By Maria Bowler
Maria Bowler interviews the poet Emilia Phillips about her work, poetic education, writing about desire, and turning self-deprecation into self-celebration. Emilia Phillips (she/her/hers) is the author of four poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including the Embouchure (2021). Her poems, essays, and criticism appear widely. She’s an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro.
I’m really interested in the deft way you handle the body within your work, particularly the way it simultaneously illuminates desire and alienation, joy and pain. Have there been any particular writers or thinkers that have informed your approach to writing about the body?
Thank you so much for your kind words about how I write about the body, Maria, and thank you for inviting me to be interviewed.
I grew up with a forensic scientist father, which is kind of an odd start to a life thinking about the body. I’ve told this story elsewhere, in my poetry and lyric nonfiction, but I mention it here because I think it might unpack a narrative of growth in the way I’ve handled the body. In my first book Signaletics, I was writing about forensic science and its relationship to the body, but I was perhaps also unconsciously adopting a clinical approach to the body. Throughout my next two collections, Groundspeed and Empty Clip, I was trying to face my own body, the realities of it, sick at first, then mentally ill.
While trying to do that, I really turned to a number of writers. Among them are Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score), and poets like Lynda Hull, Etheridge Knight, Adrienne Rich, Aracelis Girmay, Jenny Johnson, Morgan Parker, Dana Levin, Marianne Boruch, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claudia Rankine, and so on.
Continuing on this theme, I’m wondering if you can talk a little about how the theme of desire has informed your writing of the poems in Embouchure, your newest poetry collection coming out next year!
The new book is trying to make self-deprecation, especially the telling of embarrassing or awkward stories, into self-celebration. Some of that embarrassing and awkward stuff is desire: who was I attracted to? Well, turns out, mostly women, even though I spent most of my life in a straight-facing relationship with a cis man. The book is then, perhaps, my coming out book. Someone, maybe Danez Smith, joked on Twitter something like “All poets have coming out books. Some of them just do it later in their lives.”
*tentatively raises my hand*
(Of note here, too, is that after I came out, I went back and looked at my previous books and I count no less than three poems per book that could be read with a lens of queer desire. There are a lot of stockings in my books!)
“I Tried to Write a Poem Called ‘Imposter Syndrome’ and Failed”, which recently appeared in Poem-a-Day, is a great example of how you playfully manage self-revelation. I’m thinking in particular of the line, “ I made myself / laugh and so I made myself hurt— // MEMOIRS BY EMILIA PHILLIPS, goes the joke.” To what extent is the notion of “confessional poetry” useful or alive to you as a writer? What about as a reader?
When I first started learning about poetry, a teacher told me that “confessional poetry” was easy. Unartful. It was especially associated with women, too. You know what, I’ve had to work long and hard on combating my internalized bias against confessional poetry. Sometimes, you need to say what you need to say without (f)arting it up, you know? I once co-led a poetry retreat with Chen Chen and he had this wonderful workshop on The Art of Telling, a kind of directory of loopholes in the “show, don’t tell” mantra we teach our students. I loved that class, and I felt all over again that great wash of a student’s curiosity by sitting in on Chen’s class. What did I need to say and hadn’t yet, couldn’t yet say? Why was I coding everything in metaphor? In the scaffolding of a project? Who does it benefit by me not coming right out and saying something? It was Chen’s writing exercise that conjured a poem in the forthcoming book, “My OB/GYN Suggests I Consider Cosmetic Labiaplasty.” For me, confessional poetry has a great deal of power because it reveals the internal lives of those who have been systemically—historically and presently—oppressed by patriarchal, white supremacy. Yes, I have privileges as a white person, but as a woman there were so many things about which I had shame. I wanted to get over that shame by disempowering it. And how do you disempower shame? By not allowing the things about which you’re ashamed to remain secret. That included sex, gender, sexuality, body size, etcetera. But sometimes I feel “confessional” isn’t quite the right word for what I mean. “Confessional” implies a dark box in which you whisper your secrets to an anonymous priest. “Confession” implies shame.
Maybe we can come up with another phrase that doesn’t carry all that connotative baggage of shame!
How does your process differ (if indeed it does!) for your lyrical nonfiction work and your poetry? Is there any difference in the impulse to write in “prose” versus poetry? Do you know when a piece is “finished” in the same way?
For one thing, I can’t write lyric nonfiction at all times, but I can generally find my way into working on a poem at any time of the year. I have to be on an extended break for me to even begin thinking about lyric nonfiction—an essay’s arc, structure—and it’s usually after a fallow period, a break where I try to reset my brain. That’s why my lyric nonfiction is usually written in the summer. I often find myself in hyperdrive with writing poetry during about a 2–3 week stretch every early fall and every early spring. I’m such a seasonal person! I try to eat seasonally! I listen to music seasonally! Of course I write seasonally too. As far as finishing a piece, I never think the essays are done. Sometimes a poem comes to rest, which is what I like calling it rather than that it’s “done.”)
As a professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Dept. of English at UNC – Greensboro, how has teaching informed your writing life? Has it changed over the course of your teaching career?
I’ll give a specific, extremely recent example here. This semester, I assigned my Grad Poetry Workshop a translation project while also doing a Latin-American Poetry Translation independent study with one of those grad students. Reading and spending time with poetry in another language, or else translated into our own, has been one of the most life-altering, poem-metamorphosing experiences of my life. In that class, I’m learning alongside my students, which allows for more of an exchange—a conversation—between us, which gives me that same rush of energy and excitement that I felt as a student. So, yes, it’s changed for the better. Especially when we embark on projects together.
You’ve written thoughtfully about the role of education and your own formation as a writer. How does the writing advice you give now as a teacher differ (or intersect with) the formation you received as a student?
Oo, boy. I could take you down some roads, particularly with regards to one kind of “old guard” poetry education I received early on, but I saw something different when I went to my MFA program, especially with my thesis advisors David Wojahn and Kathleen Graber. It’s so strange because I invoke them in almost every class, sometimes parroting their advice. It’s just nickel-and-dime stuff, David says, I say. But I find myself increasingly having revelations about something one of them would try to teach me at the time, that I thought I got but I never really did. It’s only now that I realize how much time and energy and thought and heart they put into teaching me. I’ve also realized what an overwhelming student I must have been! (I was always in their offices, asking them to read new poems or recommend me books.) That being said, I do think that my tastes for poetry—indeed, poetic aesthetics—might be a little more expansive than some of my teachers. Things they might have steered me away from I push my students toward. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Maybe it means I’m a less discerning reader than they are.
You’re an active and generous presence online, particularly on Twitter. What has that community and engagement meant for you?
This is a hard question because I am lately resisting these online spaces, in part because it sometimes lacks nuance, especially when it comes to the behavior of real people and their opinions. I try to avoid scandals and limit my intake of the news. For me, I want to use these spaces only as a place for access, to share poetry, nature, and so forth. I’m glad I’ve arrived at this place. It’s so much healthier, and it allows me to associate the poetry community with community, not confrontation.
Lastly, what’s next for you? And that can include rest! Are there any challenges or projects you’re excited to explore?
Rest? What rest?
I’m kidding, of course. I rest here and there in the midst of projects rather than at their ends. Someone once told me, and probably someone else will correct me, that Lucie Brock-Broido would wait at least 100 (maybe 200?) days after finishing a collection to write again. That’s not me. My collections, how they interact with one another, is a little accordion shaped, where the end of one book is pressed face to face with the beginning of the next. What I mean to say is that I’m working on projects that overlap with one another.
Right now? I’m working on a poetry collection called La Dichosa, which is the title character of a poem by Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral. The moniker roughly translates as The Lucky/Joyous/Fortunate/Blissful One, gendered feminine. The poem features a speaker who has left behind her family, community, and possessions for a “plain wall and a conversation” with a beloved, who remains cleverly ungendered in the poem. Mistral has romantic relationships with women, albeit she wasn’t—like most queer people at the time—out. I have done a “queer” translation of the poem, which serves as the book’s proem. In the second half of the book, I have a sequence of poems in the voice of this character La Dichosa, more about her living a non-normative (definitely queer and possibly ethically non-monogamous) life. As I write this in the middle of the COVID-19 social distancing order, I’m very interested in being “alone with someone,” how you collaborate on a mythology of the rest of the world through your language, your conversations. That’s what I’m trying to explore there.
The first section of the book is also in persona: Eve, as in “Adam and.” My Eve is sexually and romantically disinterested in Adam, and she tries to create another woman throughout the course of the twelve-poem sequence. Of course, being my Eve, her language is anachronistic, her culture hyper-American but fantastic. The sequence is meant to cast the Garden of Eden as the ur-narrative of compulsive heterosexuality.
Other than that, I’m trying to add more to Wound Revisions, my collection of lyric essays I mistakenly thought I was finished with last summer. (I’m thinking one, maybe two more essays?) That project has been going on for almost eight years now.
Like a clock without hands, I’d be lost without at least one project. (And two helps me better account for the minutes.)
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