Episode 144: It’s a Big Hair Day!

When Marion pops up on Zoom with her curls blown out to smooth newscaster perfection, it’s a hot topic and one that offers a perfect lead-in to the first poem up for discussion, “Your Hair Wants Cutting” by this episode’s featured poet, Michael Montlack. The three poems we’re considering take inspiration from the Mad Hatter character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We discuss, Slushies, how much, if any, contextual framing is needed to guide the reader when poems refer to a character who resides in our collective imagination. We also talk about local and regional idioms, and for Kathy, how difficult they are to unlearn (shout out to Pittsburgh!). Marion accidentally bestows a new nickname on Jason. Dagne has an opinion about how speech is rendered within a poem: italics or quotation marks. She’s team italics, Slushies, which are you? While thinking about the line in these poems; Marion refers to Jason’s excellent essay on the history and theory of the line from his book Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Another poem in the batch has Marion recalling Jason’s poem “Wester.” As always, thanks for listening! At the table: Dagne Forrest, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and Lisa Zerkle Michael Montlack's third poetry collection COSMIC IDIOT will be published by Saturnalia. He is the editor the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe and other magazines. In 2022, his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Contest for LGBTQIA+ poets. He lives in NYC and teaches poetry at NYU and CUNY City College. https://www.facebook.com/michael.montlack https://www.instagram.com/michaelmontlack (website) https://www.michaelmontlack.com/ “Your Hair Wants Cutting” my grandmother would say, sitting there at her window, monitoring the restless crows. Her robe nearly as ancient as she. Since when are you concerned with fashion? I once dared to ask. I was seventeen, restless as those crows. I knew she wasn’t talking about my curls. Plumage, she used to call it when I was a boy. Sit down, little peacock—your hair wants cutting. Even then I knew it was a cutting remark. Laden. Throwing cold kettle water on my fire. I reminded myself that she was a widow. And was glad that at least I would never cause a woman to suffer such grief. I reminded her how I donned a hat most days. She stared me up and down, her eyes like the ocean’s green cold. Clever. Your kind seems to have a clever answer for everything … I swallowed the indictment. Why not make yourself useful, she said, putting down her tea cup, eyeing the trash on her tray. I was glad to oblige, happy to depart before she could notice the low waist of my trousers, let alone the height of my heels. Muchier Picture me on a grand terrace, tipping my hat. Crossing a bridge over the river of defeat— it’s definitely a state of ascent. Being owed rather than owing. A blatant triumph against the conventional. A la Lord Byron. A monocle without glass, worn for style. It’s an advance for a memoir about a life you haven’t yet lived. Bound to be lost on some but admired by all. Likely absent during the lessons on common subjects: Algebra, Classic Literature, Biology. More devoted to the mastery of the quaintest arts: Porcelain, Calligraphy, Tapestry Weaving, Drag. As ephemeral and ethereal as a bubble. It’s not something you adopt. It’s something that abducts you. Enviers call it utter madness, but the muchiest of the muchier won’t even fathom the phrase. Inheritance There wasn’t much to leave—my sister, also suspiciously unwed, took the cottage and the wagon. But our mother had insisted that the tea set should be mine. “It’s dainty and a bit chipped. Like you,” she chortled on her deathbed. I failed to see the humor but took it just the same. Knowing my sister would likely surrender it to the church, where the nuns might put it to good use but never appreciate its finery, as that would be vanity. I much rather hear my motley chums slurp from it as they sit steeped in my ridiculous riddles. I never admitted how I crafted them at night, alone in bed, in the quiet twilight, the hour I imagined reading bedtime stories to the children I never had. An apprentice son would’ve been nice, to hand down millinery techniques. Instead I had the ghost of one, there in my workshop, where imaginary fights erupted over whose turn it was to sweep up the felt or sharpen the scissors. Of course, I appeared mad, a much better impression to leave than the riddle of my bachelorhood. Sometimes I wanted to smash the porcelain cups, chuck them at that bloody caterpillar stinking up the forest with his opium. Why not? There was no one to inherit my pittance. No one to be trusted with my legacy… until the appearance of this girl, at once strange yet so familiar. I quite liked her. The way she held her own with me. If ever I had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be as brave as she. Defending the poor Knave of Hearts, accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. There in that courtroom, I almost lost my head but finally found a beneficiary.