“Daughter”, “Raw Edge”, and “Baby Buggy Boogie-Woogie” by Jennifer Hambrick originally appeared in Issue 30 and can be read here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-jennifer-hambrick.
We’d love to hear more about this set.
“Baby Buggy Boogie-Woogie” was born of an unlikely pairing. One day I thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting to combine the New York City street grid in Piet Mondrian’s famous painting Broadway Boogie Woogie with a stay-at-home mom’s experience pushing a baby buggy on a power walk around her suburban neighborhood? I wanted to capture the visual bebop of Mondrian’s painting in the language of my poem, so I let my ear guide me through the writing of the poem – its rhythm, its slant rhyme – and, in the same freewheeling spirit, I let some playful coinages slip in.
The first two lines of “Daughter” flashed into my head while I was commuting home from work up the freeway one Friday afternoon. I don’t know why. I wanted to explore in mother-daughter terms the idea that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.
There was a double inspiration for “Raw Edge.” The raw, rough stitching in Andrea Myers’ fabric sculpture Zig Zagged reminded me of my grandmother, a phenomenal seamstress who, during World War II and as a single mother, kept herself and her four children fed, clothed, and sheltered by tailoring dead soldiers’ business suits into skirt suits their widows could wear to work in their new roles as family breadwinners. My grandmother was a Kentucky woman with eighth-grade-level education and possessed tremendous natural gifts of creativity, wisdom, and inner strength. In “Raw Edge: i grieve how much more my grandmother might have been able to do with her talents had her circumstances been different.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
Writing these poems didn’t cause me any kind of grief, so I’m going to change the question a bit to: “What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you?” When I get an idea for a poem, I sometimes forget that it’s okay to start writing before I know intellectually how the poem “goes.” Stated differently, I sometimes forget how much of my own writing process is guided by my intuition once my fingers hit the keys. And when I start writing a poem, I remember how exhilarating – and surprising – it is to step out into that unknown.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Very tough question. So many good books. One that comes immediately to mind is Miles J. Unger’s Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World (2018). It’s a wonderfully researched, clearly written exploration and summary of the various artistic, intellectual, cultural, and personal influences that led Picasso to paint his pathbeaking canvas Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. An intelligent and straightforward read about artistic modernism, Unger’s book is required reading for anyone interested in Western art and culture in the last two centuries.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Another very tough question. So many wonderful authors. I would love to chat with Erik Larson about the arts and crafts of journalistic research and writing history in a way that reads like fiction and feels relevant today. I would also like to chat with Alexander McCall Smith, whose heartfelt, lyrical descriptions of Botswana take me to a world I wish I lived in.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am very excited about the two full-length manuscripts I completed recently – one is a collection of free verse poetry, the other is a collection of haibun – and I am looking for publishers for them. I am also collaborating with a well-known visual artist and an acclaimed calligrapher on an interdisciplinary exhibition piece. And I am writing lots of new poems and starting work on a series of children’s books.
Our thanks to Jennifer for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Jennifer’s poems, “Daughter”, “Raw Edge”, and “Baby Buggy Boogie-Woogie”, here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-jennifer-hambrick.
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A multi-Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Jennifer Hambrick won the 2020 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Prize of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for her collection In the High Weeds, won First Place in the 2018 Haiku Society of America Haibun Award Competition, and won the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize. Hambrick is featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper and online column, American Life in Poetry; was appointed the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at historic Bryn Du Mansion, Granville, Ohio; and authored the collections Joyride: A Haibun Road Trip (Red Moon Press) and Unscathed (NightBallet Press), nominated for the Ohioana Book Award. Hundreds of her poems appear in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, the Santa Clara Review, The Main Street Rag, POEM, The San Pedro River Review, Maryland Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Mad River Review, Oyster River Pages, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, The Haibun Journal, Frogpond, Mayfly, Wales Haiku Journal, Haiku Canada Review, Shamrock: The Journal of the Irish Haiku Society, the major Japanese newspapers The Asahi Shimbun and The Mainichi, and in many other journals and anthologies. A frequent recipient of poetry commissions, Jennifer Hambrick has also received numerous awards and other recognitions for her poetry, including from Tokyo’s NHK World TV, Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Ohio Poetry Association, and others. Also a classical musician and public radio broadcaster and web producer, Jennifer Hambrick is an Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist in creative writing and lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com.