We Are All From Where We Are
Louisville poet Emma Aprile, winner of our inaugural Salvation South New Poets Prize, discusses her creative process, the landscapes that shape her work, and what it means to write from and for the South.
Emma Aprile. Kentucky poet. New Poets Prize.
I first met Emma Aprile after Salvation South published four of her poems two years ago.
As you look at our publication, I’d ask you to pay particular attention to our homepage. Each story has a label. This week, as our storytelling gets rolling, one of those labels says “Hope,” another “Humor” and still another “Family.”
To me, those labels are much more than “stickers” that identify what each story is about. To me, they represent qualities that define the American South as a region.
When a writer meets another writer through their work, the connection can be deep. That connection feels even deeper when a poet meets another poet through their work. You know the moves, the negotiations, the sacrifices poets make. You identify. You love. Perhaps you even hate because they can pull a move you struggle to make. Perhaps you chuckle to yourself for your own weird little reasons. And sometimes you find that you’re just bonded by the trauma that comes with being a poet. It’s all words. It’s only words. Every word. Poetry just hits differently for poets.
When I was asked if I would join two other poets (Jacqueline Allen Trimble and Annie Woodford, for whom I have the deepest respect) to judge the inaugural Salvation South New Poets Prize, I said yes, because honestly, how can one say no to anything Salvation South asks? I mean, they have given us so much. So, it was me, Jackie and Annie on a daunting quest to find the winner and two honorable mentions for this prize.
It was an awesome team, and we had a consensus winner, about whose work no deliberation was needed. All three of us independently picked entrant No. 6 from the thirty-seven poets who competed for the prize. When I found out later that No. 6 was none other than Emma Aprile, I was happy, but not all that surprised.
There is just something about Emma’s willingness to push the urgency of her poems with an understated but matter-of-fact voice that drives the whole thing. Take for instance the last stanza of her poem “No One Lives in That House Anymore” published in Salvation South in April of 2023:
Southern gothic is a setting, not a story.
Southern gothic is a setting, not a story.Like a breathless dream’s
unrehearsed actors, shoved onstage before sets rendered too finely
for our work, we wait for light to strike us. We struggle to recall
what words brought us to this lush place—vine-choked, boxwood
hedges looming—where we stand alone, scriptless & gasping,
hedges looming — where we stand alone, scriptless & gasping,our
pupils wide with dark.
There is just something about the effortless control she imposes in her poem “The Year of the Eclipse” published in Salvation South last April:
We cleaned our telescopes, aimed them behind us. Held our breath.
The Year of the Eclipse we called every year the worst year.
We badgered our imaginary gods like impatient children, asking,
Will it get any darker?
And there is something about the surprises her poems reveal to me as both reader and poet that leaves me in awe. Emma’s poem “The Patron Saint of Rust” is one of my favorites. It’s full of killer lines like “Well water tasted like peace, for a while” and “Left in piles, / the old maple’s leaves crumble & rot, / cooling air around them stinking like fire.”
So you see, I was a fan long before I knew who No. 6 was.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Emma, getting to know her and talking about growing up in the South, her work from the beginning to now, and what’s next for her in the not-so-distant future. And I am truly grateful for (all) the time we spent.
Emma Aprile. Kentucky poet. New Poets Prize.
Ray McManus: Where’d you grow up and what was it like?
Emma Aprile: Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s and 1980s. My parents’ families were both Catholic, but we didn’t practice and basically weren’t religious. My parents separated when I was seven or eight, and I split time between their houses for a number of years. My mom had gone back to school and was a graduate student in rhetoric and composition. To make ends meet, my mom rented a room to one of her friends. Her friend was in the English program with my mom, and she was always sending poems out. It was the ’70s, and there was cigarette smoke everywhere.
I found school confusing on many levels, but public school was always infinitely better than the year I spent in first grade at a Catholic school—not the best place for a kid who hated being in trouble and had no idea how to pay attention. The prayers to Mary were nice, but everything else was very scary. It’s not from a poem, it’s in a novel, but in Hogfather, Terry Pratchett writes that in adulthood at least “the world wasn’t full of arbitrary light and shade.” I have found arbitrary light and shade to be an enduringly accurate description of childhood, both in the abstract and of my own.
RM: Do you have any early memories of wanting to write poetry?
EA: If I’m honest, when I was young, I wanted to write novels just like the ones I loved to read. Ones with dragons, and spaceships, and big, sweeping adventures where everything turns out okay. When I did try to write some things in high school, I couldn’t even get the people across the room! What I could do was stare at details. I was a theatre arts major in college, and I took a creative writing class where I still couldn’t get characters from one place to another, but writing about the details of things helped me start to think about what I saw, what I felt—and also, I got to really look at language. My favorite plays were ones by Shakespeare and Euripides, and I think it was the sheer force of their overwhelming language that I loved.
“I would love to say that I sit down and write every day. I’d love to. But I’m working. ... I write stuff and think it’s great. Then I think it’s terrible. Then I put it away for ages, and then I try to revise it.”
Emma Aprile. Kentucky poet. New Poets Prize.
RM: What brought you to here?
EA: When I left theater work, my mom’s old friend, Aleda Shirley, was by then a published poet teaching in Jackson, Mississippi, and she told me I would not embarrass myself by applying to graduate school with my poems. And so, I did.
RM: Let’s talk a little about your process for writing poetry. You work and have a family, so when do you write and how?
EA: I stare out the window a lot. I spend a lot of time worrying about if what I am writing adds to a conversation. Does it do more than just say I’m worried and we’re all going to die. I would love to say that I sit down and write every day. I’d love to. But I’m working. This past year I’ve started using a little daily calendar as a prompt to try to get myself writing more consistently now that our kids are both out of the house. I write stuff and think it’s great. Then I think it’s terrible. Then I put it away for ages, and then I try to revise it. When I taught Intro to Creative Writing, I used to tell students that what they turned in had to do at least one thing that made it more than a journal entry, whether that was through form, rhetoric, or content. I still tell myself that all the time.
RM: What is the overall goal (for your poetry)?
EA: Sometimes when I look at a painting, or a scene in a movie, or hear (or read) a well-wrought line, or even a fantastic rhythm section riff, it just stops me for a moment. It maybe makes my chest tight or makes me a little dizzy, but for a moment, I’m not thinking or analyzing it, I’m just feeling that it’s somehow true. And maybe it stays with me, apropos of nothing obvious: We saw a fantastic Richard II a few years ago and sometimes one bit randomly runs through my head, “Let us sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.” Richard is a terrible person, so why does that bit stay with me? That’s the goal for my poetry. A moment or two of that, for the reader. If I’m lucky and do it well.
Emma Aprile. Kentucky poet. New Poets Prize.
RM: Who are some poets you look to and why?
EA: Well, Aleda Shirley, of course. She died in 2008, and I still miss her terribly. I studied with Peter Klappert and Susan Tichy, who are great writers and who taught me so much about reading and editing that I am still learning their lessons. I also studied with Carolyn Forché, whose writing I loved since before I thought I could write—and whose class in Poetry of Witness was and remains frighteningly relevant. A. E. Stallings weaves ancient history with present daily moments and expands my understanding of what poetry can encompass. Nikki Giovanni and Lucille Clifton were some of the first poets I read and heard—my mom had the 1976 Nikki Giovanni poetry album The Reason I Like Chocolate—and they continually teach me what poetry can do with voice and attention. There’s more—more poems, more writers, more work that I think sounds like poetry but technically isn’t—but that’s a start.
RM: Are there any poets you feel speak to an issue concerning your South?
EA: Two books from poets who grew up in Louisville stand out to me from the past couple of years: Jeremy Michael Clark’s The Trouble With Light and Joy Priest’s Horsepower. Their works both encompass that arbitrary light and shade of childhood, and they are unflinching as they look at the legacy of Louisville, its history, how it treats its people, its legacies of racism, classism, and economic disparity. Each time I read their poems, I’m struck by how entwined all those layers and histories are, even as the poems themselves focus on what may at first seem to be the small details of a life.
Hannah Drake is a poet and an activist here who is doing huge work in uncovering the histories of enslaved people that white people obliterated. Her poems are sweeping and important and are the calls to action and community that we need.
I recently read an excellent debut collection by Lauren K. Watel that wrestles with aging, and anger, and invisibility, and surfaces. She is based in Atlanta, and the work is not explicitly Southern, but makes me think of the idea of Southern-ness, in a way, in its navigation of how we see and how we are seen.
“Louisville is a small town masquerading as a city, or maybe vice versa. But our history and our problems are things the city, and the region, too often overlooks.”
RM: What role does poetry (or perhaps more specifically your poetry) play in understanding the South?
EA: Poetry lets me listen to other people. Good poetry peels back the veneer, even as it examines the surface. The South is, like many places, obsessed with surfaces—even my grandfather was apparently terrified to tell his Catholic, Italian immigrant parents that he wanted to marry a Catholic whose family was not from Italy. I’m nosy, and I want to hear about other people’s worlds, how their surfaces work with their depths, and how they are different than they may appear.
I hope my poetry does the same for other readers. I mainly write to figure out how to see things more clearly, even if it’s just how to live another day with the knowledge of our own mortality. I don’t think of myself as officially Southern (I am terrible at assuming I’m qualified to be a part of anything at all), but the longer I go on, the more I look at my family, the city around me, the more I watch my kids head out into the world, the more I think I probably am. We are all from where we are, even if we don’t often feel like it.
RM: How do you feel about being a Southerner: proud, ashamed, both, otherwise?
EA: Both? There’s a lot I love about where I’m from—Louisville is a small town masquerading as a city, or maybe vice versa. We are obsessed with food. But our history and our problems are things the city, and the region, too often overlooks—for instance, we have appalling food deserts, even as we have a fantastic restaurant scene. Why on Earth can’t we have both plenty of grocery stores all over the city and plenty of restaurants? Sometimes it’s hard to see the sea we swim in.
RM: What are some new projects you are working on?
EA: It’s old, but I am tackling it again trying to figure out how to write about a piece of family history that puzzles and fascinates me. My great-great-grandfather came over from Sicily, brought his kids, and then the story goes that he ultimately chose to go home to Sicily—without them! How did he make those decisions? How did they end up here, in what must have felt like the middle of nowhere? How did leaving his kids feel like the next right decision? My hope is that I can write about it enough to understand why that little twist compels me, and that there is a way to look at it that invites a new understanding, that makes it worth looking at for other readers, too.
Ray McManus is the author of five collections of poetry: The Last Saturday in America (Hub City Press, 2024), the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award-winning Punch (Hub City, 2014), Red Dirt Jesus (Marick Press, 2011), Left Behind (Stepping Stones Press, 2008), and Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born(USC Press, 2007). His poems and prose have appeared in many journals and anthologies.
