Emma Bolden : part five

Why is poetry important?

Poetry allows us to speak to each other in a language that’s different and deeper than the ones we use every day. It creates a shared space in which we can not just see but experience the world the way another person sees it. By allowing us to see and hear and feel and experience what others experience in the way that they experience it, poetry reminds us that we are not alone, that we are all human. Perhaps that’s why poetry is most important: it teaches us, and insistently, that other people are people – and, in a time of such unthinkable cruelty, there are few things more important than remembering that. 

Emma Bolden : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Extremely. Poetry is music to me: it exists in a place that’s different than language, where words act more like sounds that, when strung together, create different chords, different kinds of harmony, different kinds of discord. My life has always thrummed with music. My father introduced me to singer/songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, George Harrison, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell, and I’ve been listening to and learning from them as long as I can remember. I’ve always listened to the way lyrics build around musical structures, how, when working with music, language transcends.

Emma Bolden : part three

How does a poem begin?

A moment of electricity. A need I can’t explain. A chord I keep hearing, struck deep within me. A question I can’t answer. A question I can’t ask. An answer to a question I haven’t begun to ask. A necessity. A lightning storm in the body. A lightning storm in the soul. A moment in which I believe in the body and the soul. A moment of total understanding I can’t seem to understand in any other language, any other way.

Emma Bolden : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Almost as soon as I became aware of words, I became aware of their magic. Our local PBS station aired re-runs of an old show called The Letter People when I was a kid, and I was totally obsessed with it. That show instilled in me the idea of language as a living, breathing thing as exciting and vivid as any 1970’s-era puppet show. I loved playing around with language but didn’t really recognize that as poetry until I was in 2nd grade. I wasn’t the most popular kid in my school (as you might have guessed, seeing as how I was obsessed with TV literacy program) and I was also often bored. One day, I read ahead in my English book while the rest of the class played a game. I came across Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and it was as if I’d been struck by lightning. I felt seen and understood in a way that I’d never felt, as if I wasn’t, after all, alone in feeling so completely alone. Even then, I understood that something about the way Dickinson used language made me feel that way. The way she chose and arranged words on the page felt strange and electric. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was all I wanted to do and read and live, from that day on.

Emma Bolden : part one

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry – House Is An Enigma (forthcoming from Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books) – and four chapbooks. She received a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Barthelme Prize and Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize winner, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and Poetry Daily as well as such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Conduit, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, the Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, Monkeybicycle, The Journal, The Pinch, and Guernica. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly.

What are you working on?

I actually just realized a few weeks ago that I’m apparently deep into two projects: one is a collection of poems about life in the deep, dirty south. The other started out as a series of found poems from true crime shows and has (apparently) developed an examination of the way our culture fetishes the female body in distress, danger, and death.