Guest Post by Sarah Matalone
Everyone writes for a different reason. Wordsworth composed poetry because of a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that bled out onto his page. Sylvia Plath, in a similar manner, believed that “the blood jet is poetry, and there is no stopping it.” But in a talk by poet Claudia Emerson yesterday, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet conveyed her own, more intentional reason for writing: to save things.
Claudia Emerson is a Virginia native, born in Chatham and a current professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. She is also the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection, Late Wife. At UVA last week, she drew a group of UVA creative writing faculty, MFA students and undergraduates.
Shoes drenched through by Tuesday’s washout, I was more than happy to escape the puddles and seek refuge on the very dry second floor of Bryan Hall. Emerson, understated but idiosyncratic with slatish hair and subtle eyeglasses, talked to us about the vital role that memory plays in the creation of a poem.
“Vision is a kind of memory,” she said. Married to a photographer, interested in Susan Sontag’s pivotal work, On Photography and “obsessed” with the 19th century practice of post-mortem photography, Emerson revealed her deep fascination with the visual art, suggesting how “photographs are catalysts for memory,” a portable time-travel device by which we can access people, places and things now gone from the world.
Sure, we all know photographs help us to remember certain moments in our lives. But in a similar way, she emphasized, poetry possesses the same power to lock in memories of our pasts, to temporarily evade “the consistent slippage of ‘is’ into ‘was.’” Emerson helped us understand her “rambles about memory” by discussing the process of revising the poem, “Cold Room” from her latest collection, Secure the Shadow. After the deaths of both her brother and father within a two-year period, Emerson sought to transfigure these familial figures through the act of writing these “memory-driven” poems.
“Cold Room,” the title of which refers to a room in which the heat is turned off in order to store excess food, is told from the perspective of a sister standing inside a cold room, her brother’s bedroom, with her mother during Christmas. The poem takes on a haunting quality because the brother is not at the house, too ill from cancer to partake in the festivities. After reading over the first draft of the poem, which Emerson realized was too “chatty,” she sought to remove the “I” in the poem, to write herself out.
In doing so, Emerson created an “eerily imminent omniscience” in which the watchful speaker of the poem, the daughter, remains set apart in her grief, holding the door open for her mother who is equally alone. In a poetic instant, grief is petrified. As described by poet Robert Hass, the words in “Cold Room" become “elegies for things they signify,” amounting to a memory of the brother to be stowed away and remembered, just like a photograph.