Emily Wilson: A Poet in Full Bloom

Most residents of Iowa City would remember Wednesday, April 8th as a temperate evening in the beginning of April just before the deciduous trees had come to bud. They might recall that their rusted lawns hadn’t quite begun their ascension from autumnal death to renewed vitality and that the tulips were still unrealized, tucked safely beneath the soil. I’ll remember it as the evening Emily Wilson teased her audience with poems about flourishing gardens and unrestricted life.

At 7 p.m. the man who would deliver her introduction came to stand before the podium. He spoke of Wilson as she would later speak of backyard gardens; she was described as blossoming, brilliant, and “generous in her sparseness." As she approached the microphone and the crowd began its welcoming applause, he finished: “Welcome, Emily Dickinson or…excuse me, Emily Wilson”; most within the crowd laughed. Wilson paused, giggled beneath her breath and then thanked him for the incidental compliment. She then thanked her husband, Mark, the University of Iowa Press, and a number of the individuals who occupied the reserved seats before ultimately beginning her reading.

Wilson read from her collection titled “Micrographia," a homage to Robert Hooke’s 17th Century contribution to microbiology, in a soft deliberate tone that was both eloquent and calming; in fact, throughout the entirety of her half-hour performance Wilson did not stutter or fumble with a single of her words.

The first poem, which I was not able to ascertain the title of, addressed the world that lay within eyesight of the backyard she formerly maintained in Oregon. It read nicely. One of the immediate qualities of her writing that struck me, and would later develop into a recurring theme, was Wilson’s ability to meld typically coarse scientific language into gentle poetic patterns. And while her word choices often lacked the inherent musical qualities of more conventional language, her fastidious word selections and arrangements only further exemplified her poetic prowess. Her opening poem, like those that followed, sounded neither forced or rigid.

Wilson continued thereafter to read several poems, often introduced by their location. Most originated in Oregon, or New York—places Wilson formerly resided in—but she also spoke of Montana and California, not necessarily as states but rather as locations with unique and impressive vegetation.

Some of the more memorable poems within Wilson’s performance include “Tableau” and the cleverly titled “Johnny Rotten’s Produce”; the latter, a poem set in New York, treated Dyker Heights and the derelicts of industrial Brooklyn with the same sincerity and imagination that had been given to "Bill's garden", pigeons and flowers in previous poems. For me, “Johnny Rotten’s Produce” demonstrated Wilson’s ability to move beyond the unadulterated spaces of nature to the confides of one of America’s least vegetated cities. What was most impressive and surprising about her treatment of this space was her objectivity. As foolish as it seems now, I had prematurely assumed that Wilson would treat industrial spaces with condemnation and disgust. I had assumed her obvious affection for the natural world would bias her perspective of these spaces but Wilson’s cool contemplation clearly championed over such sentiment, if in fact they had ever existed, the ultimate result being another articulately crafted poem.

Even more impressive was that Wilson‘s poetic performance was almost entirely free from standard adjectival descriptions. While most poets struggle to not muddy their works with an over-insistence on descriptive language, Wilson has the incredible ability to unpack her descriptions into sentences more accurate and meaningful than the words they replace. As her introducer had indicated, Wilson’s collection is deliberately “sparse."

Before beginning her final poem, “Excursion," a poem that moved from the painted coast to the water of the ocean itself, Wilson described her poems, with a gentle laughter, as her own “version of a still-life painting." Such self-assessment was not only founded but the perfect introduction to a poem that would dance over a series of objects, gracefully, careful not to overshadow any one subject with another.

Ultimately, I left Wilson’s reading with a respect for her ability and a yearning for nature’s beauty. Her work is the perfect companion to those Spring and Summer months when the earth’s vitality is renewed, and we are once again able to bask in the beauty of the natural world. “Micrographia," like beds of brilliantly arranged flowers, rubs the hues and shapes of our language against each other, further highlighting the beauty of it’s individual parts. It can be purchased at Prairie Lights or online here.

-Tyler Lang Mauseth