Hala Alyan
Interview with Emma De Lisle
Emma De Lisle was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award in Poetry by guest judge Hala Alyan. As part of the contest, the winner had an opportunity to be interviewed by Alyan. The following is their email exchange.
Emma De Lisle’s recent work is out or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Boiler, Denver Quarterly, Image, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, and West Branch. She lives in Western Massachusetts, and is co-editor-in-chief of Mark.
HALA ALYAN: Why do you turn to poetry? What does it feed, challenge, illuminate for you?
EMMA DE LISLE: Poetry changes how I see. Most of the time I don’t know what I’m looking at until I’m writing about it. Even then I don’t know what I’m looking at, but at least if I’m writing, I’m paying attention, I’m looking hard, and the way I look is being transformed by language. What I see—what I’m able to see—is changed by words. And I’m at least telling myself that by transforming my vision, I can transform myself. So I guess I turn to poetry because I want to change. I want my encounter with the world to demand some kind of active response from me.
HA: Your poems suggest a certain intimacy with absence—longing, the elusive You, the intimacy of writing towards something that may not respond. How do you approach writing about and alongside such absence?
EDL: The capital-Y You in my poems is how I’m trying to talk to God—so yes, that automatically brings in the problem of absence. I don’t think I’m very good at dealing with or writing about that absence, which might be why I keep returning to it. It’s always unresolved. And God, as the You, is always changing and moving around, so my speaker has to move around too—try new forms, new diction, make turns. Adélia Prado, one of my favorite poets, has such a great method of divine address—she has this recurring figure named Jonathan, who is, by turns: Jesus; capital-P Poetry; language itself; Prado herself; a fictional beloved; her real-life husband José; and sometimes just a guy. He’s such a flexible character, such a capacious and changeable addressee. That’s how I wish I were dealing with absence in my poems, but it’s not. Sure, my “You” shape-shifts and acts like the beloved or other characters depending on the poem, but I don’t have the power that Prado does to incarnate her Jonathan so convincingly. She incarnates him through his absence, through the excess of the force of her desire for him. Whereas I just have this sort of abstract “You” that I’m trying to constitute over and over on the page, trying to surprise both my speaker and my addressee into something like communication.
HA: There’s a visceral, almost sacred attention to the body—thighs, loins, chins, freckles, hair—in your work. I’d love to hear more about the role of the body in your writing.
EDL: There’s a lot to say about the role of the body in poetry, and a lot of it has already been said. So maybe I’ll answer a little obliquely. I’m Catholic, and in my academic life I study the eucharist—which is the bread of communion that’s also the body of Christ in many Christian traditions. I spend a lot of time thinking about bodies in that context, and what it means to eat Christ’s body; for a whole community of bodies to be unified and transformed by doing so. How does the eucharist transform something like violence, or desire? It doesn’t erase those things; it changes them. I think poetry can function as though it’s eucharistic, too—it points toward that longed-for change. We want that pointing to effect the change it signifies. We want language to change us. And we want to feel that change in our bodies. The language we use to get ourselves or our reader to undergo change in a poem isn’t always “bodily” language, exactly, but it does often depend on the senses, on concrete sense-data in an image. We have to be able to “do” an image with our bodies to believe it. Understanding it or justifying it intellectually isn’t enough. So I end up pretty preoccupied with the body—and that comes through in my writing.
HA: Where do poems begin for you? I mean this literally (what is the arc of constructing a poem) and metaphorically (where do you find poetry in your days, in other people, in yourself)?
EDL: Poems almost always begin when I’m supposed to be doing something else. I wrote a poem while I was supposed to be answering this question!
More metaphorically, I guess a lot of poems begin with confrontation for me. When I encounter something I don’t understand, I feel myself react: either I want to understand, or I get avoidant, I want to run away. Writing is a way to force myself through—instead of around—the process of encounter with the unknown. The unknown in nature, in my body, in other people’s bodies, in other people. What I want to understand but don’t in the people I love; what I don’t want to understand, but need to, in the people I don’t love. Practically speaking, this pretty much always begins with fragments that I write down in the middle of whatever else is going on, and I end up with a messy list of images that I blur my eyes at until they start to look connected—and then a poem starts to happen.
HA: There’s a stunning command of imagery and—relatedly—a really fascinating use of the real estate of the page. Can you tell us about your relationship with structure and form?
EDL: I think you’re primarily asking about the right-margin justification of poems like “Two Step” here, though I guess also about the line breaks of the Larissa poems. The form of the Larissa poems came from workshopping one of my friend Sam Bailey’s poems—it was long and stichic, and we’d been wrestling with it for a while and trying to keep it from slowing down too much in the middle. And then he was like, “Or—what if every sentence is its own stanza?” And it completely transformed the whole thing, it was like a magic trick. So I went and did that to a bunch of poems I’d been stuck on, too. It doesn’t always work, but when it works it’s a lot of fun.
The right-margin poems came out of working with my teacher Jorie Graham, who started writing in that form a few years ago. But it took me a while to realize why that relationship with the right margin has been so addictive to me personally. I think it’s how I’m dealing with the “elusive You” that you addressed in your earlier question. I’m winding up and ramming against the wall of the page again and again to try to provoke a response, and to generate enough velocity to bounce myself back and start over when I don’t get one.