Stupid Poetry: A Pitch

Hello, cruel world, it's me. I am back at it again with a loosely conceptualized newsletter. It's a good newsletter, I think. A pretty good newsletter, even. Many are calling it, "potentially something to read when [they] have a minute or two of down time in the morning, afternoon, or evening." Only one freak said they like to read it in the middle of the night. Others have said, "Hey! I like this! And I like it even more when I read it in the morning, afternoon, or evening and not really late at night. Who would do that?"

Right now, you may be asking, "what is all this? what is a newsletter? who are you?" You’re probably shaking your computer or your phone or your tablet or your smart tv, baring your teeth and screeching into the scary blue light. And if that's you, I get it. I can't blame you. It's your journey, and I respect it.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Let me explain, and as long as you read this at a reasonable hour, we'll be able to leave this all behind us.

My name is Seth Thill, and I am a poet and multimedia artist from Dubuque, Iowa. I have published some poems and/or short stories in Indiana Review, Plainsongs Poetry Journal, Into the Void, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. My visual art has been featured in a stray few local and regional things here in the Midwest. In 2022, as part of my tenure as Visiting Artist at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls, Iowa, I published the poetry chapbook, COVER, RECOVER (which you can buy here!). I have a Master's Degree in Creative Writing, and I studied the intersections of poetry, pop culture, and class while getting it. I still like to think about all that stuff now, as an independent Student of Da World.

I also drink a lot of root beer and listen to Korn. I have a dog, 2 cats, 6 guinea pigs, a hamster, and a lovely wife. I grew up on the Mississippi River, and I think Snoopy may be the most powerful figure this planet has ever seen. My first concert was The Bret Michaels Band in Waterloo, Iowa in 2008 on a date that would be my eventual wedding anniversary. I just gave a guy $20 in a CVS parking lot for life size cardboard standees of Yoda and Outkast that almost did not fit in my SUV. I spend too much time searching "EZ squirt purple ketchup bottle sealed" on eBay. In short, I believe that you gotta spend money to make money. I like a lot of dumb trash, and I like to write and make art about all said trash.

This all brings us to Stupid Poetry. Stupid Poetry is my weekly newsletter where I will be sending weekly little essays and poems and pictures and probably other stuff, all directly or indirectly about my various dumb obsessions.

For a lot of people, the sometimes dumb and trashy, sometimes not dumb and trashy stuff we watch, read, eat, wear, interact with, etc. on a day-to-day basis are not things they might readily associate with poetry. There's not a lot in common between, say, a haiku and the helicopter hat I still regret leaving behind at that Goodwill a couple weeks back. I am not scanning the meter in "Dig" by underrated (imo) nu-metal band, Mudvayne. If you told me that the Cheesecake Factory started describing all of the items on their giant menu with love sonnets, I'd be the first one there. Alas, it's not happening. I do think, though, that there are poems to write in any and all of these things.

The only poem I have ever written that made me cry immediately upon finishing it is a narrative poem about Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit. I'd much rather write an essay about my ups and downs with EZ Cheese over the course of my life than one on climbing a mountain or whatever (the fact that I could not and would not ever climb a mountain aside). I think it is really important to think about and explore the relationships we have with the silly nonsense that fills our cryptofascist hell and sometimes makes it bearable.

Writing poetry about all this nonsense over the years has really helped me legitimize my own life experiences as a person floating through this dumbass world. I have a lot in my life to thank POETRY, as a big bad abstraction, for. And I wouldn't have those things if I didn't allow myself access points to poetry that made sense to me. I've learned that writing about Street Sharks or Mountain Dew Game Fuel or Shrek 4 or whatever can help me figure out why I tear up at the smell of rubber bands or why I am always losing my phone or why I struggle with emotional vulnerability. And so I am going to keep writing all these things and put them in this newsletter so you can read them too if you want, and maybe write some of your own weird little poems if you are so inclined.

I'll be keeping the precise focus of the newsletter fairly broad. Sometimes I'll just talk pretty directly about specific dumb things that are important to me. You might get some brief essays in verse about a Family Guy hoodie I had in the seventh grade. Or maybe some meditations on severed connections and foregone youth trojan-horsed into a Monster Energy Drink review. Maybe a deep dive on the Applebee's Quesadilla Burger that explains why I refuse to step foot in Boscobel, Wisconsin ever again. Endless slop. Endless possibilities.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge the horrors. You know the ones. Let's face it, a lot of this dumb shit that you and I love is in one way or another the product of evil. Whether it be rooted in exploitation and the suppression of labor rights, in environmental degradation and destruction, in the growing pockets of the nastiest, evilest pieces of shit on this lil' blue dot, so many of our cultural touchstones and our connections to them feel so complicated and fraught, if not downright irredeemable. And so I do want to celebrate my love of tacky garbage, and I do want to legitimize and poeticize all the weirdest little parts of our day but I also want to look at the tension between our joy and these various evils. I'm trying to square away that so much of that joy across various stages of my life is built upon corporate monsters preying on me and other poor working-class people. Sure, I chose to get a tattoo of The Hamburglar boxing Grimace on my thigh as an adult, but one Mister R. McDonald is the one who dangled a shitty little Transformers toy in my 5-year-old face and got me hooked on McDoubles.

So if any or all of this sounds like your thing, hit subscribe! It's much better than screeching "devil child!" at me while your eyes turn black and you slowly vomit bile on this bus ride home. I promise I will make it worthwhile.

In fact, if you subscribe by next Tuesday morning, you'll wake up with a nice, shiny little post about 25 summers of Chicken Run. Talk to you then!