe wrote comedy! (Perhaps that’s the inspiration for the Raven’s “Nevermore” quote? #RimShot!)
None of those Fun Facts fits with our conventional image of Poe...the guy who stayed up all night listening to The Cure and writing The Fall of the House of Usher by creepy candlelight.
I kept circling back to Poe and that flawed public perception as I sat down to talk to poet Alicia Cook.
Sure, maybe that’s good branding or the profitable benefit of owning a niche: perhaps that whole Poe image works more than it hinders.
The thing is Edgar Allan Poe is gone…we can only get to know him through his work, now. Thankfully, Alicia is here and it turns out she’s more than her work.
Alicia Cook is a writer and poet from New Jersey. (A State with a long tradition of poetry: from Bruce Springsteen to Allen Ginsberg to Jon Bon Jovi. Livin’ On A Prayer is profoundly moving as you hear Tommy and Gina grapple with their fate.)
The Music Was Just Getting Good is the third and final book of her poetry mixtape trilogy: it follows Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately and Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back.
If you’ve been online you’ve probably seen some variation of Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back. It went viral because it effortlessly captures that I can’t get out of bed and deal with life emotion.
In her writing and work Alicia’s themes are grief…death and loss. (Death can mean the loss of a relationship like when you break up with someone as much as a physical demise.) She also writes about addiction and the harsh impact it has on family and friends.
These are dark and heavy topics…you’d believe she would be going on road trips with Edgar Allan Poe. They’re both intense poets, right?
“There’s no getting through grief. You learn to coexist with it.”
~ Alicia Cook shared this insight
It turns out like Edgar Allan Poe, Alicia Cook is funny.
And charming.
In this attached My Summer Lair conversation she shares one of her favourite comedies, that was a movie I was not expecting her to reveal but I’m so glad she did. It cracks me up, as well.
In A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak there’s a bewitching Robert Bloch quote. (Bloch is the horror writer who wrote Psycho a 1959 novel. Robert Bloch is Stephen King before Stephen King.)
From page 12: “You know what we all have in common and also have in common with Poe?” Bloch asked. “A great sense of humor. It’s almost impossible to do this without a great sense of humor. It’s an essential part of the basic equipment that you need to do this. So horror writers are almost always very funny people, and that always surprises people. A sense of humor is about the last thing people attribute to Poe, but if you know anything about writing horror, it’s the first thing you would attribute to him. He wasn’t funny despite writing great horror. He wrote great horror because he was funny and because he was a lot of other things. You must look past the relentlessly marketed image.”
BAM! There it is. In this My Summer Lair conversation I asked poet Alicia Cook what makes her shoot iced coffee through her nose. Heh. Which is fantastic, because nobody (far as I know…) ever asked Edgar Allan Poe that. (And maybe, they should have…)
So yeah, let’s hear what the poet who wrote The Music Was Just Getting Good has to say about life and death and karaoke and comedy and string cheese.
Happy National Poetry month, yo!
Always says word up to fresh poetry…
Sammy Younan
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Sammy Younan is the affable host of My Summer Lair podcast: think NPR’s Fresh Air meets Kevin Smith: interviews & impressions on Pop Culture.
New Book Smell: The Music Was Just Getting Good