emma bolden on "lucky" poems and survival
This year, we braved wildfires, hurricanes, and floods to bring you the best environmental short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers today as part of our climate change contest (which you can access here).
I interviewed Third Place winner and incredible poet Emma Bolden on her winning poems “glut” and “in america the summer stretches out,” which you can read below here and here.
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her work has appeared in such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she is Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review.
***
“glut”
why make green the moneyed color
good for wishes, good for winning,
the fair-prize bush all year a forced bright
like spring kept screaming azalea, fuchsia,
aren’t you tired of the emphasis on more &
more & listen, there is a silence that can shatter
& build a world again, there is in every emptiness
an echo, even lulled so low & lonely there is
in nothing a something enough, an answer
like an imprint, like the name etched so deep
in the bark that the tree can’t remember it
as anything other than itself, there are
a thousand ways to linger, there are
a thousand ways we should not last.
“in america the summer stretches out”
its frantic signatures of heat, its frenzied greening, ungreening.
A starling interrogates the zero in her nest, which is itself a zero
built in the absence of a tree. Meanwhile we sow our fields
with buckshot, feeds our children to the mines. Meanwhile
the gutters rain guttural, meanwhile we bed flowers in the shape
of a flag, meanwhile we watch bullets pierce skin and then black out
our screens, we say too much, we say we work our feet too close
to the bone. All our stupid excuses, bright as wings. Outside a starling
sings and I know I’m supposed to ask him to wing his way into
the house of this poem, to show you beauty is the kind of resolution
to which the kind aspire. Dear reader. We are a country that invites
our selves to imagine ourselves as the kindness inside the machine.
Outside a starling sings and I tell you: when it comes to the nature
of beauty, we are the people standing far from its side.
***
Caylee Weintraub: What was the inspiration behind the piece you submitted to our climate change contest?
Emma Bolden: "glut" is one of those lucky poems that came to me seemingly out of nowhere: I went out for a walk through the neighborhood just as the azaleas reached their first bombastic blooming, and my mind started writing a poem about them. The thoughts about luck at the beginning, oddly enough, came from staring at a box of Lucky Charms before I'd finished my coffee. "in america the summer stretches out" is a response to the ways in which we tend to post and pay attention to something that absolutely deserves constant decision and hard work towards change, but then forget about as soon as it's no longer all over social media.
The thoughts about luck at the beginning, oddly enough, came from staring at a box of Lucky Charms before I'd finished my coffee.
CW: Who are some authors you admire? What works of theirs do you draw from in your own writing process?
EB: I deeply admire the work of Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Maggie O'Farrell, Carolyn Forche, Lia Purpura, Jo Ann Beard, and Emily St. John Mandel. I'm inspired by the ways in which they link the past and present as well as the future and the present, and by the way they draw disparate subjects, genres, media, and schools of thought together in their work.
I'm inspired by the ways in which they link the past and present as well as the future and the present, and by the way they draw disparate subjects, genres, media, and schools of thought together in their work.
CW: Are you often drawn to environmental themes? If so, why? If not, what other themes are you drawn to in your writing?
EB: As the climate crisis escalates, I find environmental themes entering my work even when I don't intend for them to do so. It's such an urgent, ever-present issue that I can't keep it out -- and don't want to. Our survival as a planet depends upon us, as a whole, not shutting it out.
Our survival as a planet depends upon us, as a whole, not shutting it out.
CW: What can writing do to help prevent climate change and other environmental issues? Is there a particular piece of environmental writing that showed you the power of writing for the environment?
EB: I'm reading Allegra Hyde's stunning novel Eleutheria now, and though the method of fighting against climate change described in the book is definitely not ideal, I found myself captivated nonetheless by her description of a poem or another form of creative writing as something that can capture, captivate, and change the culture. I think there's a lot of benefit in that. Tamiko Beyer's We Come Elemental is a stunning and powerful collection of poems about the environment. Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower is an unforgettably searing book about environmental and social justice. I still have nightmares about Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, but it's a powerful novel.
I found myself captivated nonetheless by her description of a poem or another form of creative writing as something that can capture, captivate, and change the culture.