Though the awarding of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry to Claudia Emerson is nearly a month old, I still wanted to comment on it. Most particularly, I was fascinated with how she wrote the winning book of poems, titled "Late Wife."
To her credit, Emerson tackled very emotional and private themes surrounding the annulment of her marriage of 19 years, the growing relationship with her new husband, Kent Ippolito, and the loss of his first wife to cancer. But what strikes me most is this: she hand-wrote each poem as if it were a letter. And rather than send them, she taped them to the walls of her home and office at the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, VA. Her approach, in itself, is poetic.
Claudia Emerson's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals. Her books of poems, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997) and Pinion, An Elegy (2002) were published as part of Louisiana State University Press's signature series, Southern Messenger Poets. Emerson has been awarded individual artist's fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She earned her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was poetry editor for The Greensboro Review. She is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
You can review two of her poems here:
Surface Hunting
Possessions
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