From the Editor

Why We Dig It

“Emily Dickinson” by David Lee Garrison

I’m going to attempt an exercise in restraint because I want to keep this under 300 words. (There goes 16 words, sheesh. Okay.)

David Lee Garrison is no stranger to Mock Turtle Zine—he’s submitted, supported (see the ad in Issue 23), edited occasionally, and maybe even imbibed a few over wayward discussions about the future of poetry while hanging in the Oregon District with the Editorial Team a time or two—but we love this particular piece, “Emily Dickinson”, because he’s coloring slightly outside of his well-established, and adored, lines.

We like creatives who aren’t afraid of taking risks, especially with their own style and voice.

Sadly, the New England Mystic, Emily Dickinson, is a complete stranger to our zine. I love Emily Dickinson in a weird-creepy-idolatry sorta way. Emily not only colored outside the lines, but she also burnt the coloring page in effigy in the Amherst town square to protest the concept of someone telling someone else how to create. I digress.

This piece sings, in part, because of the enticing rhythm of the lines and thrumming repetition of the third-person pronoun, “She”, at the beginning of each stanza. The poem alludes to Dickinson’s work playfully and respectfully both from a distance and all the way up close to the “slanted truth”. The poem’s narrator deftly employs Dickinsonian tactics tilting the rhyme to the side and dipping into Emily’s meter just enough to keep the reader wanting more. This poem fearlessly “whispers lines of poetry / that haunt each page of night” and I’m not afraid of the dark.

Hey, you, go challenge “those platitudes”! Then, send us your work.