Claudia Emerson earned her
BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro, where she was poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. Her poems have
appeared in Poetry, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah,
TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals. Pharaoh,
Pharaoh (1997) and Pinion, An Elegy (2002) were published as part of Louisiana
State University Press’s signature series, Southern Messenger Poets, edited by Dave
Smith; Late Wife (forthcoming 2005) is also part of the series. An advisory and
contributing editor for Shenandoah, Emerson has been awarded individual
artist’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia
Commission for the Arts. She was recently named a 2005 Witter Bynner fellow, chosen by the
Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser. She is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington
College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.My Work
I call myself a lyric poet, but I also think in poetic sequences with narrative threads. Pinion, my second book, ended up being a long poem, and, though not as overtly narrative, Late Wife, my third, I always thought of as a whole book. The poems offered here as examples are from this book and are all letters to my husband whose first wife died from cancer.
If not strictly elegies, my poems have tended to be elegiac in tone. Elegy is lament, but also celebration. Again and again, I am compelled to recount and craft hard emotions and events in the most vivid language I can muster.
Poetry is the highest ordering of my written voice, and one of the most defining elements of that order is the line—and I work hard to find the fruitful tension between the line and the sentence, whether I am writing formal or freer verse. For a long time, I wrote a loosely iambic line without any end rhyme or stanza pattern, but with Late Wife, I felt compelled to try variations on William Carlos Williams’ triadic line as well as variations on the sonnet. Miller Williams has suggested that chosen forms, "allowed to be a little more resilient, followed not so rigorously, can inform new poems in such a manner that a sonnet or villanelle or sestina is not written but suggested"…and this "stirs old associations, as allusion will, and it surprises our expectations by being not finally the form it reminds us of. And even the suggestion of one of the forms, when a poet understands it well, can haunt a poem like a ghost." I enjoy thinking of a given form’s connotations—and have embraced having my poems haunted.
If you had asked me ten years ago to describe my poetic aesthetic, I’d have claimed interest only in persona and insisted that I cared little for writing out of personal experience. I used to tell my students that their loyalty had to be to the poem—not to the events or people that inspired it. Now I am far more empathetic to those who set themselves the daunting challenge of telling a truth so that it is also a successful poem.
While I have been writing long enough now to surprise myself, some constants have also emerged: I continually strive to write poems that are clear and accessible, even if their meanings are layered and complex; and I value finding beauty in lyrical expression, even when the subjects that present themselves are difficult.
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