The undeniable charm of Emily Skillings’ poetry is its brutal honesty. Her poems aren’t pretty, in the traditional way that a poem is pretty, but they mesmerize. She is imaginative and funny, playing with opposing themes of being dirty and trying to become clean.
“A lot of my poems have to do with being a female and being on the internet,” said the poet, who graduated Lang in 2010 with a BFA in dance and minor in poetry, during a Nov. 10 alumni reading at the college.
“That’s how my day is: dirty and clean,” added Skillings, who has written two chapbooks titled “Backchannel” and “Linneaus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants”, is now an MFA student at Columbia, and organizes twice yearly weeklong writers conferences with an organization called the Home School.
At the event, which was part poetry reading, part discussion, Skillings captivated the audience, bringing them to the edge of their seats. She brought waves of sadness, joy, and uncontrollable belly laughter as she read poems with titles like, I Love Wiping My Dirty Hands on Other People’s Things.
This excerpt from Skillings’ poem “Poem with Orpheus”, from her Chapbook “Backchannel” plays with the themes of dirtiness and cleanliness,
“A glitter splotch moves across my eye.
Bacteria raft?
I’ve been drinking too much possessed broth.
I pre-condition. I deflect an image
of the body as a series
of hermetically sealed plastic cubes
filled with sluggish wasps.”
“It’s not an everyday occurrence that you go to a poetry reading and you can’t stop laughing,” Kendall said after the event.
Skillings credits much of her success in writing to Lang, “Lang professors made me; they kept me on my toes.”
Skillings hails from Maine and said that her family had reservations about her attending Lang in the beginning. “I remember my mother was really upset,” Skillings said. “We went on the [Lang] tour and saw these flags that looked kind of run down, and I said, ‘No, that’s the style mom. It’s supposed to look urban.’”
Lang was the easy choice for Skillings.
“I just realized that [The New School] was the only place in New York City where I could dance and also take writing classes and read. It felt like the dream, to rush from dance rehearsal to a class on Soviet cinema. It was great to be doing everything I wanted, even if I didn’t know I wanted it at the time” Skillings said.
While studying at The New School, she found Belladonna, a “feminist avant-garde collective.” She quickly joined as an intern and has since climbed the ranks and is now a board member.
“Belladonna got the energizer bunny for an intern,” said the reading’s moderator, Elizabeth Kendall, who is an Associate Professor of Liberal & Literary Studies at Eugene Lang.
After the event, a few audience members discussed how they could tell that Skillings was a dancer simply from reading her poetry. One audience member commented on Skillings’ bodily awareness in her poetry, and how that leads to the easy assumption that Skillings is also a dancer.
Skillings said that in both dance and poetry she keeps in mind the terms, “Kinesphere”, which she defines as, “the area around your body” and proprioception, which is, “the body’s ability to tell where it is in space.”
Although she loves both poetry and dance, Skillings is wary of combining them.
“I’ve tried to choreograph poems, and it was really bad” she said.
Skillings hopes to one day write a book length poem. “I’ve been feeling the itch to write one,” she told the crowd.
This was the second alumni poet reading that has been hosted by the literary studies program. Kendall noted that the board voted unanimously to invite Skillings and that they couldn’t be prouder.
You can find Emily Skillings’ poetry here.