Juliet Cook on Her Poems
"Thorns Stuck Inside My Left Foot" was catalyzed by me unexpectedly falling down, landing on my knees with my feet backwards, and breaking a bone in my left foot. When something bad happens to me, I have a tendency to blame it on myself and feel like it was a result of a mistake I made even if it might have been a random little misfortune or unfortunate fluke. In this case, what happened in real life is I stepped out of my table at a restaurant to walk to the restroom and suddenly ended up on my knees on the floor, feeling embarrassed and like it must have been my fault. In the poem, I fuse that together with some of my insinuations connected with Catholicism. I was raised Catholic, sometimes felt semi-forced to stick with something that wasn't my own personal choice, and my mind associates parts of Catholicism with bloody torture, judgments, black and white/right and wrong (whereas I'm more drawn to variations of red, purple, and grey and hardly think anything is black and white), being expected to confess and repent, and feeling guilty. I semi-blame myself for semi-blaming my Catholic upbringing on my ongoing guilt when my guilt is probably nobody's fault but my own, and this cycle continues and sometimes finds its way into my poems. Maybe my poems are little semis.
Furthermore, sudden unexpected injuries or health issues (and the aging process) can significantly exacerbate my fear of death and not existing anymore, and part of me thinks that fear of death (not just mine, but almost everyone's) is a large part of what created religions and Heaven and Hell, and another part of me feels guilty for saying so.
"Knocked Out" is sort of like a short amalgamation of nursery rhyme/fairy tale/bad dream. I'm not exactly sure why choir references (in this poem "show choir") find their way into my poems sometimes. Maybe it's because when I was younger, I used to be really into choir and a good singer, but stopped pursuing that, barely sing at all anymore, lost that part of my voice, and part of me worries that I might stop pursuing other things that I used to feel really strongly about or might not be able to stick with certain passions even if I want to.
Although neither of these poems were inspired by or directed towards one particular horror film, I can say that when using the word stigmata (in the Thorns poem), I vaguely remember the supernatural horror film with that name (which I should re-watch), among other movies. And nursery rhyme/fairy tale/bad dreams turning into horror (in the “Knocked Out” poem) causes me to think of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (in which the children's chant also includes a crucifix).
Along the lines of Catholicism and horror and horrific crucifixes in movies, of course there's also The Exorcist. Many years before I watched that movie, I went down into my family's basement, where I would sometimes spend time poking and prying and finding adult books that I was probably too young to read by my parents standards, but was drawn to anyway. I found The Exorcist and started reading it, and my brain remembers some part at the beginning, like a precursor, where a whole classroom of students get pencils shoved into their ears. Or was it their eyes? Or is my brain exaggerating this? In any case, disturbing images that invade my brain for whatever reason(s) are bound to find their way into my poems.