The Words, December 2015
Lynn Emanuel Reads on a Rainy Night
Kevin Xiong ‘16
As the rain fell on Wednesday night, I listened to Lynn Emanuel read fifteen poems in John B. Davis lecture hall. About fifty people occupied the seats. English majors, community members, and professors sat politely while Lynn read from her new collection of poetry, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected.
Sometimes Lynn would pause before diving into a poem without context. Other times she would explain the background or inspiration for the audience. During one of these gaps between poems, Lynn mentioned how her writing style has grown to become invitations for readers. “I didn’t want a poem to be the transparent window through which a reader saw a story,” she said, “I wanted the reader to always be aware that they were there.” By playing around with structure and referencing creative writing terms, Lynn involves the reader. For example, one poem’s title is an ellipsis. In other poems, Lynn employs analogies such as “a page as bare and smooth as a bowling alley,” or, “If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I’d want it to be a poetry reader.”
After Lynn read her poems, an audience member asked about her recurring character, Raoul. “Mostly what I wanted him to be,” said Lynn, “was a spark in the dreary landscape of Nevada. No one will ever think that someone named Raoul lived in Ely, Nevada.” She explained that Raoul is a motif. He represents male sexuality, the out-of-bounds, exoticism, and class. In one poem he is a thief and goes to jail. In another poem he takes a taxi to see the narrator but doesn’t have any money for the fare. He slips in and out of poems without any introduction, like a familiar face on the street.
Another attendee asked Lynn about the blurry line between authorial intent and reader interpretation. Sometimes a poet will write about a tree in the forest, for example, and the reader will see it as someone’s grandpa dying. Lynn acknowledged that as she is writing, she worries about reader interpretation. “I mean, how can you give the reader so much power?” she said. But whenever she reads poetry aloud in a community, her worries disappear. “You can’t always control every interpretation or nuance,” said Lynn, “and thank God! Cause some of them are better than what you were thinking of.”
The night before the poetry reading, Lynn had hosted a craft talk in the Harmon Room of the library. Around thirty people attended the talk, with English student workers providing cookies and apple juice for refreshments. The craft talk consisted of Professor Benjamin Voigt and Professor Jennifer Kwon Dobbs probing Lynn about her poetry and inspirations. Lynn read several poems at the beginning of the talk, and fielded a short Q&A afterwards.
“Lynn Emanuel’s visit was initiated by assistant professor Kristin Naca as part of the Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities’s annual programming,” said Dobbs, who had introduced Lynn Emanuel before both events, “I collaborated with Visiting Assistant Professor Ben Voigt and Departmental Coordinator Jan Beebe and am immensely grateful for their fantastic contributions! I had the pleasure of working with Lynn as her graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, and looked forward to teaching her latest book, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, in English 350.”
During her last poem in John B. Davis lecture hall, Lynn spoke to the audience again. “This poem ends the book,” she said. It was titled “Then, Suddenly—”, and she explained it as an apology to the readers who she always gave a hard time to. As I nestled in my padded chair and listened to her words, vague memories of high school English class came back to me. “Yes, in the distance there is a river, a bridge,” she began, “there is a sun smeared to a rosy blur, red as a drop of blood on a slide . . .”