Painted Bride Quarterlys Slush Pile

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: Poe