There are many things about being a flight attendant that make you a political person. For one thing, you always have to keep one eye on the government to make sure U.S. airline jobs stay with U.S. workers. You have to organize to establish reasonable working conditions etc. Add to that having your place of employment in the crosshairs for America’s perceived behavior, you start to consider that behavior.
I began my second manuscript at a time when there was a lot of discord in our country regarding which direction we should take. As a flight attendant, you have access to observing how other people behave in other countries versus the United States, and how people behave and think and speak differently from one state to the next. You’re able to walk around in it. Of course as a little explorer, I find it invaluable.
In addition to my field observations (I’ll call it... :)), I read history books and was reminded of things such as the U.S. Civil War being unwelcomed by the Europeans who wanted our Southern cotton and tobacco. The Europeans were the Super Powers. They could have easily stuck their fingers into our war to speed up the supply of goods. If they had, the outcome could have been quite different...
I also fell in love with our American Super Heroes. I hadn’t realized they had come about during the Great Depression and WWII, when our young nation needed someone to believe in, so we made them up. We gave them good American Values and dressed them in stars and stripes! I can’t help but utterly adore the outright moxy of this country.
I needed a way to pull the poems together in my second manuscript. After showing the manuscript to Martin Corless-Smith and getting his insight, I realized the poems wove together like a dream. An American Dream with recurring images and themes.
While there are no airline specific poems in this manuscript, it was still brought about because of concerns for my profession. It’s funny when people respond to something in your work you didn’t consciously realize was there. One thing people respond to this manuscript is an underlying sense of violence. When I was an undergraduate at Iowa I had a workshop with Mark Levine. He told us if we’re feeling something we don’t have to try to put it into the poem, it will be there. “If something is true, it is audible in a whisper.”
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