Q. What was the inspiration behind The Sad Epistles? Throughout the collection, you seem to be writing about a relationship between the narrator and another person. Care to elaborate?
A. This is probably the one question I shouldn’t answer, but, yes, the collection is about a relationship between the narrator and another person. I started and ended the series during two very difficult moments in the relationship: one, when I thought it was over, and two, when I knew it was over. The poems follow my journey through a very difficult and painful realization which is, unfortunately, one of those things you have to realize at some point: that even if you love someone more than life itself, it may not be enough.
Q. What did you want to focus on poetically in The Sad Epistles? Were there any techniques that you were working on throughout the collection?
A. The collection actually contains the first poems I wrote after finishing my graduate program. I stopped writing poetry for quite a while after I received my MFA, and then, suddenly, The Epistles appeared. At that point, I was struggling to find a new way of speaking — a new language, if you will. I read Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America my final year of graduate school, and it had a profound impact upon me. I’ve always been interested in Gertrude Stein’s work, and finally discovered why. I began thinking a great deal more about the use of language itself — or, more specifically, the possibilities inherent in language, especially in terms of the development of a unique language system. Perhaps because I was in the midst of a new experience in my own life — the end of a relationship with my first love — I felt I needed a new way to express my experience. A new language, if you will, with a new alphabet — and one which seemed more explicitly female, in the way Ostriker meant.
Q. You’re currently an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University, and the editor of the Georgetown Review. How does teaching poetry and editing others’ work inform your own writing?
A. Teaching is really what keeps me going on a day to day basis — I honestly think that I’ve learned more from my students than they’ve learned from me. I love being in the classroom because I love seeing how things work: how we learn, how we respond to language, how we develop the power to name our experience and how this, in turn, gives us power. I’m incredibly grateful for my position at Georgetown College, as it allows me to interact with so many brilliant colleagues and bright, curious, and creative students on a daily basis. I mean, it’s my job to talk about poetry and writing and how we see the world — what could be better? I think that my writing is greatly informed by the sense of curiosity and exploration created in the classroom. Editing is an added bonus, as it allows me a glimpse into others’ experience, and also requires that I keep fairly up-to-date with what’s going on in the literary world.
Q. What poets have inspired you throughout your career as a writer?
A. Two poets have been my most direct and powerful inspiration: Diann Blakely and Kate Knapp Johnson. I consider them both to be my greatest influences and my mentors; without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today, much less where I am today. In terms of other poets, Dickinson has been my greatest influence — in fact, I realized that I wanted to be a poet when I read her “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” in second grade. Other writers who’ve greatly inspired me include (in a completely random and probably bizarre order): Anne Carson, Sylvia Plath, Mark Doty, Sarah Messer, Robert Creeley, C.D. Wright, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Sappho, Martin Buber, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing (I actually think that her introduction to The Golden Notebook should be required reading for just about everybody)
Q. Do you have any works in progress at the moment? What’s next for Emma Bolden?
A. I recently completed a manuscript of poems about the witch trials in early modern Europe, entitled Malificae. Then, I suddenly found myself writing essays instead of poems. At the moment, I think I might just have found myself in the midst of a collection of essays. I’m not sure how I ended up in this strange land, but I think I might be beginning to make out the terrain.
Thanks, Emma!