Introduction to Flight Problems: Amelia Earhart Poems

I wrote the following brief introduction for my recent Pinhole Poetry Chapbook publication Flight Problems: Amelia Earhart Poems. In the end my editor Erin Bedford and I determined not to include it but for the curious I present it to you now.   

I began writing Amelia Earhart poems in 2015. I was obsessing about the power of the moon’s gravity to alternately hide the affairs of humans then reveal them and was pulled as if by an undertow into the project by a 2014 Wired Magazine article.

The article told a story that wended through time. A piece of scrap metal made of the same material as Earhart’s lost model 10 Electra aircraft surfaced in the Western Pacific in 1991. The artifact could not be linked to Earhart’s plane because of its odd shape. Then in 2014, twenty-five years later, a photograph surfaced at the Miami Herald. The photograph had been taken June 1, 1937, at the outset of Earhart’s ill-fated round-the-world flight. It showed a similarly oddly shaped patch of shiny metal clearly evident near the tail of the Electra. 

Born of human failure and of what went wrong, the inspiration for my Amelia poems is the slow processing of and the earthly turning over of and the losing and finding of human detritus through the disarray of time. My Amelia poems are not so much about female ascendence as expressed through the metaphor of flight. Instead, birds and moths stand in variously straining to hoist and shoulder their way off the ground just as Amelia suffers the family she is born into and the expectations of her time of how a woman should be in her relationships.

To help readers follow this sequence of poems, here is a brief introduction to the individuals peopling them. GP or George in “Winter of ‘33” and elsewhere is George Putnam, Amelia’s “discover”, manager and eventual husband. Muriel in “Mourning Dove” and elsewhere is Amelia’s younger sister. Sam, then Sam Chapman, is an early boyfriend. Sam is also one of the boarders in the poem “California.” Slim in “Satin Moths” is Lou Gordon, mentioned in “Homing Pigeon,” the mechanic on Amelia’s 1928 fame making cross-Atlantic flight. Wilmer Stultz also in “Homing Pigeon” was the pilot for the 1928 flight.