Claudia Emerson, former Poet Laureate of Virginia, is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife. She also writes songs and performs with her husband, kent Ippolito, a musician who plays bluegrass, rock, folk, jazz, blues, and ragtime.

Published Date: August 15, 2012

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Claudia Emerson.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2012 AWP Annual Conference in Chicago with poet Claudia Emerson. Claudia Emerson is the author of five books of poetry from LSU Press, including Secure The Shadow and Late Wife, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize and Poetry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress. Named a Virginia woman in history by the Library of Virginia. She's also former poet Laureate of Virginia. She's professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry. Claudia Emerson, welcome.

Claudia Emerson:

Thank you.

Brian Brodeur:

I'd like you to start off by reading a poem, if you wouldn't mind. Would you read Great Depression story?

Claudia Emerson:

I'd be happy to.

Great depression Story. Sometimes the season changed in the telling, sometimes the state, but it was always during the depression and he was alone in the box car. The train stalled beneath the sky wider than any heat scene so far. The fields of grass wider than the sky. He'd been curious to see if things were as bad somewhere else as they were at home. They were, and worse he said, places with no trees, no water. He hadn't eaten all day, all week. His hunger, hard, fixed, doubled, gleaming as the rails. A lone house broke the sharp horizon, the train dreaming beneath him. He climbed down, walked out, the grass parting at his knees. The windows were open, curtain less, and the screen door unlatched moved to open too when he knocked. He could see in all the way through to the kitchen, and he smelled before he saw the lidded pot on the stove, the steam escaping.

Her clothes moved on the line for all reply. The sheets, a slip, one dress washed, thin worn to translucent. Through it, he could see what he mistook for fields of roses until a crow flew in with the wind sudden fleeting seam. By the time he got back to the train, he'd guessed already what he'd taken, hot and all, a hen, an old one that had quit laying he was sure or she wouldn't have killed it. The train began to move then, her house falling away from him. The story ended with the meat, not quite done, but believe him, he ate it all, white and dark, back, breasts, legs and thighs, strolling the still warm bones behind him for miles.

Brian Brodeur:

Great, thank you. Wonderful. As in many of your poems, narrative plays a big part in Great Depression Story. Could you discuss how you negotiate the formal difficulties of telling stories and poems, while still preserving the integrity of the poetic line?

Claudia Emerson:

Well, frankly, it's tricky to balance that. I've been teaching for a long time, and a lot of the conversation I have with my students is how do you balance that lyric narrative spectrum? I think you've nailed what makes it possible, and that is the line of poetry for me, to be able to do something with the integrity of the line within. Usually for me, a loose blank verse. Sometimes it's rough around the edges, but usually that. That tension between what the sentences are doing, I write to the sentence, but how that plays both with and against the line of poetry makes all the difference. In this particular sequence of poems and in this poem in particular, I decided to work with the couplet, which also sort of played into it because the couplet is such a little brief room to go into that it becomes almost a longish line to see as having that same integrity.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

It is tricky when you're trying to walk that balance between how much do I need to describe and then what's actually a legitimate more poetic observation. Lots of revision in short.

Brian Brodeur:

How did you arrive at the couplet as a partial solution to this? Let's call it a problem. I don't know.

Claudia Emerson:

I don't know. For this book, I mean, that played a big role in it. I think honestly, since I have tended in my writing life to conceive of the whole book, sometimes a form will seem appropriate for so much of the book that it's as though I'm just into it. I'm becoming practiced with it. It seems very comfortable. For me, as sure as I'll get comfortable with a particular form, a book just about exhausts it for me, and then I'll want to try something else.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the idea of the rough blank verse or the ghost of blank verse being somehow behind these lines. Also, I'm thinking about your lines that are more heavily in jam than others in which sometimes even stop with an article or something.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

I guess maybe I'm interested in how, I don't know, how you, maybe you've already answered the question, but I guess it's blank verse that kind of sets up that skeleton or something?

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay.

Claudia Emerson:

Well, I do think thought a lot about, I mean, we know the tradition. You can look through the history of the blank verse line. Again, talk in my teaching quite a bit about why do you think that's so, is it just because it's fashionable or was fashionable or seems comfortable to poets? I do believe that line length is about what the ear can take in and remember it. It's about what the eye can take in and see the line as having its own half meaning or integrity.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

I think half meaning is Mary Kinzie's term for that.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay.

Claudia Emerson:

Again, the tension between the enjambed lines and the parts of sentences that might make up a line, are all very interesting to me. I know Ellen Bryant Voigt talks about reading as a writer. I know often when I'm looking at other poets who are interested in the same thing, that's what will attract me, is how they're making use of that tension.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm. Your second book, Pinion, is spoken by two fictional characters, sister and preacher.

Claudia Emerson:

Right.

Brian Brodeur:

Could you talk about the unique challenges of writing in the voice of another, about events in which you were never personally involved?

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, okay. The truth about that book is that it grew out of a folklore project I did as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.

Brian Brodeur:

Wow. Wow.

Claudia Emerson:

It involved a family that I knew only two members of the, two brothers that appear in the book, the preacher character. They were elderly when I met them. I went to collect oral histories and the music they played, one played the fiddle and the other one played the harmonica. Their lives are so fascinating to me because as a person, ever since I was a little girl, I've been sort of backward looking, I guess. I like to hear about what my father called the olden days. To go to this family's house where they heated with wood, had chickens in the yard, the whole sense of an era that was already gone. I mean, they didn't participate in daylight saving time. They just refused. They just caught my imagination and I couldn't quite get them out of it.

Okay. Fast-forward to, I did that project and that was one thing. Years later, I'd already published the first book. I was working as an adjunct between two and sometimes three schools. I would drive sometimes 50 miles in between classes, this was before gasoline prices were so high. At the same time, I was becoming quite a dedicated long distance runner. One day when I was on a run, I thought if I don't conceive of a larger project, I'm afraid I won't ever write again because I was too busy. Not just teaching, but learning to teach.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hm.

Claudia Emerson:

I just had this notion, I think I'll write a series of poems all on the voice of this male character. I believe now the reason I chose that persona, is because I felt I didn't have a story of my own worth telling, or that my own life wasn't interesting enough and his life had seemed much more interesting.

He was also kind of an angry person. He had never married there. A lot of interesting things about this figure, and he just caught my imagination. Now when I look back on him or why was I drawn to that, I mean, we can say that we write strictly from the imagination, but there was something in my emotional context or my circumstantial context that drew me to that character. Someone who felt alone, furious, whatever. That was actually me.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

Challenges of it I think are obvious that I was a younger woman. I was living in the country and heating with wood, but that's not enough to make all that legitimate.

Brian Brodeur:

To make that leap into this other consciousness.

Claudia Emerson:

This other consciousness of another era and of another gender. Of course, people do it all the time. We have a clue what's going on. It took some good readers for me at the time to say, "How authentic does this voice sound? Can I pull this off?" Another challenge of it though, once I thought the poems had some promise, when I sent them out to the magazines to try to place some of them, my name's Claudia, anybody looking, and even though you're not supposed to mistake the author for the first person, I was concerned at the time that no one would immediately assume this is in the voice of an older man. Originally, they all carried little subtitles, "Preacher does this, that or the other thing." That was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I sent them all out that way. It's interesting now though, until fairly recently, I went away from persona after that book. Again, I found it exhausting to do it for so long. Then late in the game, the sister character was originally written in third person.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

When I decided it was a long poem and a whole project, and I'm pointing at the floor because I spread the whole thing out on the floor to see what have I got going on here. My editor, Dave Smith, had read it in draft form and said, he didn't think it was successful for me to have one character in the first person and the other one in third so I had to revise her.

Brian Brodeur:

So that was all Dave Smith's idea?

Claudia Emerson:

All Dave Smith to take her.

Brian Brodeur:

Wow.

Claudia Emerson:

A good reader for me at the time was Betty Adcock down in Raleigh, North Carolina and she agreed with him. It wasn't a terrible revision, but at that point, the decision to write her in third person was, "Okay, I don't want to do this persona anymore." We all know that third person can say things that first won't. That revision was really interesting, time-consuming.

Brian Brodeur:

Sounds like it. Yeah. Interesting too, that the male character was the one that you, A started with it, B originally had as the only one in first person.

Claudia Emerson:

That's right.

Brian Brodeur:

That's kind of interesting.

Claudia Emerson:

That's right.

Brian Brodeur:

The adoption of a persona seems a natural extension of negative capability, or at least Kinzie's idea that a poet has no identity, that he's continually filling some other body, the sun, the moon, the sea. Would you agree?

Claudia Emerson:

I think that's right, I do. Speaking of that other body, I mean, I think there's a current research about whatever we write is a way of taking it out of our own bodies and putting it into another way of being. Even if we write personal things or what we think is personal and we're expressing some emotional truth, it still others it to take it out and then it's in somebody else's voice or in their eye.

Brian Brodeur:

In the form of this other object too, which is outside of the body.

Claudia Emerson:

That's right.

Brian Brodeur:

Over the course of your career, you've written free verse poems as well as poems and received forms. Most of Late Wife, for example, is written in free verse until the last section, which is composed mostly of sonnets. Can you talk a little bit about negotiating between those two open forms? Although, you mentioned before that there were there.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah. Okay. I think looking back on it in the writing of Late Wife, I have an interesting writing process story about that book. I was teaching at the time, four classes a semester. I had 85 to a 100 students every single semester. My husband, Kent, got on the 7:15 train and came home on the 6:15 train. We were very happily married. I did not want to work at night, so I crafted my day completely around his. Now up until that marriage, I had been a morning writer.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

Now I'm up in the 0-dark-thirty, as he says, to take him to the train. I'm teaching and prepping classes and grading papers and doing all that. I had a window of about 4:30, 5 o'clock till the 6:15. I wrote that book over the space of three fall semesters and one spring. I did it by leaving school and going to a coffee shop. It's the only thing I've ever done successfully in that public private space.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

I actually gave a craft talk on this because I didn't know it at the time, but I think this is part of what happened, that I had an emotional urgency to write the poems as I was feeling those things. That was a first for me. I'm somebody who can wait two or three years to bring something from idea to poem. I wanted to write those more quickly. An hour and 15 minutes, I could work on a sonnet.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

I couldn't see much beyond that. I knew I was going to write a certain number of them or variations on them. That really, really attracted me. I had been heavily influenced, the subject is nothing like what I wrote, but Ellen Bryant Voight's wonderful, she calls it a mosaic of sonnets, Kyrie, about the Spanish influenza where she does that. I just copied her completely because that that's great. I don't want to write strict forms, but the sonnet forms seemed appropriate to the subject. The truth is, the divorce poems and some in the middle section were originally written flush left, more tetrameter lines. I didn't worry so much about them. Late in the game with that book, I thought, I have an IU construction in opposite ends of this book, and the I is utterly changed, and the U was completely changed. They can't look anything alike. They can't be anything alike. I took a jackhammer to the first part of the book. I don't think Dave had seen it yet, and I went for what I was playing around with, I think there are some staggered stepped couplets, but also William Carlos Williams' triadic line.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

I was interested in the instability of the tercet, and I went for that in there and the heavily enjambed tercets as well, sort of what was going on in the couplets in Great Depression Story. That's another thing, it may not work for you, but if you're not exactly satisfied with what you're doing, even at the 11th hour for a sequence within a shapely volume, you can just, again, take the jackhammer to it, see what happens.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

I made some really good revisions to those poems by changing the form up.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

Again, I wanted those to look more ragged. I wanted them to be uneven, and I wanted what I felt was a stability in the letters to Kent. I was happy in the end with how that worked out. I do think that time, form, space, sort of the architecture all coming together was what worked there.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

After I wrote that book though, I could not work in that coffee shop. Everything about it. Again, I gave craft talk on this up in Vermont a couple of summers ago because part of my point was writers in space and how important it is to understand your space and what it's doing for your writing life. Sometimes when your writing isn't going well, there could be something wrong with your space.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

When I kept going to that coffee shop, trying to work on the next book and everything was annoying me, the music, the people, the espresso machine, and finally I had to say, it's the space and it was. It just didn't work anymore. It had worked then, not again.

Brian Brodeur:

Not only a room of one's own, but the right room of one's own at the right time.

Claudia Emerson:

That's right.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. You already mentioned Dave Smith twice or three times. Could you talk about working with LSU and working with Dave over the years and how that has evolved?

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. Let's see, to back up a little bit, I had sent a manuscript to LSU pretty soon after I finished my MFA and it wasn't ready. They said some nice things and turned it down, and I kept working on it, working on it. Around that time, Dave was still editing for the Southern Review, and he took some poems for the magazine. Then I had sent it back to LSU. It was in much better shape. My mentor, Betty Adcock, had helped me put the manuscript together. Dave around that time decided to start his signature series, Southern Messenger Poets. I don't know how he got wind of the manuscript being over at the main house, but he went over and got it. I remember he called me on the phone and said, "I'm starting this signature series and I'd like to publish this book."

Then he went on this long thing, as I recall about, "Well, the book has gotten a good reader's report already, and you might want to stay just in the main lineup of poetry. This is new." It's like, I've been trying to get a first book for how long. I thought, "No, that sounds great to me." He took it, and it's been a really good relationship with LSU. I think they make beautiful books. I have loved the experience of knowing just about everybody there who's on staff. The book designers are on staff. They actually read the books that they design the covers. It's a really interesting place. I think they've got a great list. I'm proud to be part of it. Dave has certainly published a lot of interesting poets as part of the signature series. Yeah, I have a brand new book downstairs, just came up from signing.

Brian Brodeur:

Absolutely. It just came out, what, this week or last week.

Claudia Emerson:

I think from Amazon it's just now available.

Brian Brodeur:

This is Secure the Shadow.

Claudia Emerson:

Secure the Shadow.

Brian Brodeur:

Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Claudia Emerson:

Sure.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

I'm happy to. After Late Wife, I had shifted gears in my fourth book and I wrote something not personal at all. In part, Figure Studies grew out of my experience having been the dean of an all girls boarding school. Then in the interim there, my personal life sort of kicked back in and insisted that I write about it. My only brother, only sibling died in 2006 from a rare kind of cancer. That Hugo phrase about writing on or off the subject or writing around the subject. I was writing off the subject of my brother's death for a while, and then I felt like I had to write, was compelled to write back on it. At the same time, my father died, or about two years after that, from old age. He lived to be almost 94.

Brian Brodeur:

Wow. Wow.

Claudia Emerson:

Those two deaths, I wanted to try to handle in the same book, although I didn't want to write about either one of them exactly as my brother or my father, but as sort of states of being, if that makes sense.

Brian Brodeur:

Of course, of course.

Claudia Emerson:

Within that, I also tried some things that were ambitious for me, a poem about uranium mining. In the fifties, they found a very rich vein of uranium underneath my home county.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh wow.

Claudia Emerson:

It is credited with the high rate of cancers there and things like that. To take on uranium in a poem was hard to do, but I was really pleased with how it turned out, but it took a long time to write it. I have some longer things, a long-ish poem about hog killing in the same book. A variety of things. For me, up until that book, the books had been easier somehow to see. Even with Pinion, which was hard in the revision phase, I knew what it was going to look like. This one was a little bit harder.

I have one good story too about writing this book. At one point, I sent an email to my friend David Wojahn, who's a poet down at VCU, and I said, "Oh, I've had an epiphany when I was on a run this morning, I'm going to take the poems about my father out of this book." There weren't many, six or seven. I think it's too much. It's too much about my family, it's too personal. I was worried that the book would seem over the top somehow, I got worried about it. He wrote back a really compelling email. He hadn't read the book at that point. He did read it for me later, but he just said, quite simply, "I haven't read this book, but I feel I have to say this to you. Don't you think you owe some fidelity to how those deaths happened in time?"

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

I was sort of ashamed of myself for not, "Okay, am I poet enough to do this or not, or just put them in a drawer?" Here's an interesting thing that happened. I had taken the poems about my father out of the book, was seeing a different book more focused on my brother. Then when David said that, I thought he was right, right away, but the consequence was that I reordered the whole thing and suddenly it began to make a certain sense. Thank goodness for good writer friends and close reader friends, and then just somebody who has that gut reaction to something you've said is, "Now, wait a minute, maybe you need to think about that again," and I did.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, just on a philosophical level and philosophical level without having read anything.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah. That's great.

Claudia Emerson:

Exactly.

Brian Brodeur:

I have what's maybe a quirky question, but on the acknowledgement page of Figure Studies, you thank Bruce Dalzell is Yeah for burning a piano for you on the banks of Hocking River in Athens, Ohio so you could conduct research. Would you care to elaborate?

Claudia Emerson:

Sure. Bruce Dalzell is a great musician, singer-songwriter out in Athens, Ohio. He's been a really good musician friend of my husband, Kent Ippolito for many years. Bruce produces records. He's a great sort of pied piper out there in Athens. He is also a piano tuner. One visit he made to Fredericksburg with a bunch of musician friends, I believe it was in Fredericksburg, he talked about these piano burnings that he has because he said that, "Pianos have a limited lifespan. They don't all live forever." Sometimes people would just bring pianos to his house and leave them like strays, but they're almost dead strays. They can't be fixed. What do you do with a piano that wasn't much good to start with? What he did, he'd have a party. Burn the piano on the banks of the river and everybody play music and have some beers. It sounded great to me. I had never been to one of those parties. We went out to Athens for some music event, and I asked him if he would burn one for me. I had my own private.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, that's right. He said, "For you, Claudia, anything."

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, I have great pictures of this. The funniest thing, I think Kent got a picture of this. They got the piano. We didn't have the party because we were going to do other music things, so it was just maybe four or five of us, and they set up a little chair for me, so I sat in a chair and took notes as this piano went up in flames.

Brian Brodeur:

What kind of noises did it make?

Claudia Emerson:

Loud.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah.

Claudia Emerson:

I mean, the tension lets go and it does various sort of popping and stuff. It was really fascinating. I believe though, if you Google piano fire or piano burning, there is an artist who does various piano art things. I was disappointed that someone else was doing piano burning. Then a funny end of the story, and then I'll stop about that, when Bruce and the music guys came again to Virginia, we had a ukulele burning for him in our garden in the city.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great, just a smaller scale.

Claudia Emerson:

Just a smaller scale.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. You write and perform music with your husband, Kent Ippolito, who you've mentioned. What is it like sharing a household with another artist, and maybe more importantly, what is it like collaborating and performing together?

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. He's the serious musician. I sort of step in and dabble in it a little bit. Back to the question of what it's like to live with another artist, I'm grateful I don't live with another poet I think.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

I don't know that that would go as well. I love living with somebody who is an artist in a different genre or medium. He's also an acoustic instrument collector, and that's a lot of fun just to live with the instruments. We took our dining room and turned it into a music room. The walls are covered with, well, he plays everything in the mandolin family. We have an upright bass. We have over 30 guitars.

Brian Brodeur:

Wow.

Claudia Emerson:

He just collects more interesting instruments that hang. We like the things out where we can see them.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

They're mostly all players, but they're pieces of art.

Brian Brodeur:

Dusting is really kind of a chore.

Claudia Emerson:

It's terrible. Then in the winter, we have to make sure we get the humidifier and stuff because the instruments start to pop and crack and all that kind of thing. It's been great. I've learned a lot from him too about teaching. He is also a guitar teacher, and he says smart things once in a while, like, "Well, you can teach anybody to play a song, but I'm trying to teach someone to play the guitar."

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm.

Claudia Emerson:

Now when I go in to teach a creative writing workshop and someone hands in a poem and they're stressing out of their revisions, it's, "Sure that poem matters, but the more important thing is what did you learn from this that will come to have meaning in the next one you write?" That's learning the neck of the guitar.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, something transferrable.

Claudia Emerson:

Exactly.

Brian Brodeur:

Something lasting as well.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, exactly.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah. Finally, what are you working on now? Secure the Shadow is just out.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

Do you have anything else in the works?

Claudia Emerson:

I do.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay, great. Wonderful.

Claudia Emerson:

I'm hoping I'm about halfway through something, I'm not sure, but I'm calling this book The Opposite House, and that's from Emily Dickinson There's Been a Death in the Opposite House as lately as today, because I'm sort of keeping on with sort of the, not a death obsession, but I'm interested in the industry of death or rituals around it. These poems are all third person observations. I'm dealing with narrative a little bit again. They're moving around in time in history. Some are sort of set in a small town you can imagine me doing, and then others are not situated there. As a matter of fact, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on this project, and I'm going to go to Sicily later in the month to do some looking there. I just got interested in some of the ways people in the early part of the 20th century looked at death there. Doing that, I'm visiting, I'm also interested in 19th century medical education.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm. Such as it was.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah, and early surgery. As a matter of fact, I just went here in Chicago to the, I'm going to get the name wrong, but it's a surgery museum.

Brian Brodeur:

Okay. Wow. Wow.

Claudia Emerson:

We went yesterday. I rode the Ferris wheel and went to the surgery museum.

Brian Brodeur:

The Ferris wheel, which we can see from this window.

Claudia Emerson:

Yeah. The cab drivers, a Chicago cab driver said, "Where are we going?" He'd never taken anybody there.

Brian Brodeur:

"You know, the surgery museum."

Claudia Emerson:

"What are you talking about?" Yeah, that's what I'm working on now. I'm hopeful to write this one maybe a little bit faster, not faster, but it seems to have some momentum now. I think because it's not personal, it's just easier to do those things.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm. Great. Wonderful. Claudia Emerson, thank you very much for having this chat.

Claudia Emerson:

Thank you, Brian. I really enjoyed it. Thanks very much.

Brian Brodeur:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

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