A Conversation with Emma Winsor Wood featured on Tupelo Quarterly

A poet and editor from New York City, Emma is the author of the poetry collection The Real World (BlazeVOX Books, 2022) and translator of A Failed Performance: Short Plays & Scenes by Daniil Kharms (Plays Inverse, 2018). She has a BA in Russian History & Literature from Harvard, an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is the editor-in-chief of Stone Soup Magazine and co-author of The Complete College Essay Handbook, and works one-on-one with a select group of students on their college application essays each year.

Kristina Marie Darling: Your innovative and incisive book of poetry, THE REAL WORLD, just launched from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Emma Winsor Wood: I wrote this book when I was experiencing a block in my writing. I had always written lyric poems—but suddenly the lyric voice was neither coming naturally to me, nor feeling authentic. I would read a classically “beautiful” contemporary lyric poem, filled with similes and metaphors and those beautiful, traditionally “poetic” words like “lissome” or “velvet,” and I’d immediately start to classify the poem in terms of influences and techniques. The end result was that I wasn’t able to see the poem—much less feel or think through it—at all. So, I was feeling very jaded, I guess, toward the contemporary lyric because, instead of opening me up to the vast mystery that is the universe (or myself), it was actually closing me down, narrowing my focus to craft or technique.

To overcome that block, I needed to look outside of myself (the traditional lyric subject) for material—for language. So, I started thinking about where I could find other language and experiences that were not my own, and the most obvious answer was: television.

Read the whole conversation here

Buy a copy of The Real World here