Ordinary Objects:
An
Interview with Lynn
Emanuel
by Camille Domangue
(excerpts from the AWP Chronicle, Sept. 1997)
Lynn Emanuel is the author of two poetry books,
Hotel Fiesta and The Dig. She has been the recipient of
the Great Lakes' Colleges Association Award, and two Pushcart Prizes.
She was a poetry editor for the 1994-1995 Pushcart Prize
Anthology and has been a member of the Literature Panel for the
National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at the Bread Loaf
Writers' Conference, the Bennington Writers' Conference, the Warren
Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Vermont College Creative
Writing Program. She holds a BA from Bennington College, an MA from
the City College of New York, and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Currently, Ms. Emanuel is a Professor of English at the University of
Pittsburgh.
Camille Domangue: How did you come to
write?
Lynn Emanuel: I can't remember a time when I
didn't write--or have the perception that I wrote. My mother
read to me a great deal. She read J.M. Barrie's Peter and
Wendy until I had it memorized. She read poetry. The first adult
book I owned was Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Poems,
which was a gift from my mother and which I still have. I was
saturated with language. I was a permeable membrane; the experience
of hearing things read was an experience of having authored them
myself.
Domangue: Was there anything else about your
childhood that especially influenced you?
Emanuel: My father was an artist. All of my
aunts and uncles on one side of the family were painters, sculptors,
dancers, choreographers. All their friends were, too. There are
family stories about me being nasty to Rothko's daughter in the
sandbox. Before my father became a painter and sculptor he had been
an actor and live on the lower West Side with Zero Mostel, who was,
at that time, a painter. Everyone was or had been a communist. One of
my uncles was blacklisted in 1950 because of his cartoons for New
Masses. It was an incredibly rich and troublesome context. I knew
what it was to be a practitioner of art before I knew anything else.
My education, my art education, art in the broad sense, was an
education in practice. One went from looking at a room to making a
painting or writing a poem. These things I learned almost by osmosis.
What I never knew was the theory behind this practice. That came
later, came as I read. It wasn't exceptional that I wrote. It would
have been exceptional if I hadn't. Although my childhood was unusual,
I don't think that it was unique. Growing up in America in the 1950s
meant I was immersed in a culture that was extremely vain about its
blandness, its rationality, I was also part of another culture in
which people were involved in something that was the opposite of the
bland and the rational. We were an unconventional family living for a
good part of our lives in conventional places.
Domangue: Where were you living?
Emanuel: We lived in Denver, Colorado, in a
working class neighborhood. Our neighbors were employed in the
stockyards or owned small grocery and butcher shops. World War II had
ended only a few years before. Most of the families on the street
were German Lutheran and recent immigrants. Many spoke only German.
But I lived in a bohemian household. My father was an artist,
although my mother was a business woman. By the time I went to
college she was the first woman vice-president of the largest public
relations company in New York City. So, I felt I was living a life in
exile. I didn't know the homeland that families like ours came from,
but I knw it wasn't Denver.
Domangue: You told me once that your father used
to say, "Lynn, draw that vase, make it your mother. Turn the green
curtain into the woods she's walking into." Even as a child, it would
seem, object and subject were destabilized for you. Can we talk about
your poem from Hotel Fiesta, "Ordinary Objects"?
Ordinary Objects
"Hie et
ubique?"
Hamlet to the ghost
I am
letting
them stand
For everything I love
The light's unsteady
scale
Acrosee the glass, the hard
Brown grit of ants among
the roses.
The bittersweet--
Everywhere I look I
will see
Italy. The flowers will be full
Of prisons and
churches,
Of women in black dresses. full
Of motorcycles
and geuflecting.
The nightshade's dark, crooked stem
Is
your street
And the water in the vase the sea's
Horizon
tilting with the tilt
Of your ship. I am going to let
The
daffodil be your mistress.
She is tired of you and
stands
Looking at her feet.
In the fan's slow
wind
The curtains reach for you.
I am full of grief. I am
going
To lie down and die and be reborn
To come back as
these roses
And wind myself thorn by
Thron around your
house
To fit into the nutshell
And the flat seed, the
sear.
The door, the road, the web,
The moon's bald envious
eye
Staring at you through the drapes.
Emanuel: The most direct thing to say about
"Ordinary Objects" is that it is a still life in language. It's an
attempt to enact in language what it was I would do when I painted.
Before I decided to become a writer, I was going to be a painter.
This is an old art lesson.
Domangue: And how would such a lesson
proceed?
Emanuel: Take a table and make it a landscape.
Make the objects sitting before you into a little city. Also,
"Ordinary Objects" is an attempt to take that which is insignificant
and wrench it into significance. And,
conversely--perversely--it is about the way
significance resides in the ordinary, ready to erupt.
...The
flowers will be full
of prisons and churches.
Of women in
black dresses. full
of motorcycles and
genuflecting.
...
The verb tense of "Ordinary Objects" is
one of willfulness. I will take these ordinary things and make them
into a place. I have no place. I will make my own. There is torsion
in this poem, and intransigences. Hotel Fiesta is a book very
much about place. The book swings from one landscape to another,
Tunis to Las Vegas, and neither the cast of characters nor the
geography seems to have much in the way of conventional articulation.
When Grace Schulman reviewed Hotel Fiesta, she pointed out
that the narrative was full of implied events. You cannot guess, for
instance, wo is related to whom except through the narrator's
insistent naming of relationship: "my father, my mother, my
grandmother," the book goes. The narrator must keep asserting
relationship and connection: it's called family, the ties that
bind.
. . .
Domangue: Would you say something about your new
book? How does it develop or diverge from the concerns of The
Dig and Hotel Fiesta?
Emanuel: In early versions of the manuscript I
wrote quite a lot about the differences between reading a book of
poems and seeing a film. Gertrude Stein writes that an audience
sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a film "is not seeing
but dreaming." I wanted to contrast that extraordinary liquid
presence of film, its ability to saturate and drown the viewer with
images to the drier, less seductive, but more intimate medium of a
book of poems. Stein also called America a "space filled with
moving." I've built the book around a play on the word moving: What
does it mean to be moving? What films do, and what does it mean, as a
reader of a book of poems, to be moved? I think this new book has a
more fluent structure than The Dig which was packed,
purposefully, with impediment. A number of poems address the reader
directly because the central drama of the book is between a reader
and a writer, although the writer in this book is becoming an
increasingly tenuous entity. Sometimes the writer disappears entirely
and the poem or book speaks directly to the reader, because the
reader, that good enemy, looms large. The reader has replaced the
writer in importance, and the reader is alternately god-like and
dog-like. In one poem the reader wants to be led through a poem the
way a dog on a leash is led down a street. In another, the reader is
a god--omniscient, capricious, and inscrutable, someone the
text wants desperately to please. But while the book is about the
argument between writers and readers it is also about the argument
between language and the body. One of the heroines of the book is
Gertrude Stein. Her cubist experiments in language are, to me,
monumental efforts to unmake the page and with it space and time.
Against that effort I posit the story of the body with its
traditional beginning, middle, and end. Death can't be written out or
written beyond. The body in death is beyond the power of language,
unreformable, unrevisable. I suppose the third character is the
writer, such as she is, faced by these two powerful and
irreconcilable narratives. And, also, the book is very funny. It
really is. At times it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Domangue: Is there a question I haven't asked
that you would like to be asked?
Emanuel: Yes, I'd like to be asked why I am wary
of interviews.
Domangue: Why are you?
Emanuel: Because interviews can be used like the
sentence, "This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he
killed himself." Interviews can caption poetry and make poems
illustrations of the facts in interviews.
Domangue: So why did you agree to this
interview?
Emanuel: Well, I suppose I console myself with
the belief that, even in an interview, a fact can be an act of
invention.
Last Updated: 08/07/99
Created By: J.H.
Brugos