Juliet Cook on Her Poems
"Unnameable" was unexpectedly inspired by a photo of the character Henry Spencer (played by Jack Nance) in Eraserhead (directed by David Lynch), in which his face is the main focus, but there's a blurry dresser behind him that appears to have a floppy teddy bear on top. I am a huge fan of David Lynch, but I don't typically think of his work as horror, mainly because I don't think of his work as easily definable or categorizable. But with that said, his creations do involve strong elements of violence, gore, abuse, mental turmoil, evil doppelgangers, and so on. And both content-wise and image-wise, there are many elements of semi-abstract mental and physical turmoil that are open to multiple interpretations, similar to poetry. While writing this small statement, I started visualizing a scene in Eraserhead that involves a sexually grotesque mini chicken ejaculating or bleeding or aborting or distorting or disturbing or otherwise open to interpretation. And since my "Brain Replacement Surgery" poem included here has a chicken head in it, the last thing I'll say right now is what if that chicken head gets cut off?