Yesterday, Jessica asked about Rust Belt Poets. Today, Mary weighed in, and so did the Scrapper Poet. Seems I just can't ignore this one.
Mary describes the Rust Belt Poet like this: "[There's] so much grit that even if your job doesn't require elbow grease you never really feel fancy. You never want to feel fancy. When you go looking for poetry you find it in excavators and dilapidated silos."
Karen says there are 3 primary qualities of Rust Belt Poetry:
1. Landscapes of debris (closed factories, old buldings, etc.)
2. Nature (in some form or another, even if a poet is writing about the urban landscape
3. Social/Class Issues (layoffs, unemployment, etc...)
I'm stealing from these ladies because I think they can say it better than I can. The interesting thing to me is how late I've come to an awareness that this is who/what I am and where I'm from. I didn't realize that the rest of the world (or the country at least) wasn't like us.
One thing I might have to question, though, is that a Rust Belt Poet should be born after 1969. True, the perspective will be different for someone who was around before the factories started closing, but I think that the mentality and the landscape of the region transcend age. I'm thinking here of Philip Levine, obviously born before '69, and Craig Paulenich, who uses the same debris/nature/class issues combination in his book Drift of the Hunt.
Another question I have is how much does class play into this? Can someone who was born into the upper-middle class, whose parents or grandparents weren't part of the industrial workforce of the last century, fit into this category? Does Rust Belt Poetry overlap Working Class Literature? Or is it a sub-category?
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I just got an email from a friend about my thesis ms, and she said, "If your manuscript was a color, it would be brown and rust orange, and it would smell like stale cigarettes and rotting leaves." Now, this may not be the prettiest description, but I think it's accurate, and I think it means I definitely fit into the category of Rust Belt Poet.
Maybe there will be a movement.
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I took a practice GRE yesterday and scored a 570 on verbal and a 450 on math. I'm happy with my math score (who cares if I don't know how to do fractions!) but I'm hoping to improve my verbal score a tad by tomorrow. Cross your fingers for me.
