This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Wilson, whose poetry collection Burnt Mountain is out today from the University of Iowa Press. Burnt Mountain unfurls from an image of the “sprigged spirals” of ferns, which rise from riverbank to “dark-empaneled woods.” The collection goes on to mimic a fern’s “mingling redoubling” formation, with Wilson paying acute attention to the fractals of growth and activity within the forest ecosystem. Patterns emerge, spiraling outward from tiny “rouge stem-hairs” to an enormous lichen-frosted boulder, part of the gravel ridge left by a melting glacier. An esker boulder is a paradoxical deposit, Wilson observes: “a rooted thing / uprooted, slovenly imposed, not rooted.” Humans, too, have made their presence known in the forest, leaving “great bleaching grounds.” In the collection’s nine-part final poem, the mountain both surrounds the poet and is itself vulnerable, a “sinking slow / bulwark.” Burnt Mountain, Kara Kelsey wrote, “continues the remarkable ecological vision that Wilson has cultivated across her body of work, redefining what it means for no mountain or weed or flower or human to ever stand alone.” Emily Wilson is the author of three other poetry collections, including The Great Medieval Yellows (Canarium Books, 2015). She lives in Iowa City and western Maine.
Emily Wilson, author of Burnt Mountain.
1. How long did it take you to write and assemble the poems in Burnt Mountain?
The book includes poems written over a ten-year period.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the poems in the collection?
It’s always a stiff challenge just to begin writing again after a stretch of not writing. My last book was published in 2015, and there was quite an interval until the work in Burnt Mountain really began. It did not feel like the writing that led to my previous books. The poems were shorter and less dense with strands from readings and other source materials. They were more immediate and naked in this sense, and so harder to feel confidence in.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In rushes with long blocks of fallow time between. I have written in every place I’ve lived, cities big and small, more rural and mountainous places, towns and suburbs. I like to botanize, so local plants often figure in. I keep a journal/commonplace book for notes from reading. Poems spring from that but only with serious concentrated effort. Then there are many months, sometimes years, of revision and compression.
4. What are you reading right now?
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I read The Magic Mountain last summer and was blown away. So I am discovering Mann’s work, very happily.
5. Which poet, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Dorothy Wordsworth. There is such power of observation and expression in her journals, I can’t help but feel them as a kind of marvelous poetic undertaking in their own right. Also Carlos Pellicer, a Mexican Modernist poet whose work I have only read in the original Spanish, and so with marked difficulty, though I love its strange, ebullient, almost Stevens-like images and rhythms. He was celebrated in his homeland but is not so well known, I don’t think, here in the U.S. I haven’t been able to find a good, comprehensive English translation.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own challenges in terms of discipline and concentration. I like doing many different kinds of things. I have many creative interests. Sometimes I have a hard time committing to one for very long. I get impatient, or I get a sudden idea which causes me to drop the thing at hand for a lengthy diversion into something else. Sometimes the diversion pays dividends upon return, but it could also lead to an abandoned project. But I try to think in terms of productive constraint, rather than impediment. It’s an ongoing struggle.
7. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the poems in the collection?
The oldest poem in the book, “Convolvulus,” was written not long after a year my family and I spent in Oaxaca, Mexico. A little flash of visual memory, it was during the dry season when the leaves had fallen from the trees. There would be, surprisingly to me, vivid flowers erupting in the dense gray weave of the branches.
8. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
I did not feel the connections among them at the outset, but as I started putting them in little sequences, a shape began to emerge. I wouldn’t say I had a strategy, except to try and see what kinds of relationships they might have in smaller groupings. That led to the three “summer” sections, with a nine-part “autumn” poem to conclude. To me, that turn from summer to fall came to feel like an important one for the collection as a whole. My husband is also a poet and he provided crucial help in envisioning and putting the book together.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Burnt Mountain?
I see the poems as connected to my pursuits in making visual and tactile artwork, mostly embroideries, or fiber-y things, and prints. In these various forms, I am trying to bring about some kind of translation. Something I’m seeing or observing in the physical world gets strained and screened through a medium or technique—language, needle-and-thread, etching. It is always a surprise to see what happens. Poems are a part of this activity too, though maybe with more drift or offset from the original source experience. I’m not sure. But the goal in common is to initiate some kind of transformation.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I am thinking not of writing advice specifically, but I use a visual image that a therapist once gave me for dealing with the blockages to just getting down to things—i.e., writing a first line or lines or whatever. It’s the image of a waterskier taking the turn to ski over the wake. At a certain point, you just have to make that shift into the difficulty head-on. You have to hit it. I am not a waterskier, but somehow that image helps me in the midst of my very oblique and sideways maneuvers into the action of writing.
