What were you wearing in the ‘90s, Slushies? Sleeveless flannel and crochet? Paco Rabanne? We’re beguiled by Emily Pulfer-Terino’s poems on this episode as we discuss how she slides us back to the ‘90s. She has us sniffing magazine perfume inserts and marveling at the properly cranky voice she invokes for an epigraph, borrowed from Vogue’s letters to the editor. What were we thinking wearing all those shreds? Only the girls on those glossy pages know for sure. For more context, check out Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast, You Must Remember This, and her recent deep dive into the bonkers eroticism of the 1990s. Plus, Sentimental Garbage’s episode on Dirty Dancing featuring Curtis Sittenfeld. 

For a great collection of poems that draws its title from grunge-era jargon (kinda, sorta, wink, wink), we recommend a book we love by our pal Daniel Nester:  Harsh Realm: My 1990s.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor Wilbur Records, who kindly introduced us to the artist is A.M.Mills whose song “Spaghetti with Loretta” now opens our show. 

At the table: Jason Schneiderman, Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Samantha Neugebauer, and Dagne Forrest

Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, The Collagist, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, Juked, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook, Stays the Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been granted a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, and she lives in Western Massachusetts.

Author website: http://emilypulferterino.com/

Instagram: @epulferterino

Grunge & Glory

“You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding. At least I’ll know where to find my new wardrobe this year...in the nearest dumpster…talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes. Tsk, tsk.”—(Letter to the Editor)[1]

What’s more glorious than a girl in a field, 

curled in the whorl of a deer bed, alfalfa 

haloing her dreams of fashion magazines

while she plies matted hay, untatting her world?

Bales score the landscape, parceling

endlessness, parsing this solo tableau,

while her heroes wrench their music 

into being in Seattle, gray, time zones away.

What’s grunge if not her dense crochet

of castoff couture curated from dumpsters

and worn with a frisson of pride and shame: 

flowering nightgown, old ski boots, sweater 

turned lace in places by moths and age?

And this field like where models pose

in Vogue, each page itself a piece of land

and an ethos framed inside a storyboard.

Scala Naturae

Like prying pods of milkweed 

            so those astral seeds effuse—

unseaming magazine ads for perfume. 

            Anointing my wrists with scented glue, 

running each over the edge of a page, 

            testing scents I aspired to buy

and classifying my olfactory taxonomy.

            Grass evoked the world I’d known

with hints of rain and magnolia

            slight as fog above an unmown field.

DNA’s rosemary, oakmoss, and mint,

            ancient and clear as purpose; glass 

spiraled bottle signifying sentience 

            and enduring iteration. Both 

ethereal and hyperreal, Destiny 

            offered apricots, orchids, and roses--

bottle opaque as an eyelid, 

            veil of petals sheer as promise.

Samsara was amber, sandalwood, 

            ylang ylang, peach. Syllabically lulling, 

its s and a extending, repeating, suggesting

            endlessness. Cycle of birth and death

rebranded as serenity in ongoingness. 

            Angel’s burst of praline and patchouli

lit the crystal facets of that star,

            making heaven of my pulse and ordinary air.

[1]  Wynne Bittlinger, letter to the editor in Vogue US, February 1993