{"id":36092,"date":"2008-02-02T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-02T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36092"},"modified":"2025-02-18T09:18:59","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T17:18:59","slug":"issue-63-a-conversation-with-lynn-emanuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-63-a-conversation-with-lynn-emanuel\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 63: A Conversation with Lynn Emanuel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>63<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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February 2, 2008<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

REBECCA MORTON AND SHIRA RICHMAN<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH LYNN EMANUEL<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Lynn<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Poets.org<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, <\/strong>New York, and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Surrounded by an extended family of artists, and raised by a businesswoman mother, Emanuel distills her early experiences into a potent cocktail, rewarding diligent readers with unpredictable, meticulously crafted, hyper-aware poetry. In typical Emanuel style, a poem about her dead father, \u201cHalfway Through the Book I\u2019m Writing,\u201d moves in a startling direction: \u201c\u2018What gives?\u2019 \/ I ask him. \u2018I\u2019m alone and dead,\u2019 he says, \/ and I say, \u2018Father, there\u2019s nothing I can do about \/ all that. Get your mind o\ufb00 it. Help me with the poem \/ about the train.\u2019 \u2018I hate the poem about the train,\u2019 \/ he says.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of Emanuel\u2019s most recent book, Then, Suddenly<\/em>\u2014, Gerald Stern says, \u201cThere is some Eliot here, some Stein. Emanuel carries self-consciousness to the shrieking edge\u2014and almost falls in. Well, she does fall in. She is a master of the negative, but she doesn\u2019t sigh in boredom; she yells in pain. Her vision is original; so is her language.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em>, Emanuel is the author of two other collections of poetry: Hotel Fiesta<\/em> and The Dig<\/em>. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology<\/em>, Best American Poetry<\/em>, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry<\/em>, among other anthologies. Her honors include the National Poetry Series Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets for Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emanuel earned an MA from City College and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference, the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative Writing Program. She currently directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. We met in her New York City hotel room during the rush of the Association of Writing Programs 2008 conference, where we discussed comic strips, \u201cbreaking up\u201d with Italo Calvino, and the culture of getting by in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHIRA RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could you take us on the adventure of writing a poem, any poem you can think of, from its inception to how it grew, shrank, and found its own skin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LYNN EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s often a long, rather uncomfortable process for me. Right now, I\u2019m getting another book together, and as I was gathering my work, I found a poem I had published in long-line couplets. I also found an earlier, longer draft, and I thought, Oh no, this is a much better version. Which I often think\u2014that I remove too much material. So I went back and put the more substantial, longer version into the manuscript, and I brought it with me to New York, thinking I could read some new work. Of course, I looked at the draft I brought and thought, God, this is awfully wordy and long. The clich\u00e9 about poems not being \ufb01nished, just being abandoned, is particularly true for me. I never feel that a poem actually does reach the right form; it just reaches the form where I cannot bear any longer to change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often it\u2019s a process of scraping a lot of material away. I never write short poems. Never. The one short poem that Poetry<\/em> published started out being much longer. I showed it to a friend and she crossed out everything but the last eight lines and that was it. I sent it to Poetry<\/em> with a group of other things and that was the one they took.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m someone who carves things out of a larger block and then I feel the discomfort of having done that. Maybe I cleaned it up too much. Or maybe I\u2019ve taken too much out. Or maybe I\u2019ve diminished things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REBECCA MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are you comfortable carving out a small piece of something longer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, it worked that time because I was a) so pressed for time, b) so fed up with that particular draft, and c) when I looked at what my friend did, I said, \u201cOh, that\u2019s brilliant!\u201d That was an extreme example. I feel both comfortable and uncomfortable writing that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poet Bill Matthews was a friend of mine, and I remember him saying at one point, \u201cThe trouble is that it never gets any easier.\u201d I think that may be especially true of poetry. The longer I write, the more dif\ufb01cult I\u2019m \ufb01nding it. Each book is di\ufb00erent. I arrive at a moment when I have a certain number of pages and think, Okay, how do I put this together? I should know this, I think, I\u2019ve done this. But each book presents its own problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the troubles is that as you get older, the expectation you have of yourself\u2014that you know how this is going to work and you know how to do it\u2014is actually something you have to battle against. When you\u2019re younger, it\u2019s all sort of scary, but you realize your book is going to be kind of a provisional form: You\u2019re not going to achieve nirvana when you put this book together. You know you have other books down the road and you\u2019ll get it right then. By the time you get to your fourth book, you think, Oh no, it\u2019s never going to be… right. It\u2019s always going to be like starting from the beginning. And you feel resentful. I do. I\u2019m \ufb01fty-eight. I don\u2019t like not knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After my \ufb01rst book, what interested me were the ways in which the form of the book itself could be expressive. If I were a \ufb01ction writer, I would write novels. Never short stories. Giacometti said at the end of his life, \u201cThe only thing I care about is the feeling that I have when I\u2019m working.\u201d Which is a marvelous and unnerving thing to say. It\u2019s wonderful, but it\u2019s also like, And that\u2019s it. I don\u2019t feel I\u2019m a great artist; I don\u2019t feel inspired. That feeling while working was all he cared about. All I seem to care about these days is the larger unit of the book itself, the drama of turning a page, how I\u2019m going to feel at the end, the unfolding of ideas and, often, narrative. I\u2019m less and less interested in the work of perfecting a single poem. And though I work like a dog on that, in an odd way it doesn\u2019t interest me. What interests me is the joining of the parts into something else. But I\u2019m exhausted by it. Enough already; I want to be Steve Dunn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story I tell about Steve Dunn is that I was at a writers\u2019 colony\u2014I think it was MacDowell\u2014and as I was walking out of my little cabin in the woods one morning, he was on his way with suitcases, and I said, \u201cOh, you\u2019re leaving today?\u201d He said he was, and I asked what he was doing until his ride arrived. He said, \u201cWell, I have an hour left and my book is due at my publisher, so I\u2019m going to assemble the manuscript.\u201d And I realized that if you are Steve Dunn you can do that. It\u2019s something I envy but can\u2019t seem to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you\u2019re not working on individual poems, you\u2019re working on a group?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that I am. Always. Even when I pretend I\u2019m not. My poems aren\u2019t interesting to me until they\u2019re part of a larger form of articulation. I\u2019m interested in contradiction. I\u2019m interested in saying something and then unsaying it. Or saying something and then inventing a voice that says, \u201cNo, that\u2019s not at all the case.\u201d If you\u2019re interested in binaries and contradictions and con\ufb02icted versions of yourself and anything else, then maybe you have to be interested in the larger unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know you described Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em> as a group of rebellions, such as the characters against the author and the author against convention. How much do you see the writing of that book as a rebellion against yourself and your previous work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, at the time I was writing it, I didn\u2019t see it as being very di\ufb00erent from my earlier poems. It was only in retrospect that I became aware that it was. I wish I could say, \u201cOh, yes, I was rebelling against my earlier work or I was re-seeing it or undoing it.\u201d At the time, though, I didn\u2019t realize that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father\u2019s death came in the middle of writing that book, which was so enormous an event it swept away everything else. I remember Molly Peacock saying there was a time in her life when she was so sad and spiritually miserable that the only thing she could do in a poem was to get from one syllable to the next. And that\u2019s how she became a formalist, which I always thought was a magni\ufb01cent account of why it is that one might make a certain kind of choice in one\u2019s writing. I think in an odd way that Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em> was like that for me. I was just drenched in sorrow. The book had started as an investigation of my interest in movies and \ufb01lm, and the di\ufb00erence between sitting down and experiencing something on a page and sitting down and being moved by a \ufb01lm. That was going to be the subject of my book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then my father died. Then the issue of what it meant to be moved and be moving became an incredible heartache. I wish I could say that, at the time, I understood that this book was di\ufb00erent from my others, but I didn\u2019t. I just tried to get from one syllable to the next. I just tried to deal with grief and \ufb01nish a book. I didn\u2019t know how di\ufb00erent it was until afterward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think your concept of the book you are currently writing is di\ufb00erent now than it will be after it\u2019s done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are writers who are much more articulate about what they are doing at the time they are doing it, and I seem to be someone who needs to undergo a generous period of self-delusion and think I\u2019m doing X when all the time I\u2019m doing Y. So I don\u2019t really know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve written a series of poems in the voice of a dog, and I\u2019ve invented an idiom for this dog. It talks a little like a cartoon. I began the poems when I was teaching for one semester at the University of Alabama. I felt I was absolutely outside of the English language, because all around me it was being spoken in a way that made me feel like a Yankee foreigner. Also, it felt like daily speech was much more engaged in the sort of\u2014I don\u2019t know\u2014eloquence and \ufb01gurative possibility. Everyday speech seemed to accommodate \ufb01gurative language in a way that, when I was teaching my students or getting groceries in Pittsburgh, didn\u2019t happen. So I felt clumsy and awkward; every time I opened my mouth, I was The Other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This dog started to talk to me and it was a companion in clumsiness and awkwardness. The dog also became a \ufb01gure for a kind of class\u2014an underdog\u2014and a whole landscape grew up around this character, a world of diminishment and poverty. So I think that\u2019s going to be part of the book, but I don\u2019t know quite how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems you\u2019re often interested in the relationship between language and class. What are the origins of that interest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I always felt that The Dig<\/em> was really about class and work and impoverishment and how those things impinge on women. That continues to be something I\u2019m interested in. It comes from my own background. When I was growing up, there was a time when my mother and I lived on our own; we had few resources and little money. That kind of hardship is very very moving to me\u2014to live in this culture just barely above the line that says you are really poor. Just kind of making it moment to moment. A lot of people in America live that way, and I think they always have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frankly, it\u2019s one of the things I love about Gwendolyn Brooks\u2019 poems. They inhabit that landscape so fully; they\u2019re about the culture of getting by, especially her early work. I think that\u2019s what this dog is all about. I was reading the New York Times<\/em> this morning and one of the articles was about the dogs they rescued from Michael Vick. It\u2019s sort of unreal, the cruelty that was visited upon these animals. But it\u2019s not about the Michael Vicks. It\u2019s about a culture in which an animal, domesticated so that it is deeply part of our lives, has such cruelty visited upon it. Sometimes a dog is not just a dog. Sometimes it is a symbol for how we mete out cruelty to each other and about the abuse of things that don\u2019t have power. Women, dogs, poor people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was incredible to me when, during a discussion regarding ways to recharge the economy, someone in Congress said, \u201cWell, let\u2019s give people more food stamps,\u201d and someone else said, \u201cOh, no, let\u2019s not do it that way. Let\u2019s do it another way.\u201d I thought, How can it be that someone can say, \u201cLet\u2019s give people who need food more food or a way to buy more food,\u201d and then someone else says, \u201cNo, let\u2019s not do that,\u201d and that is considered merely part of daily conversation? It \ufb02abbergasted me, that kind of cruelty. In some way, this whole thing about the dog is part of that, although the backstory will never make it into the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview a few years back, you said that one of the reasons you\u2019re drawn to \ufb01lm noir is for its obsessiveness, the same image coming up over and over again. What are your current literary obsessions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comic strips. It\u2019s weird. My imagination has to be obsessively faithful to some muse. First, it was the muse of \ufb01lm noir; now, it\u2019s the muse of comic strips. I\u2019m fascinated with how, in a way, each panel in the strip is like a single poem, maybe a sonnet. The panel is a little box and an image and some language; it\u2019s an extremely tight, circumscribed form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m particularly interested in one by George Herriman, called Krazy Kat<\/em>, that lasted from the twenties into the forties or \ufb01fties. There were three main characters: a cat and a mouse and a policeman. Herriman listened to immigrant language, to the language of people who were learning English, so the language of the strip was saturated with this fabulous nontraditional English. The language is itself a kind of character and landscape, and that really interests me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s my current obsession. Can I get away with this? Can I create a sort of comic strip character, and do I need graphics? How do I wed a graphic element to the text?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image of the dress comes up frequently in your work. What does the dress mean to you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clothes have their own life. They are symbols and icons, and people don them. They put them on, and they are read in a certain way. R-e-d and r-e-a-d. I think that one privilege of writing out of a noir aesthetic is that icons of clothing in \ufb01lm noir are very clear. There\u2019s the bad girl and the good girl and the gangster. There\u2019s a way the gangster dresses and a way the good guy dresses, and what kind of hats he wears, and the way the police dress. There are only about four or \ufb01ve possibilities. The palette is very limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, it seems to me an underutilized possibility. Why aren\u2019t more people writing about clothes? Why can\u2019t a hat or a dress be a symbol like a rose? Why are pieces of clothing a less legitimate series of symbols than other things? Why is clothing less legitimate than trees? In India, walking down the street, you can read people\u2019s castes from their clothing, and I think that\u2019s also true in the U.S. I don\u2019t think clothing is any less legitimate than the natural world as a source for metaphor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same is true of food. Sometimes even I\u2019m surprised by how much I write about food. It fascinates me. And I think that these subjects\u2014food and clothing\u2014are seen as traditionally feminine. You can be a man and write movingly about trees and water and \ufb02owers because Wordsworth did\u2014although he stole a lot of it from his sister\u2014but writing about clothing is typically seen as a product of the feminine imagination or of the \u201cfeminized man.\u201d I think that\u2019s one reason food and clothing don\u2019t have legitimacy as a source for images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You grew up surrounded by all kinds of artists: dancers, sculptors, choreographers, and painters. Did you feel there were other possibilities for your life, or did you feel you had to choose among artistic pursuits?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had about as much choice as someone who comes from a family of lawyers and has to go into law. To some degree, it was not a choice. It was so all around me that another way of being in the world didn\u2019t seem an option, even though my mother was a businesswoman. But she was a real pioneer. She was singular. There were not a lot of women who were serious businesswomen in the 1950s. So, that felt like an anomaly. It was<\/em> an anomaly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you wish you\u2019d had a choice? What else might you have done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I wish I had. [Laughs.] I don\u2019t know what I would\u2019ve done. The older I get, the more I feel that now I want to do something that\u2019s more directly helpful to people. I would like to be an advocate for children in courts. The older I get, the more I think about how much more time I have. It\u2019s great to write poetry, but I want something that\u2019s more direct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your last book, Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em>, is so funny. Do you see risks in incorporating humor into your work, or do you fear that incorporating humor will cause people to take you less seriously?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have never had that fear. I always feel that my humor emerges out of rage and sorrow. There are di\ufb00erent ways of being funny in books and di\ufb00erent forms of humor. When you are part of a disadvantaged group, you often use humor as a way of getting back at the dominant culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have never felt that I would not be taken seriously because of humor. I know this is something people talk about and a concern that writers have. Maybe I should be concerned about that. But I\u2019ve always felt that in any book I\u2019ve written there\u2019s been enough gravity that the reader doesn\u2019t just yuk it up all the way through. In Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em>, my dead father\u2019s voice comes in and says, \u201cGod, I hate this poem,\u201d or, in another poem, \u201cWho are you dating?\u201d Maybe I\u2019m wrong about this, but if you\u2019ve experienced the death of someone close to you, that kind of thing is both extremely funny and just horribly hurtful. People die, but they don\u2019t go away. They are still there and they visit you. So when the father in \u201cHalfway Through the Book I\u2019m Writing,\u201d says \u201cI\u2019m alone and dead,\u201d I \ufb01nd that a horrible moment that sort of balances the humor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there in\ufb02uences in your life that helped you hone your sense of humor? People who you saw or studied or learned from, or ways in which you were forced to use humor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think so, but growing up, I did see a lot of people in my family use humor as a way of keeping themselves a\ufb02oat. Humor is like the ability to sing well. It\u2019s a kind of pleasure you can provide for yourself that doesn\u2019t depend on anything or anyone. You are able to provide your own joy and you don\u2019t need anybody else to do it. Since I couldn\u2019t sing, I think humor became that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I will say, now as I think about it\u2014I can\u2019t remember how old I was\u2014maybe I was in my middle twenties when I met William Matthews at Bread Loaf. He was the most extraordinary talker. You would want to sit for hours and listen to him. He was so eloquent and funny, and his humor was often extremely cutting. I remember once when we were in New York, I was saying something about the in\ufb02uence of a well-known poet and Bill said, \u201cOh, yes, So-and-So likes everything from M to N.\u201d It was perfect. He was absolutely right. That was the other thing about Bill\u2019s humor, it was not only wonderful, but it was surgical. And after that, I could never feel bad again about So-and-So, because I would look at him and think, Oh, yeah, he likes everything from M to N. Bill inspired me. I learned from him that humor could be complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once, an interviewer asked you, \u201cSo did you quit reading Italo Calvino?\u201d and you answered, \u201cYes, it was like quitting smoking.\u201d Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because, at a certain point, reading Calvino was a kind of addiction. I felt, Why should I write? Here\u2019s someone who\u2019s written every book that I would ever want to write. I must be him. I am totally unhappy in the world unless I can be reincarnated as Calvino.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I had to stop reading him because there was no reason to be myself. In order to just get a book written, I had to stop reading him because he was one of those authors who\u2014for me\u2014seems perfect. Then, luckily, I discovered that he wasn\u2019t perfect. I think there\u2019s a lack of tragic vision in Calvino. It was marvelous when I found that out. Aha! Here\u2019s your fatal \ufb02aw! You bastard, you had me in your clutches all these years!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of my homages are arguments with poets. Walt Whitman, get out of here! Who can be an American poet? Nobody can be an American poet\u2014you\u2019ve already been every poet in the world. Every permutation of American poetry that we could possibly imagine, you\u2019ve already done it. You\u2019ve ruined us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Gertrude Stein. I mean, I love Gertrude Stein. Sometimes, I think there were these writers who were beamed down to us from more advanced civilizations and I think Stein may have been one of them\u2014I\u2019m sure Emily Dickinson was one of them\u2014but it\u2019s also true that Stein is sometimes just a typewriter. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s interesting to be someone who just worships Gertrude Stein, so I had to have an argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had to have an argument with Calvino, which meant at a certain point I just had to say, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m turning you o\ufb00. I\u2019m changing the channel. No more Calvino. We\u2019re breaking up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, I hope it works. I\u2019m writing an homage now to Baudelaire, and, by the way, he is the poet of clothing. And whenever I wonder, Why do I think it\u2019s legitimate to write about women\u2019s dresses? I read him. Of course, he was French and I\u2019m not, but nevertheless\u2014I absolutely have to break up with him now. He doesn\u2019t know it, but\u2026 [Laughs.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MORTON<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What elements of your work are in\ufb02uenced by Stein?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the thing: stylistically, aside from that one homage, \u201cinside Gertrude Stein,\u201d I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much in\ufb02uence. It\u2019s not talked about often enough that one can have a lot of in\ufb02uences as a poet that don\u2019t show up stylistically. I was in\ufb02uenced by the idea of her. I was in\ufb02uenced by the way she makes nouns and verbs and syntaxes into characters\u2014she was beyond the pale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I taught a course on the avant-garde with a colleague of mine, and nobody we read was as radical as she. So I love the idea of her and I love some of her writing\u2014I love the way she critiques syntax, critiques the sentence\u2014but I don\u2019t feel therefore obliged to deracinate sentences because of Gertrude Stein. There are poets who do feel that way, and I admire that, but I seem to be able to be completely and comfortably contrarian in my writing. It doesn\u2019t bother me. I can use conventional syntax and love Gertrude Stein, love her critique of conventional syntax, believe that she\u2019s absolutely right\u2014and still use conventional syntax. I would have no trouble being a collaborator during a war, I\u2019m afraid. It wouldn\u2019t occur to me that I couldn\u2019t play both sides. Or I could easily be a double agent, the spy who spies both ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RICHMAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s partly what relates you to Gertrude Stein, because I think of that as a sort of Cubism. And one of the things in Then, Suddenly\u2014<\/em> that\u2019s so interesting is that, as a reader, you can go from poem to poem and never know what your role is going to be. It seems as though you\u2019re examining the roles of reader, writer, speaker, and character from all these di\ufb00erent angles and points of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EMANUEL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s exactly what it was. [Laughs.] I knew that! That\u2019s wonderful. Perhaps you\u2019re right, although I don\u2019t think I understood it until you said it. I think you\u2019re right. You don\u2019t feel you have to remain faithful to a certain point of view, nor do you have to resolve the contradictions, nor do you have to, at the end, think, Well, okay, here, we\u2019ve arrived here. I felt it was enough to simply present this reader, that reader, this speaker, that speaker, this author, that author, and that was the composition. That\u2019s exactly the reason I\u2019m in love with Stein.<\/p>\n\n

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Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Surrounded by an extended family of artists, and raised by a businesswoman mother, Emanuel distills her early experiences into a potent cocktail, rewarding diligent readers with unpredictable, meticulously crafted, hyper-aware poetry. In typical Emanuel style, a poem about … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36736,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36092\/revisions\/36736"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}