Emari DiGiorgio
Emari DiGiorgio is the author of two poetry collections, Girl Torpedo, winner of the Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. She is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, the NJ Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet. She hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.
Most recently, she’s read in the Wild & Precious Reading Series, Get Fresh Books Instagram Series, and Murphy Writing's Virtual Friday Night Series, and will soon be hosting a workshop for Wild & Precious.
We first met Emari and experienced her poetry several years ago at Peter Murphy’s Winter Poetry and Prose Get-a-way where she did readings and facilitated poetry writing workshops. We were immediately taken by her powerful use of accessible and multifaceted language.
RHR: Tell us about your writing process.
Emari DiGiorgio: These days, I am not writing poems as often as I might like. I’m the grievance officer of my union, and I’m running first-grade-at-home during quarantine. I will carry an idea or image in my head for a few days. Sometimes I’ll jot a few key phrases or images in the Notes section of my phone and look up things that might inform the idea, such as which kinds of snakes might have lived in ancient Mesopotamia or how we know dark matter exists. Then, I will actually block two hours on my calendar and shut my office door. My daughter calls this my “independent work,” since I am not teaching or in a Zoom meeting.
In that two-hour block, I’ll start with a handwritten draft because I’m less likely to censor myself, to tell myself that an idea or image is silly or wrong. This will usually be in a prose block. I’m just trying to get the material I’ve been accumulating out. I’ll write until I feel like I have nothing else to say and then try to write a little more. Then, I’ll read through and identify the best images and the strongest music in the draft. I’ll type these into a Word document. Sometimes I’ll write something entirely new with the four or five lines I’ve plucked; other times, the poem will be a collage of that original draft, pulling lines from throughout. I rarely arrive at a full draft in my two-hour block, but the progress of having something on the page will inspire me to block another two hours later in the week.
Sometimes poems take me many, many drafts. I like order and control, and poems are wild. The sooner I can abandon what I think a poem is about, the sooner I will discover what it’s actually about.
RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
Emari DiGiorgio: When I was a graduate student, I was fortunate to study with Marie Howe. Once in office hours, she asked me, “Where is the woman in these poems?” I was confused; there were women in my poems. However, she was asking me something else. She was asking me to own the voices and stories on the page. It was an invitation to value my story and perspective, to write it unapologetically.
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?
Emari DiGiorgio: I am haunted by ideas, but I hunt for an entry into the idea. These days, I’m trying to write into white complicity. But why do I need/want to write about this and what might I discover about myself and whiteness? How can I engage with this idea without making it a story about white tears? Recently, I was taking an online writing class that explored form–traditional and invented–with Stephanie Cawley (she’s amazing), and one of our assignments was to pick a “borrowed form.” I’ve spent so much time reading recipes trying to mix-up our quarantine kitchen that I was drawn to borrow from the recipe form, and suddenly, I knew exactly how to enter an idea I’ve been carrying for months: Assimilation (Italian Style). Each previous time I tried to write about the conscious and unconscious ways that Italian Americans traded their culture and roots to earn their whiteness, I couldn’t find a poem, just an idea. But as a recipe, something integral to my identity as an Italian-American, I found an entry to explore the complexities of assimilation.
RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?
Emari DiGiorgio: When I used to play softball, I knew as soon as my bat made contact with the ball if I’d driven it safely into the outfield. Everything in my body felt lined up–feet pivoting, hips turning, arms fully extended. Something similar happens when a poem has reached its end. Everything feels lined up–the rhythms of the poem are linked to the emotional/narrative arc, the line breaks create tension or surprise, and the images feel essential. There’s a little magic in reading it.
RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?
Emari DiGiorgio: It’s interesting to modify “poem” with “successful.” Perhaps because “success” feels goal-oriented, or in our culture, connected to money or acclaim. I’ve heard Gregory Pardlo talk about how the best poems resonate in the head, heart, and body, as in we experience them intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. Are all poems meant to be experienced this way? I’m not sure. I would say that a successful poem arrives at its form and images so that they seem inseparable, that it had to be written exactly this way. Though truly, if someone stays after a reading or contacts me via email or social media to tell me how much one of my poems affected them, I would say that poem was successful because it bridged the shared experiences of strangers.
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Read Emari DiGiorgio’s poem, "Punchline" which originally appeared in the Southern Humanities Review (Volume 50.1&2) and was awarded the 2016 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. It was subsequently published in her poetry collection, Girl Torpedo.
Punchline
The joke wishes it wasn’t the joke.
It calls a helpline—the joke wants to punch
a bullet through its brow, and it’s hard for the operator
to talk the joke down. She says, help is on the way.
No, don’t send the cops. But it’s too late. The joke
doesn’t have enough pills or a tongue to swallow them.
The joke doesn’t have knees to pray. A black man
and a Hispanic are riding in a car. Leave it there.
Leave them in the Sentra at the QuikChek. Let them
drop off their kids at school. Let the cops
bust down the joke’s door. Who’s driving?
Who the fuck is driving this joke?
What a relief.
The black man and the Hispanic are both breathing, cuffed
upright in the back of a cruiser. No blood on the cop’s hands.
Let’s make you the cop. Let’s make you the law.
What sound does a body make when it’s in a chokehold?
A black cop is driving his Hispanic partner. A white cop
is driving himself crazy. He’s tired of telling the same group
of young men to stop loitering on the platform. Every night,
just milling around, blocking people, pushing, shoving
each other, a game, intimidating passengers.
Today you’re the black man. You’ve read the script, memorized
your lines, Yes, officer, perfected the least intimidating pitch,
a walk that won’t draw attention, should you enter
a convenience store, a bank.
The car is driving itself. The car is the joke.
The tires smoke and the brakes sink to the floorboard.
Two cops are in a car—this one isn’t a joke (turns out
the first one wasn’t either)—parked, gunned down.
As if these young men’s deaths will bring another
back to his children. Some illogical exchange
fallen angels run.
A black car, driving rain,
eye whites, night, the drawbridge of gritted teeth opening,
no such thing as bulletproof words, floodlight, that
deer stare, the moment before a buck turns, threatened,
having done nothing.
This joke is a loaded Glock 19.
Between box spring and mattress, in the glove box.
A siren wails. Two cops sit in a car. Two cops die in a car.
This isn’t a joke. This was supposed to be a joke.
We were supposed to laugh and say, Oh, that’s not right,
and shake our heads and go on with our days, all of us--
black man, Hispanic, cop, you, reader, sitting there
waiting for the punch line, the big haha aha.
Maybe you’re saying, No, that’s not funny, or
It’s true, you know. Maybe you’re telling the joke.
When the cops arrive the joke is sobbing. The joke asks
to be locked up. It won’t tell itself anymore. It wants
a new punch line. It wants to reform itself, to be
elegy for cop, black man, his panic.
~ fini ~