A Poet’s Life: On Making, On Being, On Surviving with Professor Emily Skillings

A Poet’s Life is a series where we talk with Columbia poets about everything from living as a poet to making a living as a poet.

Here, we talk with Assistant Professor Emily Skillings '17 about the public landscape in her poem “The Duke’s Forest,” the magical wormholes of poetry, and the intersections between poetry and dance.

Listen to Skillings read “The Duke’s Forest” here.

Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.

One thing that stood out to me in “The Duke's Forest” is the phrase “public forest.” While the speaker is walking solo through the forest, the public is also constantly entering the inner mind. Can you speak more about this relationship between the “public” and the intimate self-reflection of the speaker?

Emily Skillings (ES): That's a great question. When I wrote this poem, I was on a residency in Germany. Walking was very much part of the culture, and the residency bordered on this forest that was public land that used to belong to a Duke. I was thinking about what it meant to be on this land and not feel like I quite belonged inside it. It's not in the poem, but there was a moment where I had to cross a highway to get to more trails, and it felt like the moment in that short story by John Cheever called “The Swimmer” where the protagonist crosses this highway and it's very treacherous and he begins to regret his journey. The forest was also strange in that it contained all of these folk art sculptures, sculptures made out of the materials of the forest itself, and that gave it this otherworldly atmosphere. Artists were coming to this forest to sculpt dead trees into interesting shapes. I guess I’m trying to say this forest kinda freaked me out!

I was also homesick and feeling embarrassed about missing home, because why would you miss America? Trump had recently become president when I wrote this poem. So I was really excited to not be in the US while simultaneously missing it. So there was this sense of being in conflict with the landscape.

There are so many people coming into this poem, such as the student and the poet James Schuyler. How do you see these people fitting into the landscape?

ES: I was thinking about female subjectivity in this poem and how that relates to landscape and language. I was reading The Morning of the Poem at the time and [thinking about] what it was like to have the language of these socialized male writers filtering through my head constantly… how I could embrace that, but also how I could create tension inside that. I was “reading men I love. / When I say that I do not exclude you.” I had this brilliant student who wrote a poem I was really jealous of, and so I invited that into the poem’s texture. There’s the funny little moment of defiance with the scratching of the asshole. The poem came out of a feeling of restlessness inside subjecthood and inside relationships.

The poem is conscious of its own act of creation, as creation happens while you're walking through the forest. I would love to know more about your process of crafting poems, while also being conscious of that process.

ES: This poem was written in a way that I write a lot of poems, which is that I jot notes or images down in the moment and then return to them much later. This means that when I finish the poem, I’m at a remove from where it began. I started this poem at this residency, but I didn't finish it there. I'm actually really bad at finishing poems! I have this graveyard of partially written poems on my computer. I think most writers do this. I actually just wrote a poem about all these half-poems I have and how terrible it is to look in on them. They're like these malnourished pets that I've totally forgotten to feed.

So this was a poem that I started and abandoned, then went back to about a year later. I feel like that’s inside the poem, where you've caught the moment in the initial draft, but you have the impulse to re-enter it. Going back and writing from inside that space infuses the poem with a certain self-consciousness. The scale of the emotions can shift. So this poem was finished in a place that was very different from the place it started in. Reading it now, I actually saw some things I wanted to change and clarify. I think I’m more interested in clarity than I was a few years ago.

Currently, you’re teaching at Columbia, NYU, and Yale, and you just edited a book of John Ashbery’s long poems. How do you make space for your own writing?

ES: I have to demand it of myself. I have Sundays blocked off on my calendar and my rule is that I don't have commitments that day. Of course, I break that rule often, but even if it's not writing a new poem, even if it's looking at an old poem, or even if it's reading—reading counts as writing in my book—I have to do something.

The Ashbery book was a three-year project and it did take up a lot of my writing time, but it was truly an honor to work on. On another residency in 2019, I was transcribing one of Ashbery’s long poems for Parallel Movement of the Hands, and I found that the act of transcription influenced one of my own long poems. My poem even ended up having a similar structure to Ashbery’s. Transcribing is very much like listening, and having Ashbery’s language in the air or going through my fingertips did something to my own sense of language and structure.

I love the idea of reading as writing. What else do you read that influences your poetry?

ES: I love reading novels. My first literary love is fiction and the short story, and I read a lot more fiction than I do poetry, which I feel kind of guilty about as a poet who loves poets and is friends with poets. But fiction is what I snack on. I'm reading an amazing novel right now called The Parisian by Isabella Hammad and I love her writing and her descriptions. There’s a scene where she is describing a character’s fur jacket and she writes: “and her cold fur, wettened into prongs, rubbed against his neck.” I mean it’s this massive almost Tolstoy-like novel and yet there are these small, exquisite details that amass. I love the level of specificity you can achieve. I started writing a poem this morning, and [I thought], should this actually be a short story? An interesting thing for me is where that line is. I've been finding myself more drawn towards narrative, which is something I’ve always shied away from.

What do you think poetry can do that other forms of art can't?

ES: I like to think of poetry as having this quantum physics element that I seldom encounter in other genres, but obviously whenever you attribute some quality to poetry you immediately read a prose writer that does that exact thing and vice versa. Jack Spicer wrote “Prose invents. Poetry discloses” and I’ve always kind of liked that but I’m not sure it’s accurate. There aren't clear boundaries, but one thing a poem can do is unite disparate images. You can put things together in a poem and let the reader find their own connection between seemingly unrelated objects, images, and textures of language. In prose, you’d want to spell out that connection more, especially if your writing is oriented towards narrative. So poetry contains this wormhole-like quality or maneuver: you can get from one place to another without the connective tissue. It’s like that saying “you can’t get there from here.” In poetry, you can usually get there from here.

Poetry is so much about the unsaid. That’s something I love.

You have a background in dance. In what ways do you see dance and poetry colliding?

ES: I've written about this a little before, but they're the disciplines people say they don't “get” the most—like "I don't get dance," or "I don't get poetry." I love that I've picked the most esoteric forms to explore in my life [laughs]. They definitely have their own structure and vocabulary to them and I see my obsession with repetition as a direct result of my training as a dancer. You repeat the thing until it becomes second nature. I'm really interested in repetition in poetry and how it can make something more familiar and strange, how it forms a latticework for memory inside the poem. Maybe that’s like muscle memory? I think of Stein’s insistence: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” I like what Julian Talamantez Brolaski did with that line:

“A rose is arrows is eros, so what
If I confuse the shade that I’ve become
With winedark substance in a lover’s cup?”

Does the performance aspect of dance ever enter your poetry?

ES: I feel like my poetry is trying to exist in this space between speech and thought. I want thought to be present in the imperfections—the way we have thoughts that don't come out perfectly. I read my poems out loud to myself as I'm writing them, but I don't really think about performance when I'm writing. It's much more of an interior situation.

I will say I was in some experimental dances where I was performing naked or scantily clad—ones where I was doing really weird things in front of people like chugging gallons of milk onstage or my shirt was sewn to someone else’s shirt with red thread and we would duet until it broke. I was never afraid or embarrassed—though I was kind of bored, to be honest—but when I read poems in front of people, I get so scared. There's something much more vulnerable [in poetry] for me because when you’re dancing, you're kind of on autopilot. When I read my poetry, I always feel like I'm tearing myself open.

How do you make space for your work within a society where money is necessary for survival?

ES: I will say that writing and making a living are often at odds for me. I’m not special in this—this is how so many artists feel.

In order to write a poem, I used to have to lie in bed for hours. The nothingness would give me a space to drift and be associative and that would feed the poems. It’s hard for me to write on the go, or to write in a sliver of time between things, or to wake up early to write. So I’m trying to work on that. I've been trying to write on my phone when I commute, even if it's unformed or just notes towards something that I can transcribe later.

I teach and have an administrative job that allows me some flexibility which I'm really grateful for. I love being helpful to other writers and that has been what my career has centered around—teaching and being an assistant. Having a mixture of teaching and another job has allowed me space to not be teaching all the time, so I can have periods where I focus on my own writing and go on a residency, for example. I feel so inspired by my students, and that feeds my own work, seeing them really transforming their language and honing their projects.

What is something you've been thinking about recently?

ES: One thing that's been influencing my poems lately is the idea of imposter syndrome. I often wonder if I'm an imposter, and then I think, maybe I am and maybe that's fine. And maybe that's the place my poems come from, “faking it” or trying things on or creating something out of thin air. I’ve been wanting to question the idea that being an imposter is bad.

I’m going to try to end by reciting this Emily Dickinson poem that I’ve been thinking about obsessively:

“Essential Oils — are wrung —
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns — alone —
It is the gift of Screws —

The General Rose — decay —
But this — in Lady's Drawer
Make Summer — When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary —”

What I love about that poem is “the gift of Screws.” To get the attar and perfume from the rose, you have to compress it. You have to squeeze it. You have to destroy it to get this essence of the rose, which I think is Dickinson saying what a poem does. A poem is about a kind of wrecked, radical distillation. A poem can't hand you a rose, but what it can do is pulverize it into this image that will linger.

When she first wrote the poem, the last two words were “Spiceless Sepulchre.” I love how removing the specific image of the grave and substituting “Ceaseless Rosemary” makes the “Lady’s Drawer” in the stanza above a kind of coffin for the poems, for “this” poem, which will endure. Nobody does it like her.