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Right before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Lynn Emanuel went to a gallery in New York. A painting by English artist Rachel Whiteread drew her attention. Ostensibly, it seemed to be merely a swath of white canvas.
But when Emanuel read the painting’s description, she realized it was so much more. A sense, a feeling that Whiteread’s work engendered, reverberated for Emanuel when the pandemic started to shut down the world.
“She was telling us that even our memories have been lost,” Emanuel tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “All that you see there is this white block. There’s no detail. There’s nothing. You wouldn’t even know it was the negative space under her dining table unless you read about it.”
She adds that “it was really the pandemic” that wrote her latest collection Transcript of the Disappearance Exact and Diminishing, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
“It doesn’t have the feel that a lot of my other books do. Loss is almost too gentle a word. It was the feeling that things were going extinct,” she says.
Emanuel will appear on Thu., Sept. 28 in conversation with Maggie Anderson as part of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures Made Local series.
Transcript is arguably Emanuel’s most autobiographical poetry collection. A Shadyside resident and Pitt professor emerita, her prior releases include Hotel Fiesta, Noose and Hook, and Then, Suddenly.
There’s a different tenor present in some of Emanuel’s new poems. “Notably Once a Day” has a subtle weariness: Once a day I try to take my body/off its leash, unchain it from the desk/ where it waits and labors, where it sits/its knees bandaged tight in the tourniquets/of ache.
Emanuel notes that her previous work had a “joyousness with the language, and also a kind of playfulness.” But writing the poems in the new collection was “more of a struggle,” she says.
“At the beginning of the pandemic it was really easy for me to write,” Emanuel explains. “But that washed away. It became difficult. Sometimes in an interesting way, sometimes in a not-so-interesting way.”
What eventually emerged were more personal poems, especially in the second section of the book. Emanuel plumbs childhood memories of time spent with relatives in Ely, Nevada during the 1950s. Poems such as “My American Self-Portrait” and “Hard-Boiled Elegy” have a gritty, raw tenor, as Emanuel’s senses were clearly sharpened by the southwest landscape and the area’s proximity to nuclear testing.
“At night, it was utterly dark,” Emanuel says. “Even during the day, it was beautiful, but it was kind of featureless. … There was a copper mine near where I lived for a while that was so big, that at that time, aside from the Great Wall in China, it was the only thing that could be seen from space. There was an actual emptiness in that landscape, and then suddenly came the technology and industry of the bomb. … I didn’t see the bomb, but it haunted that landscape.”
There also are numerous references to noir throughout the collection, directly in “My early poems were filmic like a `B’ movie, I have always loved the unassuming objects of noir” and “How it Was with Us,” which features the line: At night from the green radiance of our radio – Eartha Kitt’s voice, rough and slow, like a prisoner with a wire sawing into an iron bar. Emanuel cites a line by Pittsburgh-based writer Catherine Gammon, “This wasn’t noir, this was childhood,” as emblematic of how she approached writing about that period of her life.
“And that’s what is for me so compelling about noir,” Emanuel says. “It was in some ways completely accurate. … There are moments when I’m watching a noir film and it’s in a little hotel room, and I know how that smells. Noir was violent. Bombs were being tested, World War II wasn’t that far away, it was compelling and terribly frightening.”
Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures presents Lynn Emanuel in conversation with Maggie Anderson. 6 p.m. Thu., Sept. 28. Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Free. Registration required. pittsburghlectures.org
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2023.
