About the Poems - JR
About the Poems
by Jessy Randall I wrote "Home" after visiting Rochester, New York, after many years of being away. I drove around with a friend one night and we kept feeling almost, but not quite, lost. The last line is a reference to a line of dialog in the film Broadcast News: the Albert Brooks character tells the Holly Hunter character "I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time," and of course they both know exactly the place he means. "Welcome to the Fun Head" is one of a series of poems inspired by Le Marchand's Fortune Teller. Dream dictionaries have interested me since I first saw one in library school. They're so sincere, so sure of themselves, even though of course they contradict one another and are full of meanings for things people seldom dream about, like monkeys or eyebrows. "Diving Up" is a poem about childhood and motherhood mixed together. The English dog is Kipper from the TV show with that name. The caterpillar is of course the Very Hungry Caterpillar. There's a German word, auftauchen, which means appear, but appears to mean dive up (since tauchen means dive and auf can mean up, as in wach auf, wake up). "Laundry Haiku" needs no explanation, sadly. "Blast! Goes the Icyhot" is a poem about contradiction and ambiguity. I've never used the product but have always loved the name and feel like I frequently experience a form of icyhotness.