Alienated from poetry? A guest post by #BLauthor11 Andrew Rihn

"Injured Brain = Total Abstinence,"
mixed media collage,
by Brett Stout

I haven't written a poem in roughly two years. As strange as that sentence is for me to write, it is equally strange to see my poem “Tow Truck” appear online. It is the last poem I wrote.

It is strange because two years on, I'm really happy with the poem. At the time, I was writing a lot of poems about alienation: alienation from God, alienation from each other, alienation from ourselves. Most of my poems started from images, from things I've seen that could be excavated as metaphors. In this case, the idea for the poem began by seeing tow trucks that appeared to have crosses on them, and considering the phrase “my cross to bear.”

I was also looking at spaces where alienation became somewhat literal: the space between customer and cashier, between the artist and model, or in the case of “Tow Truck,” the space between driver and passenger. I'm interested in the relationship between intimacy and distance. It is intimate to sit next to someone in the cab of a truck, yet the relationship is quite distant. Proximity may not be fulfilling, yet sometimes it is all we have.

#BLauthor 11: Andrew Rihn

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#BLauthor11 is poet Andrew Rihn.

Andrew Rihn is a writer from Canton, OH.  He is the author of several chapbooks of poetry, including Foreclosure Dogs (Winged City Press), Outside the Clinic (Unlikely Stories), and The Hunger Dictionary (Night Ballet Press).  He works as a writing tutor at Stark State College.

Note: Winged City Press is another project by BL co-editor Teneice Durrant. She selected this Rihn poem for us; read about why below, and be sure to visit WCP, which publishes chapbooks of both fiction and poetry.

For now, here’s a new poem by Andrew: