Interview with Emily Hunt and CutBank Reader, Celia Easton-Koehler Spring/Summer 2024

Stranger, Emily Hunt's long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection of poems, intimately chronicles the effects of love, labor, and grief on the life and sensibility of an artist. These poems shed a shifting light on the peculiar textures of our era. Hunt treads with concision, vigor, and excitement, addressing directly lived experiences––from the mundane to the profound. Whether it’s her curious interactions with dating apps, 19th century political speeches, dizzying corporate communication, or emails from her schizophrenic brother, the exact details and use of language in these poems become almost elemental, making an urgent record of the present. Stranger blurs the boundary between life and art—“The things that happened / bled into the language we exchanged.”—with the crystalline touch and nuance of a truly gifted writer.

"In Stranger, the gorgeous follow-up to her first collection Dark Green, Emily Hunt betrays a Schuyler-esque commitment to dailiness. To all of it: to memory and the great infinite void of the present moment, to that which wounds us and that which nurtures us, to agony and boredom and sweetness, equally to the blooming life of flowers and the “bad bloom” of waged work. These poems are electric with pleasure."

–Sara Nicholson

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Celia Easton-Koehler: While reading many of these poems I kept returning to the epigraph of the book by Eleni Vakalo, translated by Karen Emmerich:

(I’m talking about the thing that stirs inside movements)
the way
the leaves of a plant are always more transparent at their edge and its body slowly slowly from the center spreads  

Many of the poems feel like they are interested in arrangements—compositions involving a physical placing in space, in the perception of gestures (of the non-human and human), and in touch.

Can you speak a little bit about this excerpt: where did you first encounter it? What does it make you think about? Or what does it mean to you emotionally? And how do you think it relates to the collection as a whole? Perhaps especially in relation to the poems that are not explicitly about plants?

What is the thing that stirs inside movements?

Emily Hunt: Thank you for this beautiful question.

I’m obsessed with the word “arrange” and one of many reasons I liked STRANGER as a book title is that it’s linked by sound to this word.

At this moment I’ll say that “the thing that stirs inside movements” is energy, power, god, light, death, breath, water, it’s what makes us act, evolve, speak. This is a phrase that captures growth, especially growth that may be under the surface, or so slow it’s not perceptible, which is something I’m interested in. For instance, I’ve always loved how trees’ trunks can look liquid—they are just as fluid as water in their way, they’re just moving at a different pace.

I like that the epigraph is a translation because it’s an echo of an echo of echoes. And I found the use of parentheses to be beautiful with this in mind.

I love this book (Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo, translated by Karen Emmerich) so much. I remember posting it about it on Instagram while waiting for BART in San Francisco and feeling basically ecstatic. It was a book that kind of hit me out of nowhere and felt like it had already lived inside me in certain ways before I knew it existed – I forget why I bought it or heard about it, I think I’d been thinking about plants so much in Oakland and San Francisco after I wrote “Company” and encountered such different flora from the East coast, and I was drawn to the title of the long poem “The Life of Plants”.

I wanted to choose an epigraph that was dynamic, that changed each time I read it over the years of crafting the book, that felt zoomed out but also down in the dirt.

One way I noticed this small part of “The Life of Plants” change for me: I previously chose these lines as an epigraph for the chapbook Company, which I wrote before my brother died by suicide, but that word “body” took on new meaning once I put it at the start of Stranger, which includes poems that feature his physical body (or a body that is a kind of echo of his actual body), both alive as a child, and as a dead adult in the woods. I thought about my brother’s – and any single human dead body – as being a kind of center, and about his drop from a height and contact with dirt and death as a cause, and the ripples of effect that continue to come off of it. It reminds me of energy that ripples out from a word in a poem. I think of letters and words as bodies too. One death changes many people and thus the world. A few words also can.

There are many other centers, many other bodies, of plants, people, animals, light, etcetera that “slowly slowly from the center spread”...
an embryo becoming a fetus becoming an infant
a child becoming a parent the sun
a cookie cooking
fire
an idea crossing ground
my answer to this question growing as I walk home from the grocery store...

These lines also contain the possibility of being outside a center or beyond an edge, which is relevant to artists, radical thinkers or doers, as well as to people like my schizophrenic brother who basically had nowhere to go or be at the end of the day, didn’t “fit” here on earth as he was among people. To anyone that lives around rather than inside.

I’ll also say that another incredible translation by Karen Emmerich, Diaries of Exile, certainly influenced and inspired me as I was editing the book and writing a few of the most recent poems, because I read it over and over and taught it.

Celia Easton-Koehler: I am interested in how the poems’ gestures echo each other in surprising ways; wrapping a ribbon around a stem and rolling a sock upon a small foot, for example. Attention to touch and gesture function as logic in the poem, asking a reader to relate these two labors. Does this feel true to how you wrote the poems? Can you talk about how touch functions in these poems? And also throughout the collection?

Emily Hunt: Absolutely. I was thinking so much about gestures and small movements in space and how a tiny shift in one’s body can change one’s immediate environment and that can spin out and change everything or nothing or something. Someone typing at a desk is such a “minor” movement, but it’s amazing to think about what typing leads to. Or someone feeding an animal or ringing a doorbell or boiling water or parking a car or cutting down a tree—all of these brief actions are huge and lasting if you include everything that results. And I’ve thought a lot about speech as a gesture, how the language my parents and siblings and peers and teachers used impacted me/shaped my brain and body as a child, as a form growing second to second.

Touch is closely linked to care, to caring about people, caring about language, caring about living things, to acknowledging something as real. And I think when I first started writing poems, “touch” was a word that really lit up for me, because my development as a writer is closely linked to my development as a body in space. Writing Dark Green and all the reading that entailed, (in tandem with talk therapy, another kind of writing) really did feel like rebuilding my physical self molecule by molecule at times. Writing can be a direct naming of physical reality in order to come back to the body and the present moment, to try to touch what’s true.

Celia Easton-Koehler: Many voices enter into the poems — the unnamed people from the dating apps, the “higher-ups” at the florist, your brother, simone weil, Eavan Boland, and in one poem the hidden and mixed voices of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, and Carl Shurz.

It feels like the poems are interested in how other people's speech becomes embedded in a person, in private or public daily life. How do you think about your relationship to other people’s language?

Emily Hunt: Yes! Glad this is coming through. People are porous—the language that enters our thoughts becomes the language we use ourselves, or the language that pushes us toward saying or believing something entirely different. I’m interested in, and struck by, and sometimes set into despair by, how what we receive via cultural influences shapes our thinking when we’re young, how that shapes our life, where we end up, what we do, how we regard ourselves and others and what’s possible or isn’t. The voices of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, and Carl Shurz entered my writing many years ago as I was reading a collection of American speeches in my 20s and processing the very old, obvious, mundane but alarming fact that 99% of them were given by men. How did all of those rivers of thought travel through time and become part of my brain and body? My mother’s? How will this get mixed up into my child’s future? Hmm, scary.

Celia Easton-Koehler: In the poem Stuart’s Sentences you and Stuart write: “Our shouting made me realize/people other than me are suffering.” I feel so grateful for this poem, and especially for this line because “our shouting” means both “my” shouting and “your” shouting and whoever else is shouting. Somehow our voices encounter each other, become a shout. I am trying to articulate a question, and I think it is just that I would love to hear why you think it is important that Stuart’s voice and story are in this collection.

Emily Hunt: Yes, you’re getting at what’s so incredible about pronouns in poems, I think about this and play with this a lot, how flexible they are. Because of how many relationships are involved in one person reading one sentence one writer thought and then wrote down and then shared as poetry. Pronouns are like joints or pivot points that keep a poem in motion. This sentence uses “our” and “me” and relies on the word “other” in reference to “people.” So it’s inherently complex, but it’s easy to read. It sounds familiar, but it’s also appalling. It’s a sentence from an email Stuart wrote me after we yelled at each other. In the poem it can become many other things. There’s an absurdity to this statement presented as a realization, as opposed to a given. It was both maddening and clarifying for me to receive it. “Our shouting made me realize/people other than me are suffering.” In effect it says, ”I just realized you (or other people) also exist.” This is an important thing to know. For me, it was crucial to realize, “Oh, this person doesn’t really know I exist, maybe I’ll find a way to respond accordingly from here on out,” and to then ask myself, “Whose existence do I graze over/not know in my bones to be real? What, who, where are my blind spots? What am I losing because of this, what harm may I be causing, how can I grow? How did I get here, where will I go with the thoughts this thought is offering? In this way, it’s a hopeless and hopeful sentence.

I think about Stuart every day. He’s in my mind, on my mind, and in the background of my days. He was my brother, three years older than me, and my relationship with him has had a huge impact on how I think, see, move, feel. He started developing schizophrenia when I was 12ish, and it was devastating. Stuart was part of me because he was 3 years old when I entered the world and I shared space, language, food, sound, a yard, everything with him, every day. It will always be impossible to describe what the onset of his schizophrenia was like; it was a rupture that occurred before my brain was fully formed, which I think is part of why I write poetry. I don’t know what happened, it was unlike anything I could have ever imagined happening, there aren’t really words for what happened, and that made me realize I don’t really know much at all. Death is like this too, and it felt like a death, or several blurry, overlapping deaths. Then many years later, once I was estranged from him, Stuart died by suicide when he was 36, and I was 33. After he died, I went through his emails, stories, and essays (which were usually too difficult for me to read while he was still alive), and I noticed his frequent use of the word “sometimes”—was it frequent? or was this confirmation bias, I’m not sure. It’s a word I noticed that I used a bunch of times in my first book, Dark Green, so I felt connected to him through this word, a little liquid bridge. It’s a beautiful word – soft, wide, it flows and shimmers. It can be the start of something new, a new, open sentence. I started to collect any of Stuart’s sentences that included that word in my own document. I then arranged them as this poem, without editing the syntax or phrasing or diction at all. It happened quickly, and then I think I went back to the poem a few times and rearranged the order a bit, but barely touched it after that first sitting. I think it’s one of my favorite poems in the book, and it’s a collaboration with Stuart he will never see, but it’s one that probably wouldn’t have happened if he were here to see it.

Celia Easton-Koehler: Many of these poems approach violence, brutality, and devastation with deeply tender attention. As an example, I see this articulated in the poem “Farmer’s Market” when the voice of the poem admires a ginkgo “unreal, totally new” before crossing the street to avoid a “psychotic veteran.” Or in the poem “Canned Food,” or the poem “Freshmen.” There is attention to dailiness, and so the dailiness of brutality and tenderness both; How do you write something both casually and carefully?

Emily Hunt: Violence is often braided into calm or peace or stillness or ease (for example, the convenience of the seemingly casual act of feeding your cat with a can of wet food purchased on Amazon comes at a huge cost and sits on layers of violences of varying scales, which shows up in “Indoor Cat.”)

I’ll sometimes catch an honest progression in my mind and trust this as fertile enough for a poem, write it down, pay attention to it. “Freshman” includes the line “I was raped by Christmas break.” This is true for so many people, which is absurd. It’s so common it’s treated as inconsequential and widely accepted. Putting it in a draft gives me a chance to sit with and reflect on the depth of that weirdness, and deciding to keep it in a poem gives me a chance to commune around how odd and awful (and actually consequential) it is with others.

That poem “Farmer’s Market” — I felt myself crossing the street to avoid a person who was talking in a charged and lonely way to the air, and I named that as something I was doing in the world, and it took me to other words in a note on my iPhone. Having immediate family members with psychosis means I’m inclined to have a strong response to encountering people in the city exhibiting symptoms of psychosis, thinking about where they’ve been, where they will go, where they were children, their original spirit, which may be lost to time, who their family members are, if they are homeless, if they were in the military, if they access to medication, etc. At the same time, it might make me even more inclined to avoid them. What does this indicate about people, cities, housing, relationships, war, childhood, the answer is endless and always changing and worth thinking about, so I put the statement in a poem.