Em Frank interview with Emily Hunt

Now that I’m older I like being corny. I’m a huge Emily Hunt fan. I didn’t realize it until we started this conversation, but I originally wrote her a fangirl email 8 years ago that said, “i just wanted to write to you and express how much i enjoy/ed dark green. the book is a tremendous light to me so thanks so much for writing it. hope you are well.” lol so cute and I still feel the same and I am not ashamed. To love without shame keeps me coming back to life. Anyway, when I saw Emily had a new book coming out from The Song Cave I got really excited and wanted to connect with her about it in some way. With my first time getting Covid swirling around my brain, I typed up a bunch of questions after reading her book Stranger, and this is the convo that ensued. I hope you enjoy it!

–Em Frank

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Em Frank: I felt hit in the gut on what it means to truly love as a parent in your poem “Stranger” where you write “I’m starting to get to know her. / She has a center.” And I hoped and wondered initially, only knowing you from social media, that your new book was titled Stranger because of your new baby. I thought, how exciting to think of one’s baby as a stranger. Sometimes I think culture stresses to us that in order to truly love someone you must know them, but I kinda think that it’s the opposite, that we can only ever really love someone if we remind ourselves that we really don’t know them. So let’s start simple, tell me about the word “Stranger”! 

Emily Hunt: It's cool to hear that “Stranger” brought parental love to mind, because that poem is actually one I wrote while nannying an infant in San Francisco, years before I gave birth and became a mother myself. And my hope with any poem is that it can hold or take root in someone’s particular experience or read of it at whatever time they encounter it. The same is true for me returning to my own poems at different points in my life – it’s one way I decide if a poem is strong enough to publish.

I remember the time I wrote this poem so well, the walks I took through the Mission District in San Francisco with a baby strapped to me. Infants are so magical. They seem to have come from another universe, but because of this, they show you that the universe they come from (yours) is strange. In part I chose the title “Stranger” for this poem (and for the whole book) because the word contains something strange (life or a person or a relationship or a place) getting stranger. 

This word “stranger” also felt right to title this poem that I wrote while caring for someone else’s child, knowing I probably wouldn’t have a relationship with her beyond the job. There was a dissonance between the intimacy and bond I was forming with her and the knowledge that though I was spending more time with her than anyone other than her parents in that first stretch of her first year alive, she wouldn’t remember me or “know” me later. We were building a very important and impactful relationship that would sort of dissolve into time, be carried in her body, but not be continued in the physical sense or out loud.

I agree that it can be more possible to love someone from a distance, or with the knowledge you don’t know them. I can be struck with an easy love toward strangers I encounter, and there’s no need for it to be reciprocated or voiced, it’s just a kind of light or energy or force that circulates. And that’s what poetry is too, in its ways. It’s private and public at once, distant and very close.

I like being in cities because I can go out and catch these waves, participate in these webs of energy. I assume that people I cross paths with have at some point (or will if they haven’t yet) encountered something horrible or catastrophic that wrecked them, and that it might be a big deal that they’re out getting groceries, or putting one foot in front of the other to mail a package at the post office, or sitting on a bench in clothes they chose in spite of whatever weight they’re bearing. So I feel tender toward them from far away.

And I like being in nature (complicated term, not going to unpack it right now!) because the “strangers” I encounter are trees and rocks and streams and flowers, which have also been through a lot and also seem to experience their own kinds of pleasure and joy.

The word “stranger” also feels relevant given the internet’s influence on interpersonal relationships and how that shows up in the poems. It’s gotten to the point where we don’t even notice or think much about how the majority of interactions with others over the course of a few days may happen through an iPhone with people we might never hear or touch or smell or see, and that’s weird. 

There are a million other reasons I chose this title but this is just a flash into a few of them. Basically, I think “stranger” is a rich and delicious and agile word.

Em Frank: I am also taking care of a baby right now. One of my oldest friends’, so I love that we are having the joint experience of dipping into artmaking while having to dedicate ourselves to child care. I always felt with my early writing I was like trying to force something into existence, whereas now, since having had to take care of babies, animals, plants, myself lol through my life, I feel like when I write it’s more like I’m caring something into existence, or into itself. How has your approach to artmaking changed from your first book to your second, and how much do you think life versus “wanting to get better, or like, “refine your craft” (ugh I hate this phrase lol, sorry) influences this?

Amazing, I love this rhyming. Yes, I think about writing as caring about and for language, caring about what happens or happened, caring about people, the earth, blood, dust, food, homes, cats. My first book felt like a kind of ladder out of somewhere dark, whereas with this book, though I’ve struggled in the many ways any person alive might struggle, the lights have been on the whole time, if that makes sense. Dark Green is (for me, but not necessarily for readers) a kind of record of bringing myself back to life, and Stranger is a much more awake book. Like, okay, I’m back, and my body is here, what do I see, where am I going, what does it look like, where will I live, what will I do about housing, how will I make enough money, what is this culture that I cannot extricate myself from, that is creating me as I yield to it, resist it, contribute to it?

Em Frank: I love this­—and I think it really does come through from your first to your second book. Your poems in this book feel much more exact and rigorously detailed to me than some of your previous work. I feel like you honor your poems in a way in your new book that I’ve always been too afraid of with my own. You allow them, in a way, to be unpoeticized a lot, to just be life, for instance, with the simplest of lines such as, “I pull the gate closed, / lifting it slightly / so the lock tongue lines up.” I’d be terrified to write so honestly about life, I mean, I couldn’t write like this, but it reads so beautifully to me, and it makes me wonder if you were ever scared to write like that? Did you ever worry a line wasn’t poetic enough? Maybe I’m just projecting here :/

I feel a kind of high when I read or am able to write clear images or naked statements because it just feels like I can see and touch something real, solid like a branch or root, and I’m not in a foggy or cluttered place. I tend to keep editing over years because that’s how I can find something that doesn’t feel muddy, and is true for me in different ways each time I return to it. The line, “I pull the gate closed, / lifting it slightly / so the lock tongue lines up” came from a fun edit. I was trying to find a way to make this image clear (it was phrased differently before), and I Googled the parts of a lock. I was happy to learn that “lock tongue” is a term, and it felt right for a poem in which I’d talked about the baby’s mouth, milk, water and succulents. This is writing poetry to me, learning the words and learning them again on a different day, looking at them from all angles, trying them out to see if they can hold a feeling or experience, giving them room on the page to live and brush up against each other so they can show me how it’s all oddly connected. Relatedly, I love that George Oppen line, “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’” 

Em Frank: Omg yes. I just recently read On Being Numerous and love how much he loved bricks! Your lines have that punchy snipped quality to me too, kinda like the flowers you write about. How many of your final lines are just portions of the original lines? To me, there’s something so magical about seeing only some of something, I think this is what makes your poems so magical, they read like glimpses, or pieces of some whole that doesn’t and/or can’t really exist. Are you interested in big truths in this part of your life? Or are you happy enough with little things, like “a lone green,” as you write? Do you find details somehow truer, more complete than the thing they comprise in some way?

Haha yes, I think about Oppen’s love of bricks basically every day walking around NYC! And as I’m looking out my windows holding my baby, pointing to the bricks and fire escapes of the building across from mine.

I definitely snip and cut and trim a lot. With the long serial poems “Company”, “Landline”, and “Weekend Shifts”, I found that separating the stanzas with asterisks was a way to insert a pause and make a switch, kind of like in a film, where you see someone start to do something like wash a dish or order a coffee or kiss someone or see a car go by or whatever, and you don’t need to watch that whole interaction play out to feel its energy and implications braided into the whole of who that character or place becomes over the course of the film. I wouldn’t say I find details more true, necessarily, but I think a flash of physical detail can leave room for a variety of truths to land inside the text; I want to touch down on something and hand it off to the reader and let it open in their hands into whatever it does, which will probably have crossover with my experience of the text but also go entirely different places.

Also, I think I lean toward a “less is more” approach in a lot of areas of my life because I’m pretty easily overstimulated, claustrophobic—I crave room to breathe and reflect as I take in the world and everything that happens minute to minute, word to word. Another way I’m growing as a person through parenting is realizing that I don’t get much space to name what’s happening for weeks or months on end, I just have to keep moving and doing, and I can feel those accumulated layers of mood and event and image as kind of ambient noise. So I’m learning to cope with this accumulation, and I’m sure it will lead to a bunch of new writing in a few years in the same way that being a new resident of a new city and starting from scratch in the Bay Area led to me start writing “Company.”

Em Frank: I love the line “any ageless day / but it’s this one.” I love how proud and acceptingly present it is. It reminds me of a sunflower and begs the question for me, what’s your relationship to being present? I read your line, I don’t wanna say spiritually, because spirituality I think sometimes feels lofty, or overwrought, at least when fleshed out with language, but just as an acceptance of the present, a dissembling of that loftiness. It really makes me curious about how you work on being present in your life, in your poems etc. That’s something I always want to know about somebody.

Thank you. I remember writing this poem “Little Money” very well because it was one that came quickly and necessarily in order to ground me in the reality of what was happening—I was coming to terms with saying yes, here I am, sitting on this curb, on this day, at this age, and this is true. My brother had recently died by suicide, and I was outside my sister’s apartment holding huge sunflowers while she slept. I had gone to the Whole Foods near her to buy her flowers and food to make dinner. Everything felt wonky and gorgeous and haunted and huge and deep the way it can when someone’s suddenly dead and it hasn’t quite become real to you yet. This poem came fast, in my Notes app, just before I got back to Laura’s apartment. I later snipped (to use your very resonant and relevant word!) a few lines from it.

This poem also has mixed into it that I had just left a job and was engaging (as I frequently am, and as I often do when I make a technically unnecessary purchase of some kind, such as flowers, or an organic rotisserie chicken instead of a cheaper non-organic chicken) with some foggy mixture of questions/fears/realizations/frustrations regarding intersections between money and health and time and art. That kind of tangle of “too much what?” in the mind often necessitates a poem that feels as direct and honest as possible to me.

And I definitely rely on the word “spiritual”. “Spirit” and “soul” are words I’ve needed. Writing poems is spiritual for me, it feels like trying to touch something fleeting, invisible, sprawling, and attempt to capture it like a little seed or shape, only to then watch it keep changing and changing and changing. I don’t belong to any religion and didn’t growing up, but I also have found the word “god” useful as a container. 

Re your question, “how do you work on being present”, before having a child my answer to this would have been, at least in part, that I write poems and take photos. Now that I have a baby, I think generally, I am more present than ever before, I am taking things moment to moment to moment because I have to. My baby changes and grows so fast – no one and nothing has ever given me such drive to cherish the present, trust the present, try to trust myself as I make a quick decision. I’m so grateful to Saskia for giving me this (among a zillion other things). It’s invigorating, refreshing and sacred.
 

Em Frank: It’s so fascinating to be making art while being of service to others, especially the endless demands of a baby. There’s such a grace, and finesse in a way to it, that it almost feels like getting better at an arcade game or stepping into the middle of a ballet. But I also find that the experience of taking care of a baby doesn’t need to be explained in a way that I would other things about my life, like love, regret, fear, money etc. It feels so much easier and satisfying to say it plainly: that the baby is hungry, the baby is looking at something, if that makes any sense. And I’ve come to wonder if this feeling has partly informed your writing now. Admittedly, and embarrassingly, I wrote this poem I’m not quite happy with it yet but I wonder if you relate to it in some way by what I was just talking about and about how you wrote to me about only having little of snatches of time for your creative self now: “writing poems / while the baby cries / finally, / I don’t need metaphor / to place me / in my life / anymore.” 

I love that phrase “to place me” in your poem, what a beautiful line.

Yes, “like stepping into the middle of a ballet” is exactly how it feels! So well put. And yes, maybe because taking care of a baby just contains and touches absolutely everything, so there’s no way to explain it or liken it to something. And I don’t think of it as separate from writing or making art, it’s just all part of the ongoing poem or the poems to come (This haiku by Dōgen I saw on Twitter comes to mind: “persons, places, things/ do not exist in time/ they are time”). Here’s a couple more haiku, both translated by Makoto Ueda, in Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women:

the baby carriage

and the wild waves

side by side in summer

–Hashimoto Takako

one naked baby

is all I’ve got

and I pray

–Ishibashi Hideno

Em Frank: I love short poems, (especially, especially Haiku! – I was taught Basho, Buson, and Issa in high school!) they’re always the poems I find to be the most instantly and enduringly true. Your poem “Love” in this book is so so good, “Fruit in the sun / That could be us / Sun on fruit.” I love a topsy-turvy logic, where the perspective changes quickly and gives itself the gift of new meaning. It reads to me as a paradox, and therefore true. I’ve heard about how real truth is a paradox many times in recovery and spiritual settings in my life: surrendering to have power, giving away something to keep it, letting go to receive etc. How do you feel about paradox?

Me too. I love short poems so much. And yes, paradox is everything! I’m jealous that you read those poems in high school. That poem came from a long document of a very long draft of a poem I was writing in 2020 or 2021 that split off into several much shorter poems in Stranger. I love your phrase “topsy turvy”—that sensation is something I intend to try to preserve on the page if I come across it while writing. These three lines just kept replaying in my head and felt richer and stronger than the rest of the writing on the pages around them so I decided to let them live and grow on their own without distraction. Several of the very short poems I’ve published have come this way, plucked out of a longer draft.

Em Frank: Aww I love this response so much. I read it as you liking your poems! So fun! That’s something I think I honestly really struggle with, or have struggled with, to like my own work, and when I see someone else doing it in a wholesome and genuine way it makes me feel close to something so special. However, lately my relationship to thinking about art in metrics has changed. Like when I was younger, I used to wish that I wrote so-and-so’s poem, because it was a “good” poem, but now what I’m envious of is how it felt to write the poem, not how good it is. Like, recently I was reading John Ashbery’s “A Wave” in the bath, and I got so excited thinking about how beautiful of an experience it must have been to have had those poems run through his body like that. Like to me, that’s enough to love and engage with poetry now. Just to be struck by its lighting, not to create a “good” poem. Do you find that you are able to like your older work, and not want to edit or change it, like do you honor how it was, is that enough for you? 

I think of all the poems I write as collaborative and cumulative, like mushrooms or cool rocks I’ve come across. Though I shape them over days or years, they surface from so many influences — someone's outfit I saw on the street, something a friend said that made me think of something else, the pacing of another writer’s poem, a tone I’ve developed as I text with a friend, a word my husband uses a lot. For example, the last phrase of my book is something my estranged father’s mother, from whom he was estranged, said to me when I was 21. She said it in the room she died in (I think), which, because it was at an elderly care facility, was likely the room other people died in, too, before her, and after her, and in this way, those strangers who’ve passed are also part of my book in my mind, as are the people who cleaned that room and the nurses who worked in it, and I can smell the weird food that’s been on trays in there just thinking about it. And imagine the plants and bugs and rodents that got smashed while that facility was built, etc.

Another example: I may not have used the word "freakish" in the first poem in my book if I hadn't been so deeply struck by James Schuyler's phrase, "freaks forth" in his poem “The Bluet”, which Peter Gizzi introduced to me about 15 years ago, and which I’ve taught several times in subsequent years and heard students read out loud in living rooms and on Zoom.

If I’m remembering right, this poem "Love" popped in my head as I passed an actual fruit stand in Inwood, Manhattan, so the light on that fruit and the person who set up that stand is as responsible for this poem as I am, and that light is also me and that person, and on and on and on. I don’t think, “I, Emily Hunt, wrote a poem I like”, I think a thousand influences came together to show me something that I preserved using a thousand tools, some of which are part of my body and most of which are not.

I appreciate one way June Jordan defines poetry: “it is attitude and response”. And Simone Weil’s often quoted statement, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I love the material (language, woven with everything that can’t be put into words), I’m interested in it and care about it and need it, so if I pay attention to it and engage with it, it occasionally offers me a poem. All just to say, if I like a poem of mine, I’m liking being alive to see or touch a billion things beyond me.