Sara Omer: \u201cThe Skeleton Caf\u00e9,\u201d describes the everyday goings-on of an endearingly dreary caf\u00e9 for the undead that feels very familiar. What was your inspiration for this poem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eleanor Ball: My inspiration was my favorite coffee mug<\/a>, which features a whimsical drawing of a few skeletons reading. These skeletons sport trendy sunglasses and jaunty berets, smiling as they flip through their books, steaming coffee and cracked iPhones scattered across the table in front of them. It\u2019s certainly much cheerier than what I ended up writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I bought the mug at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe a couple years ago. The drawings are inspired by the work of Jos\u00e9 Guadalupe Posada<\/a>, a 19th-century Mexican artist best known for his illustrations of skeletons, which have since become a central aspect of Day of the Dead imagery. Sometime in April I was in one of those terribly itchy moods where you want to write something but have no ideas at all, so I just started describing everything around me in the kitchen, including the mug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SO: Could you describe how you use repetition to create rhythm and subvert reader expectations? The change from \u201csmells like embalmed women\u201d to \u201csmells like spoiled fruit and false prophets\u201d was particularly hard-hitting, and the repetition of \u201cskeleton\u201d so melodic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n EB: I love repetition; it\u2019s one of my favorite poetic devices. It must have something to do with how our brains are hardwired to respond to it (I think\u2014I\u2019m not a doctor, so don\u2019t quote me), but I light up whenever I hear, read, or write it. While revising this poem, I actually forced myself to reel the repetition back a bit; the poem originally ended with some variation of the first sentence, \u201cClicking teeth keep time in the skeleton cafe,\u201d but then I couldn\u2019t get it to land quite right, so I decided it wasn\u2019t worth the fuss and cut it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I still wanted the beginning and the end of the poem to mirror each other in some way, but I didn\u2019t want the mirror to be perfect. I wanted it to feel cracked, \u201coff,\u201d like how the world of the skeletons is just a little bit \u201coff\u201d from our world and the skeletons are a little lost and off-kilter themselves. First, I changed \u201cThe skeletons speak in the grating of bone \/ against bone\u201d to \u201cthe skeletons go on arguing \/ in the basslines of chants for the dead.\u201d The \u201carguing\u201d lines intensify and subtly call back to the \u201cspeaking\u201d lines. Then, a more overt mirroring: \u201cEvery table is lit \/ by a yellow candle, which smells like embalmed women \/ and cannot be blown out\u201d becomes the final lines of the poem, \u201cevery table is lit by a yellow candle, and every candle \/ smells like spoiled fruit and false prophets \/ and cannot be blown out.\u201d Until this point, the poem has been written in couplets, but \u201cand cannot be blown out\u201d hangs alone off the edge of the poem as its own stanza. I wanted the end of the poem to feel unbalanced, for the form to feel unresolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SO: The skeleton behind the counter at the caf\u00e9 felt particularly \u201cfleshed out.\u201d What advice would you give other poets looking to create richly relatable characters in short spaces?<\/p>\n\n\n\n EB: Specificity, specificity, specificity! I\u2019m always revising towards specificity. Specificity helps you craft memorable images and narrow down what you\u2019re communicating about your characters and theme. So, for example, my barista skeleton is not just \u201creading behind the counter;\u201d we meet him with his \u201ceye sockets glued to the pages of the latest \/ vampire\/skeleton romance novel.\u201d He doesn\u2019t just buy \u201ccandles and plants,\u201d but rather \u201ccandles the color of fool\u2019s gold, succulents \/ coated in yellowing dust.\u201d I should clarify that adding specificity is not necessarily the same as adding length, though that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done in these examples. By switching out a few key words, you can dramatically increase the specificity of your lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also think it helped that as I wrote about the skeletons, I wanted to make sure I was not just describing<\/em> them, but writing about how they related<\/em> to the world around them. Are they part of a skeleton \u201cin-group,\u201d flipping through newspapers and smoking with their skeleton buddies? Are they perhaps a skeleton in an \u201cout-group,\u201d like the barista who does not make enough obols an hour for his work? What are the objects they interact with, and what meaning do those objects have to them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n SO: Can you recommend poetry by yourself or others that blends the mundane with the dark fantastic like \u201cThe Skeleton Caf\u00e9?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n EB: Curious Specimens<\/em> is a fabulous anthology from Sundress Publications that features a lot of great work in this vein. Like all of their e-anths, it\u2019s free to download!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m also enormously inspired by work that blends history or religion with modern life. \u201cMedieval Mystic Margery Kempe in Tesco\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Laura Varnum in The<\/em>\u00a0London Magazine<\/em>\u00a0and \u201cWikihow for Sainthood\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Elena Sichrovsky in HAD <\/em>are two recent favorites. I really admire Laura\u2019s eye for detail and Elena\u2019s wicked sense of humor, and I tried to emulate both of them in \u201cThe Skeleton Caf\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n SO: What other projects do you have in the works right now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n EB: I still consider myself to be at the beginning of my writing journey, so I don\u2019t have any long-form projects in the works. Right now, I\u2019m writing some poems here, some flash there, working towards my graduate degree, trying to stay sane. We\u2019ll see where it leads me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n SO: Do you write to music, and if so, what kind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n EB: I sometimes write fiction to music, but I can\u2019t do the same with poetry. It keeps me from hearing the rhythms of the language, which sounds pretentious but is unfortunately true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sara Omer: \u201cThe Skeleton Caf\u00e9,\u201d describes the everyday goings-on of an endearingly dreary caf\u00e9 for the undead that feels very familiar. What was your inspiration for this poem? Eleanor Ball: My inspiration was my favorite coffee mug, which features a whimsical drawing of a few skeletons reading. These skeletons sport trendy sunglasses and jaunty berets, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","ph_site_tiers_settings":[[{"Price":"1.00","Tier_name":"Voyager","Tier_id":"prod_PbejBstAbzGx6D","Selected":true,"Tier_status":"publish"},{"Price":"2.00","Tier_name":"Pioneer","Tier_id":"prod_Pbekxd4dT46vIU","Selected":true,"Tier_status":"publish"},{"Price":"5.00","Tier_name":"Cosmonaut","Tier_id":"prod_PbenhwsNUd6XSB","Selected":true,"Tier_status":"publish"}]],"_ph_post_tiers":["prod_PbejBstAbzGx6D","prod_Pbekxd4dT46vIU","prod_PbenhwsNUd6XSB"],"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[2298,1693,531,615,614],"class_list":["post-5428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-eleanor-ball","tag-july-2024","tag-orions-belt","tag-orions-belt-interview","tag-sara-omer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5429,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5428\/revisions\/5429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/on.patronhunt.com\/orionsbeltmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}