Episode 117: This Episode Smells Delicious

What were you wearing in the ‘90s, Slushies? Sleeveless flannel and crochet? Paco Rabanne? We’re beguiled by Emily Pulfer-Terino’s poems on this episode as we discuss how she slides us back to the ‘90s. She has us sniffing magazine perfume inserts and marveling at the properly cranky voice she invokes for an epigraph, borrowed from Vogue’s letters to the editor. What were we thinking wearing all those shreds? Only the girls on those glossy pages know for sure. For more context, check out Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast, You Must Remember This, and her recent deep dive into the bonkers eroticism of the 1990s. Plus, Sentimental Garbage’s episode on Dirty Dancing featuring Curtis Sittenfeld.  For a great collection of poems that draws its title from grunge-era jargon (kinda, sorta, wink, wink), we recommend a book we love by our pal Daniel Nester:  Harsh Realm: My 1990s.   This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show.    At the table: Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest     Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays the Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.   Author website: http://emilypulferterino.com/ Instagram: @epulferterino Grunge & Glory “You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding. At least I’ll know where to find my new wardrobe this year...in the nearest dumpster…talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes. Tsk, tsk.”—(Letter to the Editor)[1]   What’s more glorious than a girl in a field,  curled in the whorl of a deer bed, alfalfa    haloing her dreams of fashion magazines while she plies matted hay, untatting her world?   Bales score the landscape, parceling endlessness, parsing this solo tableau,   while her heroes wrench their music  into being in Seattle, gray, time zones away.   What’s grunge if not her dense crochet of castoff couture curated from dumpsters   and worn with a frisson of pride and shame:  flowering nightgown, old ski boots, sweater    turned lace in places by moths and age? And this field like where models pose   in Vogue, each page itself a piece of land and an ethos framed inside a storyboard.     Scala Naturae   Like prying pods of milkweed                so those astral seeds effuse—   unseaming magazine ads for perfume.                Anointing my wrists with scented glue,    running each over the edge of a page,                testing scents I aspired to buy   and classifying my olfactory taxonomy.               Grass evoked the world I’d known   with hints of rain and magnolia               slight as fog above an unmown field.   DNA’s rosemary, oakmoss, and mint,               ancient and clear as purpose; glass    spiraled bottle signifying sentience                and enduring iteration. Both    ethereal and hyperreal, Destiny                offered apricots, orchids, and roses--   bottle opaque as an eyelid,                veil of petals sheer as promise.   Samsara was amber, sandalwood,                ylang ylang, peach. Syllabically lulling,    its s and a extending, repeating, suggesting               endlessness. Cycle of birth and death   rebranded as serenity in ongoingness.                Angel’s burst of praline and patchouli   lit the crystal facets of that star,               making heaven of my pulse and ordinary air.   [1]  Wynne Bittlinger, letter to the editor in Vogue US, February 1993