The Lightning Room With Emily Mae Stokes

Emily Mae Stokes (3 poems, Nov. issue) from a tepee with relatively few demons, speaks in a clear fifth paragraph of stars about her wolves.

1) When I read your poems I feel like I’m in a tent made of buffalo skin falling asleep thinking it’s warm enough for night, while three other guys talk about making a fire. Why do I feel that way?

The creative mind is the last tepee in the desert and sometimes it’s populated with strange logic. In all seriousness, I couldn’t tell you.
2) Talk a little about the meditative state of writing poetry.

In the actual cold/hard act of writing, I have to be somewhere where there are relatively few demons (neutral territory) or at least they’re keeping quiet. Then I need the patience to focus and genuine will to create. That last one is probably the toughest and the most crucial.

3) What’s one of the saddest thing anyone’s ever said to you? Describe the scene in the third person.

She awoke one morning to an extensive late-night message from someone she hadn’t spoken to since childhood. It was exciting. It became clear after the fifth paragraph, however, that the entirety of the message was a deep and circular apology for not extending an invitation to a birthday party in third grade. Out of curiosity, she searched for said sender on facebook, only to find the bare informational details of sender’s life adequately depressing.

4) Name two poets I’ve probably never read but should (they don’t have to be published poets).

Dianne Seuss and Lidjia Dimkovska. If you know Dimkovska, go for S.E. Smith.

5) Talk a little about fables. The importance of wolves to modernity.

The wolf plays on our curiosity about the wildness that we’ve presumably left behind, or–as in the case of Red riding hood–about the possibility of a misperceived hidden danger within the self or another. Maybe it’s about balancing tameness with a more natural chaotic vitality. For Ginsberg, the wolf would probably signify a return to the pith of who you are, expressing yourself honestly, and being liberated by a certain ferocious energy.

6) Use your full name in an acrostic.

Easily or not, the
Mansion comes down
In the night–
Loud only to
Your neighbor’s corgis

Making sweet
Aortic
Expressions near the shed

Stifling what fear is
Traced into fire & the
Outline of hedges
Kindly swaying as
Embers sift like ghosts across the bobbing
Stars