Five Poems by Carrie Green
Poet's Note:
I purchased The New Etiquette: The Modern Code of Social Behavior by Margery Wilson (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1937) on a whim at a thrift store. Several years later (also on a whim), I began making stitched erasure poems out of the book. Once I realized I had a project underway, I learned that Wilson was a Kentucky native and had been a pioneer of the early film industry. I hope these poems work in conversation with the original text, disrupting the book’s patriarchal aspects to create a new guide for living in the modern world of the twenty-first century.
I purchased The New Etiquette: The Modern Code of Social Behavior by Margery Wilson (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1937) on a whim at a thrift store. Several years later (also on a whim), I began making stitched erasure poems out of the book. Once I realized I had a project underway, I learned that Wilson was a Kentucky native and had been a pioneer of the early film industry. I hope these poems work in conversation with the original text, disrupting the book’s patriarchal aspects to create a new guide for living in the modern world of the twenty-first century.
[The modern world]
[Grace is not]
[A body thus dropped]
[We hesitate]
[The silverware knows]
Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She hosts the Prompt to Page writing podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.