“Earthrise,” “Tesla’s Tower,” and “Ever Elvis After All” by Joel Peckham appeared in Issue 46 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about each of these poems.
“Ever Elvis After All”—This one was inspired by the experience of losing my father to Dementia and explores the fascination that I have with the connection between identity and memory. Who are we if not our memories? I am also interested in memory as time travel and how the moment we are in connects us to every other moment. What does this mean in the context of grief?
“Tesla’s Tower” is my attempt to write the strangest, most uncomfortable love poem I possibly could. And I think I succeeded. It started years ago with just a few bits and pieces on Tesla, who was a genius and kind of an absolute nutter. But I was really interested in this idea of how he saw the spiritual and communal possibilities of electricity. From there it’s just free association.
“Earthrise” is about looking back on one’s life and really seeing it for the first time as if from space. How terrifying and beautiful it is.
What was the most difficult aspect in completing this set?
They were all pretty difficult, actually. Some poems come fast, these didn’t and all went through many revisions over many years and changed profoundly. They deal with deeply personal subject matter, and I had to work to find the courage to let them do what they needed to do and go where they needed to go.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Let’s go with Danez Smith’s Bluff. Brilliant, painful, important, lyrical work.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Percival Everett. Just a beautiful writer, maybe the most important American author since Ralph Ellison.
Our thanks to Joel for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “Earthrise,” “Tesla’s Tower,” and “Ever Elvis After All” here.
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Joel Peckham has published eleven collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: new and selected poems (SFAU) and Gone the Sun (UnCollected Press) and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems). With Robert Vivian, he also co-edited the anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. He is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University.