“Lying is Essential to Poetry”: Emily Skillings on Holes, Collage, and John Ashbery
By Neha Mulay
Emily Skillings is the author of Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017) and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021.
She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series.
I encountered Skillings’ poems last year. I’d been following the groove of my writerly obsession with John Ashbery, which led me to Skillings. Her collection of poems, Fort Not, is cleaved in a radical oddity of dissection that deftly moves between the mind’s examination of itself and formative contemplation with clean cuts of the poetic scalpel. It’s simultaneously cavalier and furious, inventive and reactionary, seeking without being sought.
Skillings’ language strikes as it surprises, wielding together the banality of perfunctory consumerism with bold, provocative examinations of the body and moments of exquisite linguistic amber. Skillings’ oblique renderings give way to moments of staggering perfection—in poems like “Garden of Slow Forms,” “A lake explodes in a nearby district,” and subsequently, the “Instrument of indecision, the Calabash Harp, / Combs into a cream-colored fog.”
There’s a logic to Skillings’ inscrutability—it exists at the moment of visualization. Her images are rapt and unexpected, they upend the consciousness with their bizarre naturalism. A thought is described as “some rare embossed urn, / youngish flowers pasted / on the back of light, / misaligned polka dots / on an entitled seam…”
Skillings’ gaze is sharp and astute, irresolute, stubborn, and wry, with just a touch of an enchanted lightness, a quirk of graphic consideration that creates bifurcated kingdoms: “The daylight is scrolling itself to death. / Everything presses into an atmospheric parfait.”
Skillings follows the lines of objects through fissures and sounds, fearlessly turning abstractions into a necessary process. There’s something experimental and ritualistic about the book. It functions as a meditation on objects and the divisive autonomy of self and its corporeal permutations.
The body is described with a defamiliarized visceral onus. “Holland Tunnel” begins with a quote by Alice Notley about disappearing into the organism. The poem moves in seeping precision to describe the eponymous terror of the self as a black hole, an abyss felt as a “single raw rod.”
And yet, the poem ends in a frozen, delicate moment of lopsided masquerade: “You lean towards the mirror / for hours, manipulating / tiny gardens in your face.” It’s moments such as these that characterize the sheer prismatic pulchritude of Skillings’ work.
While many of her poems are formally clean and magnetized, there’s a penchant for a repetitive wildness too. Skinllings’ poems are filled with defiant, self-reflective troughs which consider “that ancient/ceremonial chalice of feminine shame.”
Poems such as “Fort Not” brim with a pure, repetitive refutation, while others such as “One Hundred and Fifteen Places” embody an assemblage that radically creates space as it trails through scents, sounds, and actions.
Poems like “I Love Wiping my Dirty Hands on Other People’s Things” are wry and irresolute, curving like an amphibian staircase and saturating in the oozes of the body, from the “mayo” and the “microfiber” to the oil on John Cage’s face, all the way into the persona, who smells “like a new coin.”
These poems stop to examine themselves, calling for an overturning of parameters and an insistence on residing within distance in charged potency, like “a beat in my ass” that opens into a rendered externality: “A logic grows, a white chrysanthemum. / It becomes very intense and external, like opera.”
Most recently, in poems like “The Fool,” Skillings melds together voices and strange, disembodied topographies, pithily considering caricature but never quite residing entirely in its gust. “Do you know who I am? / I have some names. You pick. / One of them is Alice / One of them is Trudy / My name is Bunny.” These meandering voices in this poem are multitudinous, subversive, laconic, and affecting in their risible, exquisite entrapment. I’m beginning to think / that long ago / I got stuck in a poem / your poem / and grew weary / and lay down and slept / and perished there.
I’m enthralled by Skillngs’ poems—I seek her out, and she agrees to an interview. I meet her at the Lillian Vernon Writers’ House. I sit across from her as she leans back in her chair, amused and interested. I have a strange feeling that Skillings is beholden to some inherent, embodied truth of form, an intelligent discernment that unravels the culverts of understanding.
There’s an open refutation within Skillings, and she brims with an entirely natural wit. As she begins to speak, and I saturate in her lopsided anomalies, the sheer inventive might of her mind quickly becomes apparent.
Neha Mulay: John Ashbery referred to your work as “staggeringly beautiful” and “wildly off-kilter.” How do you arrive at your stunning, eccentric poems?
Emily Skillings: I really believe in the image as a powerful and potent unit of being. We think of an image as a picture, but it's actually temporal, it’s sensory, and it’s three-dimensional.
Mark Doty reflects on Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and notes that the poem is so lasting because of the distance between the images or the “metaphor meaning” and the subjects/objects of description. Working with that space of dissonance and trying to make that distance as elongated as possible has always been interesting to me.
But I never had to think about it in those terms until I started teaching and began questioning, “What is a line?” “What is an image?” I’ve always wanted to make lasting images, and I use repetition a lot. To me, repetition is holy. In the vein of Stein, repetition renders defamiliarization in fascinating ways.
Sometimes I'll just repeat a word or a line and let it cast me off somewhere else. And I might not keep that repetition in the poem, but a way of launching myself into a different place.
NM: Yes, I can sense that process of elongation in the poems. Defamiliarization or extending out the specific moment at which we are confronted with the problem of representation is a crucial aspect of your work.
ES: Exactly. Fort Not was written at a time when I was experimenting with collage. So it wasn’t even about constructing images; it was about seeing how I could knit or glue things together. I started out writing by mashing notes and fragments together. But there was also a storytelling narrative in there which did not come easy to me. Now, my poems are much more invested in narrative.
NM: I can relate to that. I tend to think intrinsically in images, so my writing is very image-oriented. Since your writing stems from the potency of the image, how do you work towards the integration of narrative in your work?
ES: I read so much fiction. I read poetry, of course, but I really hunger after novels. Even when I’m writing more fragmented works, I’m always trying to capture a sense of a moment that is advancing; something has been set in motion that cannot be evaded or escaped, which is exactly what novels give us.
And often, the novels I read don’t really have strong plots. There’s something that’s so inspiring about the density of prose. Some poems just come to me, whereas the collage poems are definitely assembled bit by bit. It’s a form of construction that feels more visual.
Are you familiar with that meme of the two wolves inside you? One of my wolves is working on assemblage, while the other wolf is a novelist. I’d like to be a novelist, but I don’t have the attention span for it.
Currently, I’m reading a novel called Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives. The book so evokes a space of poetry, that space in which there is so much happening, and there are numerous threads you can follow. The protagonist in the novel is a writer, and the book itself contains all these different texts, components, and research. It starts with an essay on botulism and Botox. That’s the kind of novel that I’m interested in, particularly since it associatively feels like the space of a poem.
Elements of Fort Not are definitely inspired by Kafka’s short fiction. There’s a poem in Fort Not called “Fort Something,” which is a prose poem that considers the process of condensing the history of a place into a single paragraph, which allowed me to smuggle in some narrative.
NM: Yes, fiction can be so engrossing and poetically generative. I’m currently reading Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, which has led me to consider the Brontë sisters. What led you to write “Emily Brontë’s Last Words?”
So Emily Brontë’s last words were, “If you send for a doctor, I'll see him now.” I discovered this whilst watching Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971), which references the last words.
I found her final words really devastating. I suppose they kind of point to the idea of meeting god, that “him” in the second clause. I mean, we romanticize the last words, but Brontë’s utterance is straddling two worlds. It has one foot in living—in wanting to hold onto life—while the second is already in the afterlife. So, I added “sisters or not” before the final words, which kind of works to imagine the setting around her.
This poem is actually a collage poem. I knew I wanted Brontë’s last words to end the poem, and I began working on the poem from there, which now feels kind of phony or overdetermined. I love endings. Aditi Machado’s “The End” is a great essay on endings. It’s about unlearning the idea of the perfect ending. It thinks about the over-determined ending, and it engages Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure.”
ES: The idea of the perfect ending is a difficult one to resist, but I remind myself that a poem is not a package or a parcel; it cannot be neatly wrapped in its deliverance.
The collage poem is also somewhat linked to this idea–the poem as an assembled ligature. Ashbery’s poems often embodied a collage format. What does the work of John Ashbery mean to you?
Ashbery means everything to me. I was his assistant, and being in his presence was incredible. He was so voracious, varied, and omnivorous in terms of his reading. He would read everything from horoscopes in The Village Voice to cheesy local newspapers with weird headlines to obscure French novels.
He was reading the Times Literary Supplement, forgotten poets, dead poets, and younger poets who had sent him their books. People always note the ways in which he mixed high and low modes of language, but this process was actually ingrained in his reading habits.
There’s an Ashbery poem called “Domani, Dopodomani,” and the title of the poem is a phrase in Italian that means “tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.” He once said that he liked the idea of the title being something you might overhear. His poems display and engage such incredible poetic range. It’s like walking into one of those wonderful shops that are filled with strange knick-knacks.
Of course, not all of his poems are collage poems. Some are more cohesive and formally driven. But I do find those magical aspects of his work so permission-giving. It sounds corny, but poetry is everywhere—the material is everywhere.
NM: The collage format is so fascinating because it’s a form of dissolving meaning but also discovering it. One scrap put together with another scrap, can often create a new dimensionality, and it’s so disorienting but also multifarious.
It’s drawing so much from the world but also refusing to abide by linearity–it’s simultaneously engaging and reflective yet sequestering.
ES: When I was editing Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, I realized that Ashbery had left behind several different projects, and each one engaged an area of interest for him: be it music, visual art, or film. These were forms that he had devoted his whole career to, as a poet but also an art critic, and I quickly realized that people might be interested in seeing this work.
The final poem in the book is a book-length poem called The Kane Richmond Project, and it moves between lineated passages and prose. The poem is a love letter to campy, serial films, and it mentions dozens of films and actors. It’s also a poem that’s playing with the conventions of seriality (like the cliffhanger) using the serial form.
The first poem in the book is called “The History of Photography,” and it incorporates the landscape of photography as well as some of the pioneers of early photography, such as Muybridge, Eakins, etc. And, of course, like the best ekphrastic poems, the poem isn’t about photography, but it uses the visual medium to transport us somewhere new.
Another sequence of poems is playing with a musical composition by the composer Carl Czerny. One poem retells a biblical parable. It was such a pleasure to live inside these poems and to think about how he came to write them.
NM: Yes, absolutely; Ashbery was frequently at NYU for the “Conversations with John” series, and I’ve heard they were incredible conversations.
ES: Yes, they were.
NM: Another fascinating aspect of Ashbery’s work and collage poems, in general, is the question of the poetic persona. Where do these poems leave the poetic persona?
Fort Not begins with a quote by Laura Riding Jackson that presents the idea of the poet as “a false wall” and a “lying word.” What are the facetious elements of poetry or the poetic persona?
ES: That’s such an interesting question. I think the idea of lying is essential to poetry. The conversation about authenticity is an important one; however, I identify as someone who has faked just about everything. I’m still faking it. Faking it is my poetic practice. I believe in imitating people. I believe in stealing people’s forms—ethically, of course.
I used to be a dancer, and so much of that was about imitation—what if I just pretend to be loose even though I'm stiff?
What if I pretend to be a specific kind of poet? Lying is important. Stories, even true ones, are lies in a lot of ways. I like to be really tender towards myself when I’m writing and faking it.
NM: Yes, and I think this idea of “faking it” is a means of countering imposter syndrome, as well as suspending or transmuting the blocks and stoppages that stem from feelings of inadequacy.
ES: We all write poems that come from somewhere else. Spicer has a great lecture on poetry as a kind of received transmission from elsewhere.
NM: Yes, I encounter the idea of poetic transmission quite a lot. And the key question is, if you accept yourself as a poetic medium, what kind of egoic resistance do you encounter within the self? Hauntings can get pretty eerie.
Dorothea Lasky’s essay “A Belief in Ghosts: Poetry and the Shared Imagination” is so fascinating, unruly, and disconcerting. And yet, there is something like the shared imagination.
ES: I do believe in ghosts and hauntings. I think that the “transmission” is such a brilliant image because it's technical—it points to a technology of listening, like the radio.
In Cocteau's Orpheus, the protagonist (a poet who is experiencing writer’s block) dials into the radio to access poetry signals that are emanating from the underworld on a secret frequency. They’re the best poems he has ever written, but they are coming from somewhere else, not from him.
Later in the film, Orpheus and Euridice are in the underworld, and they’re standing before a judge. The judge asks, “What’s your occupation?” Orpheus says, “I’m a poet.” And the judge asks, “What’s a poet,” and Orpheus says, “To write without being a writer.” And that’s such a great definition of a poet.
In some ways, to write poetry, the poet has to get out of the way.
NM: Yes—this notion of the death of the author. How do these otherwordly and technological ideas tie into the cover image of Fort Not?
ES: Going back to the quote about “a false wall” by Laura Riding Jackson, I was thinking about the idea of being a writer as having an (intellectual, creative) border or a delineation that is always permeable.
I was thinking about the body as encrochable—you can penetrate it and infect it. I was also thinking about words: how they are these permeable yet solid objects that have been dragged through the mud of history and art and utterance, only to be used by you in your poem or your mouth.
The cover image features a body that is surrounded by solid objects. The artist who created this image, Stephen Arnold, was known for his assemblage photographs.
NM: I actually recently wrote a review of Fort Romeau’s album “Beings of Light,” and his album also features artwork by Stephen Arnold on the cover. It’s another great image—Arnold’s work is incredible.
ES: I never really considered the title of the book as being in conversation with the cover image until recently. I realized that all the objects surrounding the body are not just adorning it, they’re also protecting it. And, of course, there’s the twin image—the figure that emerges from between the legs.
It ties into the idea of Fort Not as a body that has borders but also doesn’t. The title of the book is also maybe a reference to the gold reserves at Fort Knox, and the idea in this book is that there isn’t really any gold there.
NM: If we haven’t seen something, how can we be sure it exists?
ES: Yes. And that play with Fort Knox is secondary, but it’s fun. I wrote two titular “Fort Not” poems. The first one was a collage poem, and the second one is a mean, negating poem that is inspired by choreographer Yvonne Ranier’s “No Manifesto.” I want to read you this manifesto—it’s the best. It’s like a poem that is not a poem. It was written in 1964:
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
NM: It’s brilliant.
ES: It’s brilliant precisely because it’s untenable. These are not really things that can really be rejected. Refusing them is also a way of reinscribing them but questioning them makes you define your own values and intentions.
NM: Yes, if anything, it’s about the fact that we cannot reject these things, even if we wanted to. And yet, the refusal or the negation does create some kind of spatial alternative. “Holland Tunnel” begins with a quote by Alice Notley about the “organism” and its disappearance into the thinking mind. What is the significance of this idea for you?
ES: Mistrust of my mind is such a huge aspect of my writing. I mean, as feminists, we’re taught to combat imposter syndrome, that it’s a symptom of patriarchy and also whiteness.
To reject imposter syndrome is to question the structure, which is important—but mistrust of one’s mind and knowledge is also an important part of being human. I don't want to just reject it outright. What if I am an imposter? What could I do then? Could I be a spy?
NM: Yes. I think that as a woman, the question is how do you engage in self-inquiry—particularly in terms of questioning cognition and perception—without gaslighting yourself?
ES: Exactly. I’m interested in the recurring thought, the voice that asks, “What if I’m not very smart?” I don’t really gravitate toward thinking through ideas in my poems, but of course, ideas are unavoidable, though you can approach them sideways.
I once had someone come up to me at a reading, and they asked me if I had visual migraines, which I do. They told me that my poems had a specific visual aura and that they investigate perception and color in a way that reminded this person of the halos around things you see when you have a visual migraine, those disturbances in vision and perception.
Fort Not is very much a seeing/perceiving book, whereas the book I’m working on right now is more of a thinking book.
NM: What are you working on these days?
ES: I’m working on a new book, and it’s (tentatively) called Ladies! Be Your Own Grave. The book is about a lot of things, but one thing that’s emerging is an examination of—for lack of a better word—stupidity, the intrusive thought that you are a person who doesn’t know.
Some of the poems listen to the voice that tells you you’re stupid, and some of them consider the sources of knowledge that come at you from all sides. There are a lot of quotations. There are many poems that embody people who aren’t me—ghosts. There are also a few prose poems that feel like very short stories. There are a lot of holes.
I’m teaching a seminar next semester. They asked me about the focus of my seminar, and I responded with, “holes?” I guess they’re letting me do it! I want to think about holes—the grave, the mine, the void, the mouth, the anus, the empty or full mind—all of these spaces.
I was inspired by Kim Hyesoon’s long poem “Manhole Humanity,” as well as William Pope L’s Hole Theory, which I took as the title for the course. I am very inspired by Kim Heysoon. The ways in which she writes about the voice, gender, the state, and the violence of being is incredible.
I feel like a poem can start with the notion that somewhere, there’s a hole waiting for you.
NM: Yes, and that ties into the ideas of poetic transmission that we were talking about. It also speaks to the body. I really admire the bold, provocative, and feminist aspects of your work and the ways in which they work to disrupt feminism. You’re part of the Belladonna* Collaborative, right?
ES: I interned with Belladonna back in 2009, before it even became a collaborative. It's a collective publishing structure, and it’s comprised of poets who are thinking about feminism, its ramifications in poetry, the material lives of poets (our health, our needs, money, sustainability), and experimentation. It has been a great way for me to encounter the work and the thinking of so many writers.
NM: I really like “Siege of La Rochelle”—it’s such a defiant poem.
ES: For that poem, I literally took an article about how to perform oral sex, and I replaced a lot of the imagery with battle imagery. It’s such a found poem. I barely wrote it. It took me so long to find the title. I knew the title had to refer to a battle, so I was on Wikipedia for hours trying to find the perfect one.
NM: That’s very apt, especially because when you consider the gendered politics of romance and sex, so much of it is essentially about power dynamics and psychological conflict.
ES: Yes, exactly. There’s so much heartbreak in this book. I wrote it during my Twenties, and I was dealing with a lot of rage and sadness. I was also reckoning with gender, with feeling “used up” by my relationships with socialized men. “You can see my girl organs through my skin.” It’s about the transparency of gender, but it’s also about its masked aspects.
NM: I’ve been reading Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum, which also grapples with a very kind of specific, discursive anger. I’ve often thought about how anger can definitely get in the way of a poem, but it’s also an impulse that sometimes needs to be followed.
ES: Brenda Shaugnessy was my very first poetry teacher! I loved how she talked about the space of a poem.
I always resist the idea that what’s subterranean in the poem isn’t the poem—it’s the idea that the anger may get in the way of the poem, but the anger is also the material. Anger is great because it can help you see what you want to turn from and turn towards. It can help you ask, “What am I rejecting here?”
Sometimes, when you’re writing poetry, you can find ways of hiding your interests and your self within the poem. Psychologically, we do so much to bury our true selves. Since our poetry often comes from an unconscious place, editing can be a lot like the work we do in therapy. I’m reading this amazing book by Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy, that does so much interesting work to link the space of the poem with the space of psychoanalysis.
You can read a poem in workshop and realize that there are two poems there—the one that you are actively reading and the poem that lives underneath. When I took the initial version of “Baby Food” into workshop, the teacher told me that the poem was inscrutable. And I was angry about that, but of course, the teacher was right.
So, I decided to scrap the poem and write a straightforward, “dumbed-down” poem that tells you exactly what’s going on. I wrote it on the subway, and I realized that the resultant poem was actually much better. Good, even.
NM: Yes, I know that feeling. I write a lot of inscrutable poems.
ES: And there is something to that.
NM: Yes. I’m a huge proponent of the difficult poem, but then at some point, you have to ask yourself, how difficult do I want to make the difficult poem? And how much of this difficulty stems from seeking refuge within the poem and using it as a cloak?
I’m really interested in the ways in which you suspend linearity in poems like “Phoenicia, Hunter, Cairo,” “A New Sound,” and “Basement Delivery.”
ES: Those poems feel like the narrative impulse of a surrealist storyline. “A New Sound” started with the thought, “I don’t want to go to work anymore.” And then I thought, what if there was a poem that was about an anti-capitalist spore or virus? A lot of zombie films are actually about capitalism.
Dawn of the Dead takes place in a shopping mall, which points to mindless consumerism. So, I thought, what would happen if we were “infected” with this idea of putting everything down and refusing to go to work? Like cordyceps meets general strike.
NM: Like Bartleby.
ES: Yes, exactly. Bartleby is amazing!
NM: But refusing to engage in the constant demand for productivity is really important.
ES: Absolutely. It has changed the way I teach, and it has changed my boundaries. There’s a great essay by Melissa Febos that asks, “Do you want to be known for your writing or for your swift email responses?” I also love “Diet Mountain Dew” by Dorothea Lasky, as the poem fantasizes about withholding one’s labor.
NM: That has always been a conflict for me. I always fill up my schedule with so many concrete things that giving myself permission to rest and even permission to write poetry can be really difficult.
ES: That’s the kind of struggle with teaching. Teaching definitely gives me a lot, but at the end of a long day, it’s hard to sit down and write a poem, so I have to trick myself into doing it. But it’s okay not to write a poem for two months. My book came out in 2017, and I haven’t released anything since then, and that’s okay. It’s okay to be slow.
NM: I completely agree. Sometimes, there’s such an emphasis on expediency, but we need to remind ourselves that it’s okay to take the time, regardless of external pressures. That being said, is there a timeline for the current manuscript?
ES: I would love to get it done this summer. The second book is such a strange animal. With your first book, you’re kind of gathering what you’ve already written, and it takes a long time to assemble it. It’s like arranging a bouquet. But the second book actually has to be written as a book, and it’s feeling more cohesive in some ways.
NM: Do you have a writing routine?
ES: I'm a very frazzled, scattered person. I must look as though I’m always falling apart. I feel perpetually like the woman in a sitcom that’s always rushing into a room with too many bags, and the heel of her shoe has fallen off.
I don't have a daily routine. I've never had a daily routine—my attention is pulled in so many different directions. But I’m obsessed (like everyone) with the routines of artists: “She wakes up at 5:30 and eats half a hard-boiled egg,” etc.
I'm from Maine originally, and my fantasy is to like get a little cabin and not tell anybody where I'm going. I’m a very social person, so I tend to invite people along, and then we make elaborate meals and watch movies, and nobody ends up writing. I can't write when there are people around me. I always tell students, “Don’t be like this! Learn to write anywhere.”
NM: Yes, it can be fun to just disappear for some time.
Yeah, I’m going to ghost on my life.
NM: Yes, there’s so much ghosting—so many ghosts.
ES: Yes, lots of ghosts.