Poet in Person: Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

I personalized Google News for Dr. Ron Art to include poetry, and the New York Times headline caught my attention Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies at 57 (December 4th).  In particular, it was Pulitzer, Poet and 57 that prompted me to open the link.  I am a poet, I am 55, and I have imagined winning the Pulitzer Prize, since I discovered another such prize-winning John Ashbery in the late 1970s.  I loved reading about personal stories behind Emerson's book:

In an interview with PBS in 2006, Ms. Emerson said that writing “Late Wife” was a way to deal with her emotions about falling in love with a man whose beloved wife had died of lung cancer. She then looked back on her first marriage and found poetry in it, too. “I process the world through poetry,” she said.

Part of Ms. Emerson’s inspiration, as expressed in the poem “Artifact,” was seeing objects from her first marriage, to Jesse Andrews, a carpenter, and from her second, to Harry Kent Ippolito, a technical designer and musician. “When someone is missing, their possessions take on meaning,” she told PBS.

Then, I stumbled on Poets in Person Series by Cortland Review, and there was Emerson relating her down-to-earth, loving home and relationship with her husband: