Experiences and energy, an interview with: Em Brill
Come to KGB (where poetry is back, baby)
The poet Em Brill cares a lot about introductions. At the—more or less—biweekly readings she curates and hosts at the East Village’s KGB Bar, she reads off thorough bios for each reader, which she meticulously researches and writes with the attention of an owl stalking a field mouse—or, idk, something less grim.
Often these intros begin with, “When I first met” so-and-so. And so, taking a page out of Em’s book, I will do the same: When I first met Em Brill, I was nervous. I knew her as someone who was established in the scene. I had attended one or two readings she had MC’d and anyone on stage will invariably grow larger in your mind, like Alice eating her Wonderland cake. My friend Amelia introduced us and I bought Em’s chapbook, the title of which is a great example of zeugma, Running on pure animal instinct and ice water. (I’m sure she’d be thrilled to know it sits on my poetry shelf, completely serendipitously, between a volume by Rachel Rabbit White and Ariana Reines.)
I read the slim chapbook before the M train arrived and then wrote a poem myself. Since then, we played a game of phone tag before finally getting together over Google Hangouts to do this thing. By then, our friendship had been solidified. I used to have a rule for the newsletter: no friends. I didn’t want to interview people with whom I see documentaries about dance instructors, as Em and I did a few weeks back. But, fuck it. Rules are made to be broken and if anyone deserves to be held up to the light to shine, it’s my friends. Long gone are the nerves I felt going to KGB Bar by myself (or with my lovely girlfriend Julia). Em and her friends from the 8-Ball Community have made the place feel like the Cheers bar and I am thankful for the community she has helped foster.
Over an hour, Em and I broach her upcoming full-length, debate whether Psy is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, read each other poetry, and discuss her visceral writing process. Read on for our (accessible) insider baseball poetry convo and come see Em host IRL @ KGB.
Me: When did you first start writing poetry? When did you first realize you were a poet? (Those might be two separate questions.)
Em: I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid. I remember on my parent’s computer, and on the computer that they eventually moved into my room, just writing poems in [Windows] Notepad. It’s something I've done since I was very young. I started writing in a journal when I was five or six because I had this great-aunt who kept diaries her whole life. She used to babysit me and she’d be like, “OK, now it’s journal time” and we’d have these notebooks that we’d both write in. I got used to writing down my thoughts and observations pretty young and then I started writing poems pretty much as soon as I knew what a poem was. The question of realizing when I was a poet is a little more complicated. It’s this identity that you claim. It wasn’t until the past couple of years that I started identifying as a poet. Like, “I’m not just a person who writes poetry; I’m a Poet.” That was in the last couple of years.
Me: Is that when you began taking workshops or did the workshops help you to identify yourself as a poet?
Em: I felt this internal restlessness and aggression until I admitted to myself that I was a poet and it was that that told me that that’s what I was. Every time I tried to fit myself into a different box, I would feel mad internally. Eventually, I was like, “You’re just a poet. That’s why you’re like this.” Then, everything started to make sense to me. It wasn’t connected to workshops. But I think from that place of recognition is when I started to do workshops. I was like, “Oh, I’m a poet. I’m gonna do stuff that poets do ‘cause now I can.”
Me: What do poets do?
Em: Poets write and work on poetry seriously. That’s the main thing that they do. And they do other auxiliary things like act nuts sometimes and look at the sun set.
Me: I think poets are leaders of their groups. In a friend group, they’d be the person to make all the friends go up on the mountain and smoke hash. They’d be like, “You guys all need to experience this as well.”
Em: I agree with that. Poets are all about experiences and energy so they’re gonna be the ones who want to lead people into that.
Me: Definitely. I feel like you’re a leader. You and Jessie [Freedman] are the patron saints of the poetry scene at the moment.
Em: Well, thank you.
Me: Do you think of other people as holding that title or position?
Em: I think there are other people in the scene right now who are doing good work. Ben Fama is one of those people. He runs these “Cool Memories” workshops and those have been a way for a lot of people to work on their poetry seriously. Elaine Kahn does workshops, too. And there are other people organizing readings, too. Through KGB, we’ve been able to do it on a really consistent basis, which I think has been a good thing. But there’s a lot of stuff happening in the literary world right now. Stuff flowering.
Me: Be more specific.
Em: Like name names of people?
Me: Yeah, name names. Get people in trouble.
Em: Jesse Prado has a reading series called “Hella” that he does in Brooklyn. LA Warman has a poetry workshop, [“Warman School”]. There’s a lot of cool journals out there, like Peace on Earth [Review] by Christian Michael Filardo and Jason Wright. I’ve always thought of Jen Fisher as a patron saint of the literary world in New York because she sells books in the East Village and she’s organized readings and is always very supportive of poets. Tiding House from the Quarterless Review is a new Riso publication. Those are some of the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Me: What was the poetry you were reading early on and where did you come across it?
Em: I got into poetry as an adult through—and I know it has a connotation but— a lot of the Alt-Lit poets, like Sam Pink and Ana Carrette and the prose writer Megan Boyle.
Me: What’s the connotation?
Em: I guess the connotation is that that scene is navel gaze-y and not that deep. It’s always had this black mark on it of being excessively self-concerned or edge-lord-y in a cringey way. Lacking depth. But to me, when I was first looking for poetry that spoke to the world as I understood it—the modern world—it was accessible. My first extended exposure to poetry was this class I took in college that really didn’t penetrate at all. It was just old, old poems, which I think now I’m at the point where I can appreciate, but it wasn’t a good intro.
With the Alt-Lit poets, it just read like a lot of what I was reading and taking in online but had that elevated aim of being lyrical and having a goal of reaching toward the sublime, like a poem does. It wasn’t a text message, but it was text-message-y enough to touch me but more elevated. That was my launching pad to other poets and types of poetry. Then I got into a lot of small press poets and a lot of female poets, like Chelsey Minnis, Ariana Reines, and Rachel Rabbit White (who is influenced by some of those poets). And Dorothea Lasky. A lot of them were big for me. I also liked Louise Glück. She can be a bit too New England-y my-divorce for me now, but her style is really good so I connected to that when I was starting off. Have you ever read Louise Glück?
Me: Yeah. I’ve read her. Did she win the Nobel last year? Did I make that up?
Em: She won something for Averno, which is such a good book. [Ed: It was a National Book Award Finalist for Poetry in 2006.] When I Google Averno, Google is like, “Did you mean Aveeno, the body care product?” No, I fucking didn’t.
Me: She did win the Nobel!
Em: Averno was cool for me because it’s about myth. She and Ariana Reines are both interested in myths and the sacred and that was compelling for me. It was the first poetry I had read that was really like that. Aside from the Song of Songs and Psalms when I was a kid. “Averno is a lake west of Naples that the Romans mythologized as an entrance to the underworld.” Just reading that from Wikipedia.
Me: Gotta love Wikipedia. Ariana Reines comes up a lot when I talk to people about poetry. What do you enjoy about her?
Em: I like her because of her bridging of the ancient and the modern. She connects what’s existing now to what’s always existed. She’s speaking to the parts of right now that are timeless. She’s really interested in ancient wisdom and that was really compelling to me. And she writes in this snappy, modern tone. I like how narrative her poems are. They read like prose poems. The first work of hers I read was Coeur de Lion. I’ve since read Mercury and I like that even better.
Me: What does your poetry practice look like? How often do you write poems? In what mood do you find yourself drawn to a book or the Notes app or however it is you put down your thoughts?
Em: When I’m feeling something strongly is when I feel the desire to write a poem. Either that or it’s a combination of feelings and thoughts. When I’m really into a particular feeling and I’m trying to tunnel all the way through it to something and make it out the other side, I’ll start having these thoughts that are poetic. Then, I can gain a couple of lines from that. From that mode of feeling something really strongly and wanting to break through to the other side of it, I’ll sit down and write the poem and the writing of the poem will help get me to the other side of it. Then, I’ll feel a sense of release and relief. And then I read it back and make sure it makes sense and captures the precision of the feelings. Sometimes, I go back and edit it, but I try to do a lot of the writing and editing at once because I want to be true to the mixture of emotions inside me that led me to write it in the first place. I almost see it as taking a picture of a particular emotional moment in time and the further I get from it, the more trouble I have recalling the real details of that picture. I try to do the writing and editing within a pretty quick turnaround. If I return to it later and this one thing seems like it would make more sense I’ll sub in something else, but most of the time it’s like that.
Me: Yeah. I think poetry is a language like French or Arabic. You have to turn it on and there are moments where all my thoughts will be in prosody. I’ll be thinking of things very much as a way of toying around with words in a Tetris-like mode to make sure everything fits properly, but it’ll just be me thinking about like a glass of water or something. I totally agree with honoring the moment in which you make the poetry. Some people might want to lie and be like, “No, I go back and change it so much. I really edit a lot.” But I only really edit in the moment and then maybe I’ll read it over a week later, once I’ve forgotten what it’s all about, and then I’ll be like, “Oh this one word would slide a little bit smoother.” But otherwise, either this one’s gonna make it on the Substack or not.
Em: If I was going to make a blog I’d make a Substack.
Me: What would your Substack be?
Em: I was thinking today about some story I have that I think is funny. I was like, “I don’t wanna be obnoxious and shoehorn this story I just remembered into a conversation.” And I was like, “This is what people have blogs for: to write their little stories down and other people can read it at their leisure.” I could write it up into a story but I don’t really write short stories. I would like to at some point, but it’s not really a goal right now because I’m really focused on poetry.
Me: It’s such a hard change in temperament to go from writing a short story to writing a poem. Poems don’t need narrative but the only thing that makes a short story a short story is narrative. You have to be able to figure out how to do a beginning, middle, and end and keep it interesting. Whereas a poem can not even make sense and be really good. I was reading Chariot [Wish]’s book [a new heaven and a new earth] last night, on my bed, after I went home [from a reading] and there was this part where it’s this Rimbaud-like thing where it’s a smattering of words that don’t all make sense together but it does at the same time, too. I don’t remember what the sequence is, but it’s a description of three or four things in a row and it’s like, “I get totally what this is, but it doesn’t mean anything, but it does.”
Em: That’s why I love poetry. I think there’s a lot of prose poems that read like short stories but they don’t have to adhere as tightly to the plot structure and that’s nice. I think flash fiction and prose poems tend to have a difference in affect, but they’re relatively similar genres.
Me: I think the thing about poetry is it can be anything.
Em: That’s what I like about it.
Me: If you tell me you’re a poet and then write a grocery list I’ll be like [*snaps like at a poetry reading*]
Em: Like when Al Bedell read a list of her summer goals. It was really funny and to me, that’s a poem. A list is very much a poem.
Me: Amelia [Gillis] has a poem that’s a list and the first line is, “Weed, obviously.” I love that.
Em: She read that at your reading. I read in Maggie’s interview that you had done that interview the day that you were going to do the KGB reading. I remember you talking about how nervous you were and Maggie was reassuring you. It made me happy because Maggie was like, “Oh, the vibe is nice there.” I was like, “OK, nice!” How did you feel that that reading went? I really thought you killed it. That reading to me stands out because it was one of the ones that I felt like I retained everything that all the readers said. There wasn’t a time where I fell into a trance. I felt like all the readers spoke clearly or their delivery was really present.
Me: Those were such heady and weird days. I was moving out of my apartment I’d been in for five years. I was nervous for the first minute, but once I started reading I felt OK. But I also felt like I should read as fast as I could. When I see other poets, they do banter.
Em: That’s how I am, too, for the most part. If I’m gonna do banter, it’s either at the beginning or the end of the set. It’s not between a poem. Once I’m going, I’m just going. I like banter between poems, though. But I also don’t want to give too much away. I don’t want to talk about the meaning of my poems in front of an audience. I’d be down to talk about it with a person one-on-one. But, overall, the mystery is so much a part of poetry.
Me: Yeah, of course. One of my friends—I think I mentioned this in another interview— but he was complaining that some of my stuff is opaque and I was like, “Good, that’s how it’s supposed to be. If I was trying to be crystalline, then I would just write prose.” Poetry is a little bit about obfuscating and doing things that are very different. For me, all that matters is that I believe that the person who wrote it has an idea of what it means, and then I can extrapolate my own ideas and feelings from it. To me, they’re not trying to communicate directly. Poetry sometimes is just talking to yourself, or God, or nature. All of poetry, to me, is apostrophe.
Em: Apostrophe?
Me: It’s the poetic device where you’re talking to something else. Like, “Oh sadness, how come I’m this way?” or whatever, that’s apostrophe.
Em: Is there a device where you’re speaking from those things, like letting those things inhabit you and do the talking?
Me: I’m sure. But I don’t personally know it. [Ed: Perhaps personification comes closest?] I do like going on the Poetry Foundation website. They have a glossary of hundreds of different terms. Sometimes, it’s nice to know about old-timey ways to write poems. Like, I did a sestina recently and it was kind of fun but also very limiting.
Em: One thing I’m interested in is poetic education because I didn’t really have one. A lot of people don’t have one. A lot of poets didn’t study poetry in school. And you were talking about this last night: how you read the Poetry Foundation’s website. Do you see that as one of the ways you’re giving yourself a poetic education?
One way I see poetry is as an expression of a sensibility
Me: Oh absolutely. I was thinking about what you said before about the Alt-Lit poets. It makes total sense that, at any age, but especially a younger age, it would speak to you more to have colloquial and straightforward language as opposed to like John Ashbery or early Adrienne Rich or Theodore Roethke. Who our age reads those people? I mean, I do ‘cause I’m a fucking weirdo but that’s not the standard. Or at the very least, you’d never start with those people unless your parents were also poets.
Em: I read Fanny Howe this year and I love her. But she’s super opaque. She’s someone I was thinking of when you said putting a couple of words together that create some sort of picture when combined with the other words in the stanzas. You’re not exactly sure what it’s gesturing toward. It’s kind of like a feeling. One way I see poetry is as an expression of a sensibility. I like [Howe’s] sensibility, so I like her poems even though I don’t always know what they mean (but that’s beside the point). If I had encountered her when I was younger—when I was 19—I probably would have not really responded as much as I do now. It’s about going on a journey and where you go later on.
Part of the reason I liked the Alt-Lit poets was because if people were ever like, “I don’t get poetry.” I could be like, “Well, read this and let me know if you get it.” And they would read it and would understand what a poem is and what a poem could do. Then, there was less of a barrier to entry. I always appreciated that. It seemed good for people whose parents weren’t poets or who didn’t come from money or something. I like Dorothea Lasky for the same reason. She’s thought of as more elevated than the Alt-Lit poets, but she’s also someone who speaks in straightforward language and is expressing this sensibility that is essentially poetic. She has a poem that changed my life, actually.
Me: What is it?
Em: “Ars Poetica.” Have you ever read that?
Me: I don’t think so.
Em: It’s not that long. I could read it.
Me: Yeah, please. I’m looking for a poem, too. Why don’t you read yours and I’ll read mine.
Em: That sounds perfect. This is such a nerdy poet convo.
Me: It’s gotta be. This is our insider baseball poetry convo.
Em: This poem is Dorothea Lasky. It’s called “Ars Poetica” :
I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me
But I resisted for fear she’d think it strange
I am very lonely
Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good
Well maybe he didn’t mean that
But that is what I heard
When he told me my life was not worthwhile
And my life’s work the work of the elite.
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes
I want my face to be a poem
I have just learned how to apply
Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide
There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I can feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point
That’s one of my favorite poems of all time.
Me: Wow. I wanna read this one. It’s “What You Should Know to Be a Poet” by Gary Snyder and the reason I’m reading it is because it’s exactly what I think you need to be a poet. And sometimes it’s very arcane knowledge. Here’s what he says:
“What You Should Know to Be a Poet”
all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;
dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;
kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum'd and golden–
& then love the human: wives husbands and friends.
children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.
work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.
the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy
real danger. gambles. and the edge of death.
Em: Yeah, I love that. I like where he took it. At the beginning, I thought, “This is just gonna be some hippie shit” but at the end, I was like, “Nice.”
Me: I think I like the hippie shit better honestly, but I do like that it does devolve into this other thing.
Em: For me, it puts it in a context that makes it feel fresh. Sometimes, with Diane di Prima, she’s just like “Oh my god, the war. Oh my god, the trees. Oh my god, my moccasins.” And I’m like, “Babe.” I love it but it’s so of-its-time. I’m interested in how different poems age and which ones become timeless and which ones stay of their time. I feel like some of her work transcended and some of it didn’t. That Gary Snider poem is one that transcends. Parts of it seem of its era but it has a timeless quality or a quality that is still present in our age like tarot and divination and that stuff is definitely a thing that’s progressed. It’s existed way longer than then but it stayed popular.
Me: I read this from a literary review [New American Review #8] from 1970 so it’s very 1970.
Em: I’ve been wanting to read Nostradamus. He wrote a book of his predictions and I feel like it’s a poetry book. He’s best known for his Les Propheties, a collection of 42 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. It was published in 1555.
Me: I didn’t know it was poetry. My only interaction with Nostradamus was in 11th grade some kid in my class was like, “Yo, I was reading some crazy shit on the Internet” and we were like, “What’s up?” And he was like, “Wait until 2020.”
Em: Wait a second. What?
Me: I feel like people who read him on weird, old Internet forums would be like, “Shit’s gonna go down in so and so year.” It’s like the Mayan calendar or like, “He predicted 9/11.” No, he didn’t. He just said some shit and you’re taking a liberal understanding to make it fit.
Em: The Nostradamus in Popular Culture Wikipedia page has a part about how there was an Internet hoax in 2012 that the rapper Psy, who sang “Gangnam Style,” is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and they were trying to say that Nostradamus predicted that, but there’s no way.
Me: Imagine how many hoops you’d have to jump through. [Nostradamus] is like, “OK, bear with me here but in 500 years music is gonna be so much different. You only know Gregorian Monks chanting and shit. It’s gonna go through a Baroque period, a Classical period, we’re gonna get the blues and jazz and then pop music, rock, and then that’s gonna evolve into this form called hip-hop. All right, are you still with me there?” Like what? So stupid.
Em: The quatrain has nothing to do with Psy. It’s such a stretch.
Me: Why would it be him? It sounds like someone just didn't like “Gangnam Style,” which is admittedly a catchy song. What’s not to like?
Em: It doesn’t get into it on this Wikipedia page and quite frankly I don’t want to delve into the people’s twisted minds who are trying to cast Psy as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Me: Yeah, definitely not. So, I usually end by asking, “What should the readers know that we haven’t already covered?” It’s a vague question but it gives you an opportunity to plug anything.
Em: Well, I want to put together a full-length collection so I’m at the beginning of collecting the poems that I would want to put into that. I’ve been posting readings at KGB, my plug is: Come to those. Also, I just deep-cleaned my car for the first time in years and it looks the best it's looked in ages and I’m really happy about that.
Me: Whoah, that’s great. Things rarely get deep-cleaned. It must feel good to have the car nice and clean and fresh.
Em: It feels amazing.