Just One Thing with Pepper Cunningham

Pepper Cunningham’s poem “My Family and Friends Make Small Talk at My Funeral” is sharp, funny, and poignant, using line breaks to punch us with the unexpected. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“I wrote ‘My Family And Friends Make Small Talk At My Funeral’ in a sad month when I was unemployed, tipsy on my terrace, living alone for the first time and feeling the weight of all that entails. I was drafting a will (at the urging of my pragmatic mother, not because I was dying) so death was on my mind. I thought back to the year of funerals I went to when I was eighteen and how people talked about my dead friends at the wakes. 

Like many people, I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall at my own funeral, and I’m fascinated with the odd intersection of platitudes, grief, and offhanded comments sparked by the death of a loved one. The poem is self-absorbed because it has to be, but I wanted to interrogate a different structure than putting such a navel-gazing subject in the first person. 

Because my freelance project had recently ended, I wound up writing nearly 60 earnest poems in April, taking workshops from Dr. Taylor Byas, Sofia Fey, Dr. Rita Mookerjee, and their colleagues. This poem was the last of the month, scribbled when I was feeling fed up with poetry while simultaneously realizing that the poems were what was keeping me alive.”

Photo credit: Matt Goias