Wasn’t it wisdom I wanted?

KARAN

Emily, I love that these poems refuse the typical illness narrative, how they don’t offer self-help-ish wisdom. In “Yellowstone, WY,” you tell us that it’s “all about life’s density, not length,” and then you pile up these compressed memories: wolves, wild horses, purple lightning, naked swimming. The hospital room becomes  “thin and disposable as a sheet of blue lined paper.” I’m intrigued by this metaphysics of survival. Can you talk about what you mean by density versus length?

EMILY

This is a great question. The narrator’s thought—maybe a desperate and futile thought—is that we might be able to win more life, even if we can never make more time. Our lifespans are variable and ever-decreasing, but the idea (based on a category error, really) is that someone who is ardently attentive and adventurous, but dies young, could pack more “life” into a shorter time than someone who distractedly plods through many dry, repetitive years. This is the first poem in the main body of the manuscript, and things shift by the end. “Pacific Spirit Park, BC,” currently the last poem, is in some ways an ode to routine and normalcy.

But maybe there is a way we really can subjectively enlarge our lives. The passage of time feels variable from the inside. Time subjectively moves more slowly when we are children, and it seems to speed up the longer we live. I feel that way, at least. I want to pull up a passage by Annie Dillard about this in Teaching a Stone to Talk, when she’s contemplating her daughter riding a bike with cards slapping in the spokes:
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You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers, you revolve in the upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside-down onto your head, hope you somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven’t the strength. 

But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb’s whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal (from “Aces and Eights” in Teaching a Stone to Talk, page 167).

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We all face this predicament. We are running out of time, so how do we feel vividly alive in the time we have? We can try to slow down the subjective passage of time through close attention, curiosity, and cherishing. (Poetic attention slows everything down, I think.) 

This can be a greater challenge when you are sick, weak, and embedded in the medical world. Admonitions to be more “present” are not helpful when the present moment just absolutely sucks. And many of us will end our lives in a depleted, grim state. So what then? Imagination, memory, and mental time travel can offer transcendence. (Not to get too self-help-ish after all!) 

KARAN

I love how physical “Mojave Desert, NV” is—I can feel the shovel digging through the dirt, that “shunk of hesitation.” You write: “I was out there to recover from you. It was hellish. I still miss it.” There’s something ascetic about wilderness work crews—the repetition, the punishing heat, scorpions in sleeping bags. You’re doing a PhD in philosophy, but these poems are occupied by chainsaws and blistered hands and “enormous Jerusalem crickets.” What does the body know that the mind refuses?

EMILY

I think I’m often disconnected from what my body knows. I often feel like a floating head. I’m constantly bumping into things because I’m off in the clouds: a stereotypical poet and philosopher in that way. When I went to work and live outdoors for the first time, in physically intense conditions, digging all day in such heat, it really was a shock. A wonderful revelation. It was suddenly with my whole body that I was able to feel and understand the Mojave. Not just vistas, but unending thirst. The mind slows down. The world rushes in. 

Still, disconnection from my body is my more ordinary state. My cancer was not caught until it was quite advanced partly because for a long time, I did not consciously grasp that I was becoming gravely ill. I responded to symptoms that should have sent anyone to the doctor with denial, confabulation, and secrecy. My mind refused, as you say. 

But it seemed that there was some form of bodily understanding of my predicament that percolated through me. My oncologist thinks I had had cancer for several years, and during that time I had many vivid, emotionally intense, vision-like dreams about dying and being dead. Watching my loved ones from above, unable to speak to them, for example. Meanwhile, I was writing persona poems spoken by a dead person. The whole collection I wrote during my MFA reads as if it was written by a dying author. And it was. But I had no idea. 

I struggle with what to make of this, but I think it may make sense if we consider theories of embodied cognition that my supervisor, Evan Thompson, originally developed. One of the central ideas of enactive and embodied approaches to philosophy of mind and cognitive science is that the mind isn’t hermetically enclosed in the skull: it exists in the dynamic relationship between the embodied nervous system and the world. Maybe my dream content arose in response to a cognitive system trying to make sense of interoceptive feelings within the body. In this case, my sub-personal imaginings were accurate, and my rational cognition led me astray, reinforcing denial. I wouldn’t say this bodily understanding amounts to knowledge, but I find it very striking.

KARAN

“Grand-Staircase Escalante, UT” opens with this chilling catalogue: “friend raped, friend abducted from a sidewalk, friend chased by a stranger through woods.” Then you introduce that hermit—“eyes like a prophet,” living on lizards and divinity—and the poem ends with dread: “I never want to see him out there, walking towards me, thin as he is.” The wilderness is supposed to be where you escape men, but men are there too. The coexistence of solitude and threat is scary. What does it mean to seek healing in a landscape that’s also potentially dangerous for women?

EMILY

Some of the themes of the larger manuscript that come up in this poem are predation, violence, and being stalked. I was stalked by a mountain lion in California; so was my friend and mentor when she was on a spirit quest in Arizona in her 70’s. In another poem, a woman begs me not to sleep outside alone at night, but I do. There is kind of a mysterious, dark force that stalks the wilderness in the poems, but maybe that’s misleading. Probably, when it comes to human violence, nowhere is safer than the wilderness. Most of the violence against women that comes up in the manuscript (not towards me) takes place in town, by trusted, known men, not feral strangers. (Though my husband and I have encountered four men living alone in the wilderness between the two of us: that number seems way too high. Maybe that’s a future poem.) 

I should say for the record that I think the hermit I met in Escalante is a kind and fascinating person, and not at all dangerous to my knowledge! But when you are the only person around for miles at night and hear something rustling in the dark, you think of who could be out there, and what physical power they could have over you, and remember that terrible things do happen. 

KARAN

“Gas Station Bathroom, UT” is haunting too. “Maybe the true self emerges, lives and works outdoors. Forgets it can be seen—no mirrors, no service, no battery life, no photos.” Then later: “The thing, soul, that makes its appearance in the absence of comfort and purpose.” You’re asking whether the self is forged or whittled away by extremity. I love that you don’t allow for an easy answer. Did illness and wilderness teach you similar things about the self? 

EMILY

I think both teach you what is left of you when everything familiar is gone. My ordinary life is academic and cosmopolitan. And yet I feel that when I am living outdoors and achieve a certain shimmering, lucid, very present state, I am my real self, which feels like being nobody in particular. Simone Weil writes about “decreation” of the self as a means to become unified with the world through our loving attention to it. Out there, sometimes it seems you could be anyone. Ordinary life blows away like mist. Your consciousness, to use a metaphor beloved by Indian philosophers, becomes like a mirror, reflecting everything exactly as it is. Rafting the Grand Canyon for three weeks with my husband last year, we would just sit, watching the water and the intricate cliffs, elated, never growing bored. 

Catastrophic illness is very different as a terrible unchosen transformation, but it also takes away so much of who you are and leaves you with something else. You see what you are made of through suffering, and you transform physically. The poem reflects memories of being shocked at seeing and barely recognizing myself. I had nearly died, and had spent a week in real horror through a major emergency surgery and a ghastly hospitalization. I was emaciated, sallow, cut open, could barely walk. My life as I knew it was over. I suddenly made eye contact with myself in the mirror. I felt I could see who I really was, and had always been, and would always be, which had nothing to do with my appearance, abilities, achievements, situation, and so on. I saw that I was strong. It was ecstatic and I felt, as Emerson wrote, “glad to the brink of fear.”

KARAN

You write in “Pacific Spirit Park, BC”: “Wasn’t it wisdom I wanted? Experience, philosophy—whatever secret truth I thought the desert meant. When I had cancer, I hated wisdom.” Argh! Here you are again, training as a philosopher, and rejecting wisdom as a category. What’s the relationship between your philosophical work and your poems? How do they speak to each other? And what did you want, if not wisdom?

EMILY

I love wisdom, and I think a life spent in pursuit of wisdom is a good life. When I was younger, before cancer, I think I understood that wisdom differs from knowledge, and that wisdom is something you attain not only through reading and contemplation, which I also value highly, but through experience and hardship. I sought these things to some extent as I was searching for beauty and wilderness out west (and romance—my husband is a true outdoorsman and to be with him meant to be out there). But courting danger is different than really, truly suffering. When the real catastrophe came, it did make me wiser, but I saw that it wasn’t worth it. 

Pain is terrible. I was disgusted with the whole situation—I wanted to spit out my new understanding of life. It came at such a terrible price. And what wisdom I seemed to access was awful and unwanted: it mostly had to do with the depth and ubiquity of human suffering and our total mortal vulnerability. I also saw that my prior innocence was valuable in many ways, and longed for it. What I wanted at the time was to be stupid and naïve and healthy and safe. When people told me that I was brave and that cancer would make me a better person, I relished insisting that they were wrong, and that cancer made me worse: more bitter, less empathetic, more selfish, more superstitious, more fearful. 

I said a lot of things back then. I feel I was right that cancer made me worse in some ways, for a time, but I have changed a great deal since. It could never be worth it, but I appreciate the person I’ve become and the insights I had when death was close, fleeting and fugitive as many of them were. I will spend much of my intellectual life trying to catch up with them. I think the processes of writing poetry and doing philosophy at their best can be attempts, in very different ways, to give expression to the insights we are not yet able to articulate. (Henry Bugbee explores and enacts this idea very beautifully with respect to philosophy in The Inward Morning.)

KARAN

All six poems here are prose blocks—dense, breathless, accretive. They move like thought, like physical exhaustion, and I love this relentless forward momentum. In “Gas Station Bathroom,” you write: “There are thoughts, many of them, petty and ruminative. Wide ranging, caged pacing.” The form itself feels like caged pacing, contained yet churning. What drew you to the prose poem for this work? Does the block shape do something that a broken line couldn’t? (I ask partly because I’m obsessed with prose poems.)

EMILY

Me too. I absolutely love prose poems. I became obsessed after reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely many years ago. A prose poem always strikes me forcefully as both cool and earnest. No bullshit. The form somehow communicates that the author is leveling with me, and that they trust me with what they are saying, because it does not enforce a particular rhythm or pace of reading other than those suggested by the sentences themselves. But that doesn’t mean a prose poem can’t be musical and complex. (Though to be honest I’ve never been very good at knowing where to break a line, and I envy the masters. A brilliant line break can take your breath away. Bobby Elliott’s poem “School Nights” has several.)

I didn’t start out thinking of this project as a collection of prose poems at all. I’ve been calling them The West Essays. I thought of them as lyric essays, or flash creative nonfiction pieces. I initially imagined a long, sprawling book, but the manuscript is crystallizing instead into a shorter collection of pieces that are more careful and polished, and I hope the ones that make the final cut will be worthy of being called poems. I think the prose form suits them: longish prose poems like these can be expansive but also spare, like the landscapes that pass through them. Because they deal with big feelings, the prose form helpfully tamps down sentimentality. And they are often discursive, which would be harder to pull off in a lineated poem. 

KARAN

Near the end of “Pacific Spirit Park, BC” there’s this pivot (or volta, if you will): “Suddenly I’ve had enough remembering. Or maybe I’ve just begun to forget.” You write about “nursing memory” earlier, and throughout these poems there’s this tension between holding on and letting go. “I worshipped innocence and the young woman who could never have known what was coming. Today, at last, I don’t miss her.” How do you think about memory in relation to survival? Is forgetting a betrayal or a form of healing?

EMILY

I hadn’t noticed how persistently tension between holding on and letting go arises, but you’re absolutely right. I’ve struggled enormously with this question about memory, healing, and betrayal, and am still struggling with it. When I write about what happened, do I betray my former self? Don’t I defuse the horror of those memories when I put them into words, and is that right? Every time I remember, I iterate over the old file. I change the memory. It loosens its vivacity and force. You heal by doing this, but I think it is also a betrayal. 

But maybe that’s all okay. I’m not sure if there is a path forward along which I don’t betray my former self. When I was sick, I was unreasonable and angry. I wanted to never forget what happened. I have some gnarly scars, but there was no part of me that didn’t want them, because the idea that I could get out of this unmarked held some sort of horror for me. At the same time, I also desperately wanted to forget it all and move on. I could never have both. And then I was enraged at the idea that my future self might try to find a silver lining, or make positive meaning out of the meaningless pain that I was often living through. But at the same time, incompatibly, I felt that I had realized important truths that could make me better somehow. And then I also felt that my “real” self was my self before illness, and that I was ruined forever, while also scornful of my former naivete.  

I want to honor my past wishes, as impossible as it might be. But as the past recedes, it has less power over me. I will never be glad that it happened, but I have grown (fled) into a very different life now. I feel reborn into it, and very happy in it. 

KARAN

The closing movement of “Pacific Spirit Park” is so tender: “I wanted this everydayness: crosswords, long walks to campus, groceries, ocean, rain boots, seasons, deadlines, libraries, outings, repetition.” After all the compressed intensity of wilderness and illness, the everyday becomes precious. It’s also anticlimactic in a way—the wolves are gone, as are the apocalyptic storms. How do you keep faith in the ordinary after you’ve lived at that pitch of intensity?

EMILY

The simple answer is that I’m just happy to be alive, and ordinary existence is joyful! 

Throughout my twenties, I swung back and forth between academic life and seasonal work out west as a raft guide or trail crew member or river ranger. I appreciate both ways of living, and I am pulled to move between both poles. Adventure and routine, hardship and ease, solitude and company, poetry and philosophy. I don’t find that I get bored with the quieter parts of life. Though I crave exploration and often long for the desert wilderness, having every part of my life organized around trying not to die also changed the way I feel about danger. I would never now seek out danger for its own sake. There are experiences worth risking everything for, like rafting through the Grand Canyon, but thrill-seeking isn’t the point.  

There’s a different kind of return to ordinary life after illness. Life with cancer is extremely boring. No horses or wolves. What intensity there is is almost all horrible. But living under threat of death does do something to your experience. Everything becomes almost unbearably luminous. You sit dumbfounded watching people on the subway. In all the ugliness of that experience, the miraculous beauty of being alive pierces through everywhere. It’s not worth it, and we do not need to be sick to access this feeling, but it is powerful. After the elation of finishing treatment and this journey to a new life (in the Grey Havens, as I sometimes think of it), there is just mundane everydayness. Anticlimactic, yes. Thank god. Sometimes I miss the ecstatic cherishing, or whatever, but you can’t live like that all the time, and it is just so good to be a normal person. 

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? (And I ask this knowing you’ve written poems that are simultaneously about each, so feel free to complicate the hell out of the question.)

EMILY

I love this question. Somehow it doesn’t feel complicated: poetry of the soul! I hardly know how to justify this, but it is true, at least from the inside. Keats writes about the “vale of soul-making.” I imagine souls in Keat’s sense as mental constructs we create and grow over time, and that create us, rather than spectral things we are born with. Soulfulness is my favorite quality in other people, though I couldn’t begin to define it. I don’t know if we are responsible for our hearts, or our bodies, but we are responsible for our souls. Philosophy is work of the mind—we try to sort out what is true for everyone, not just for us. The heart receives and responds to the world in its own idiosyncratic ways. The soul as I imagine it would be the crucible where our knowledge and wisdom meet our feelings and senses, and we become our true selves, our best selves, through a mix of conscientious effort, moral choices, and spontaneous transformation. For me, the alchemy of soul-making is distilled into poetic practice.

KARAN

What’s the best piece of advice (writing-related or otherwise) that’s helped you keep making poems through illness, recovery, and whatever comes after? Alternatively: what would you tell someone who’s trying to write through catastrophe without falling into cliché or sentimentality?

EMILY

To the first question: everyone should read Gregory Orr’s beautiful Poetry as Survival. I needed poetry to survive the hardest parts of my life so far, and I was so lucky to have Greg as a mentor. 

I can pass on some excellent advice I’ve received that speaks to the second question. One piece of advice is from my best friend and favorite living poet, Aimee Seu. This past summer she read a nonfiction piece of public-facing philosophy I was working on. I was writing about my most harrowing medical experiences, but I was pulling my punches. Where was the imagery, she asked? I admitted I was afraid of being too graphic, of scaring my reader or turning their stomachs, or seeming unprofessional. We were sitting in the sand at Wreck Beach in Vancouver, looking at the ocean. She looked at me and said, “if we aren’t telling the truth, then what the fuck are we doing?”

Right. If you’re going to write about it, tell the truth. Don’t try to make it pretty or acceptable. But to make it real does not mean to make a relic of your own blood. Give the reader an experience that reaches them; don’t just put your pain on display. 

To that point, a piece of advice from the miraculous Ross Gay. He visited UVA and gave the best reading I have ever seen in my life (tears of laughter were rolling down our faces—it was transcendent!) and read our poems. He made us all little placards that read “Joy is the Ground.” He told me, gently but firmly, that my poems were too sad. They needed more joy in them. He was right, and this is probably the best single piece of writing advice anyone has ever given me. I’m sure he gives it often enough: I was not the only young poet to have thought that real poems, serious poems, were somber and heavy. What on earth was I doing, in the flush of youth and innocence and happiness, giving the world such bleak offerings? I still tend to be over-serious and I often write about heavy subjects, but I try to remember that the best poems (and in fact the saddest poems) are grounded in joy.

I think it’s important to be disciplined and honest when we write about our own pain because confessional poetry about suffering and trauma can be easier to get published than poems on other topics. (At least, this has been true for me.) So make sure the work is up to your own standards. Don’t exaggerate or mislead, and don’t use pain, especially someone else’s, as a decoration or as a shortcut to depth. 

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

EMILY

Yes! I love prompts and constraints. Here is a simple one I used while writing “Gas Station Bathroom”: Write a poem about yourself that never uses a first-person pronoun. 

KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art—a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem—that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

EMILY

I recommend listening to Townes Van Zandt on a long solo drive, ideally through the country. Maybe smoking just one cigarette. 

I’ve loved Townes Van Zandt for a long time, but lately I’ve been truly marveling. I’ve been listening obsessively to his music all year. I can’t stop. His songs are understated but full of heartache, weather-beaten knowing, trickster joy, gambler’s highs and lows, and redemptive love. The guitar is aching and sweet, and transmutes whatever sadness I feel into something painfully beautiful. The world looks different. The lyrics are masterful. I have been thinking all year about this verse from “Sky Blue” that goes “To me living’s / to be laughing / in satisfaction’s face.”