Observable Readings
Lynn Emanuel and Allison Funk, Two Much-Honored Poets, Bring a Rich Brew of Work to Observable Readings on February 7
Saturday, January 15, 2011 at 04:58 PM
Gritty, playful, serious, confrontational, self-conscious, well-dressed--Lynn Emanuel's work has been surprising and inspiring readers for the past thirty years. Her poems demonstrate a rich brew of literary forms and interests, both subversive and traditional, with muses ranging from Gertrude Stein to Piers Plowman, film noir to George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Emanuel's speakers are passionate, confident, self-effacing, and leery of most things, including the poet, the poem, the book, beauty, and anything too convenient or comfortable. Intellectually sharp and socially aware, the poems make use of conventional tools, too; readers will find some of the most luscious figurative language at work in each one. Even this even the poet (critically) observes: "my poems lacquered with the gloss of adjectives / until they beam like meringues."
Emanuel is the author of four books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly- (winner of the Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets), and, most recently, Noose and Hook (2010). Her work has been featured in anthologies such as American Hybrid, the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry series, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and a recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a National Poetry Series award. She is a professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh. To read some of her work, click here. To read an interview with Emanuel, click here.
Born in 1951, Allison Funk grew up in the central bay area of Delaware, was educated at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio; and went on to study poetry under Stanley Kunitz at Columbia University in the late 1970s. Her first volume, Forms of Conversion, appeared in 1986. A convert to Judaism, Fun
k now lives with her husband George Soule and her two sons in Edwardsville, Illinois. She is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and one of the most beloved poets of our local company.
Living at the Epicenter (1995) won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press and the Society of Midland Authors Award. A chapbook, From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell (2002), was folded into her next volume, The Knot Garden (Sheep Meadow Press), which appeared later that year. The Tumbling Box (2009) is her most recent volume. She also has received prizes from Poetry magazine and The Poetry Society of America as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Joy (in nature, friendship, and family love) and grief are the guiding feelings structured by Funk's poems, "the patience and proportion of the declaration" (Stanley Plumly) always their first care. However, the self, as she has admitted, "is no polestar." Part of the burden of Funk's poetry is the risk ventured of having flown into a thought. The power of that "flight...beyond the horizon," as The Tumbling Box's epigraph quotes Robert Duncan, is suffered without ever being subject to the judgment or self-clarifying insight we expect of such a force. The majesty of stoical respect that must be paid to this power, finally, the power of poetry, her own in the first instance, has always been in Funk's poems, but never more bracingly, clearly observed than in this most recent volume.
To read selections from The Tumbling Box, click here.