EMILY REARDON

BIOGRAPHY

Emily Reardon received both her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. She also attended Trinity College in Dublin for a year. She was awarded a Goldwater Fellowship, which allowed her to teach creative writing to physically disabled adults. Recently, she has taught composition and worked on her own poetry. Her poems have been published in the literary journals Frantic Egg, the Southern Poetry Review and Anamesa.

Reardon's work interweaves stories of ancient literature with current political issues and the social dynamic of the present. She is interested in these ancient stories not only as archetypes, but also as representations of the thread that binds today's poetry with what we might consider the beginnings of art. While suffering, war, etc. are cyclical and omnipresent, beauty and art seem to stack, building on material that came before while also reaching for new limits, given that even a conscious break from tradition is in fact a reflection on that tradition.

INTERVIEW

Interview date: April 2005
Interviewed by Ka-Man Tse

LMCC: So tell me about process.  How do you work?

Emily: Generally, I read for a couple of hours before I write and then go from there.  I write for three, four or five hours at a time and then usually take a break after that and then go back and revise.  Usually the first draft is pretty much it.  So I revise, but it’s not huge after that.

LMCC: So you go with your gut?

Emily: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s good or not.  But I generally find it hard to go back and get into it again.

LMCC: Tell me about your most recent piece.  How did it start?

Emily: It’s a poem about recycling.  It started because I read Don DeLillo’s Underworld.  … He talks about garbage a lot in it and I was thinking about recycling and the idea of saving certain things and finding old junk and trying to make things whole again.

LMCC: Besides Don DeLillo, who else are your influences, what sources do you draw from the most, and any interdisciplinary influences?

Emily: Don DeLillo, oh he’s just what I’ve been reading lately.  It’s mainly poets.  Right now I’ve been reading Wallace Stevens again, who I love.  It’s because I’m trying to work on getting an image rather than being more prose-y, which is what I think I have been lately. Adrienne Rich.   Then the old guys, I love [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, for his sound and all that.  Some people I’ve had in grad school were Phil Levine and Sharon Olds, because I read everything they wrote and I had them.  They probably shaped my work a little bit. 

LMCC: What do you try to achieve in your writing, what are your goals and how do you describe your personal style?

Emily: I would describe it as narrative, most of the time.  But I’ve been trying to get away from that.  When I was first starting this I was working a lot with old stories and trying to make them somehow fit into our context.  I’m trying to get away from that now and work just strictly with image, to get some sensory meaning out of that.  I don’t know if that came from doing this [LMCC residency] and working with a lot of visual artists.  I’m not sure.  I’ve been thinking about it more, but then I was thinking about doing a project where I write it on the wall, as you can see.  I found I didn’t really like it.  I might finish it anyway and just write them all up there.  Well, some of it’s [my writing] and some of it’s not.  It didn’t feel very good, and I think it’s because [my style of poetry] is not particularly very public poetry.  Which some poetry is, some people’s poetry is very public, but I don’t think mine is.  The next step after that is to kind of work with it in the poems. 

LMCC: Tell me more about your process for the past 6 months, and if the trajectory of your project has been affected by or coincides with this residency? Or, what else has been going on?

Emily: I’ve just been working on getting the image more.  I think that comes from this residency and it also comes from this class I’m teaching on Fables right now, in which we’re talking a lot about why we use animals to learn from in stories.  Again, it’s that kind of emotional or sensory thing that we don’t have symbolic language for.  So I’m trying to fit that into the work.  I think painters do that same thing as well.  I think the language we use to talk about violence and sex and these kind of things we can’t easily talk about, and I don’t know why we don’t have a language for it yet but I think that’s what these things do.

LMCC: What are “these things?”

Emily: Poetry and art in general, tries to express that which we can’t do with our existing language, or that which we can only “kind of” do.  I’m not sure that I’m thinking that the image is the closest you can get to describing the feeling or to getting at it.

LMCC: How long do you work on something? When do you know you’re done?

Emily: I think it totally depends on the poem.  There are some I’ve worked on for two or three years and I’m glad that I’ve spent so long and it worked.  Some others, you know right away that it goes in the garbage.  And others, you know you nailed it right that day.

LMCC: What do you struggle with the most as an artist and as a writer?

Emily: There are several.  Practical things, it’s finding the time to write.  Teaching seems to take up every moment of my life.  That’s part of it.  I think about coming up with something new.  Doing something that other people haven’t done.  And I don’t know how important that is to me, but it seems like something I should strive for, I guess.  I’m not sure why, but it does, and I can’t seem to come up with how to do it.  That’s something I’m always struggling with.  And how much to preserve other traditions, or the whole tradition and the individual talent, that kind of discussion.  How important is it to know everything and to preserve that in your writing?  That’s what I’m struggling with a little bit.  When I think about my work, that’s what I think about.  But when I’m actually doing it, I’m don’t think about those things, really.

LMCC: What’s the oddest job you’ve ever had?

Emily: I was an agency nanny in New York.  So I got assigned to different families everyday.

LMCC: Like a temp agency?!

Emily: Yeah.  It was very bizarre, it was all these very Upper East Side type of families, whose mother would be drifting off into a limo at night, and these snotty kids.  But it was pretty cool to see the insides of all those [houses].

LMCC: They’re so exclusive. So reclusive.

Emily: Although most of them looked the same.

LMCC: Did you ever look in their drawers?

Emily: No! [laughs]  Never!