Oz in poems

I briefly published an Oz fanzine way back in the 80s. It featured a column, “Oz in Unusual Places,” that cataloged mentions of Oz elements in newspapers and books and, well, wherever I came across them. The zine could have been just that, frankly.

When I read the two poems by Stephen Danos in a 2012 issue of Court Green I flagged them with that old column in mind. Both poems use Oz, the MGM Oz anyway. Both “Place No Likelier Than Home” and “Tourist Trap” cast the speaker as a version of Dorothy. 

In “Place” the Dorothy persona sounds doomed: “I get a hernia from lifting the gray ruins off the witch. The tornado cuts my throat …”

In “Tourist Trap” the Dorothy persona is a bit more empowered. Glinda tells her “my task is to do evil     to evildoers.     Raise hell, turn acidic narratives / into musicals fit for family night.”

source: Court Green

#9, 2012 

a literary magazine edited by David Trinidad and Tony Trigilio

Columbia College, Chicago IL