Emily Skillings Talks Dance, Writing Process, and the Nourishing Mist of John Ashbery

It's still National Poetry Month, you know. In honor of the April weather, Huffington Post interviewed Emily Skillings, the author of two chapbooks: Backchannel (Poor Claudia) and Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants (No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press). Jonathan Hobratsch asks Skillings about John Ashbery's influence, her dance work, her writing process, and more. Here's some:

Last year in an interview I asked John Ashbery to name some promising young poets. You were one of five names that he mentioned. Has Mr. Ashbery been an influence on you?

John Ashbery’s work is like this supportive mesh or nourishing mist that surrounds my poetry. It’s more a way of connecting sensibility to practice than a concrete poem-to-poem influence. Influence feels too direct, too storied a word. His poems have taught me how to connect seemingly disparate art forms, dictions, images and tones but most importantly they have underscored the importance of creating your own logic(s) and allowing others an entryway into them. An Ashbery poem captures this process of the many translations between sensation, thought, connotation and spoken/written language. One thing about poetry that obsesses me is how it creates a space where you are being spoken to, however directly or indirectly, and John’s poems have this feeling of direct/indirect address that captivates and opens possibilities. I’m so grateful for his poems. He’s also been incredibly generous with younger poets, and that has influenced my desire to support other writers.

What are your primary interests outside of poetry? How do you integrate these interests into your poetry?

I was trained as a dancer and I try to see modern dance performances as much as possible. Some of my favorite contemporary choreographers include: Alexandra Beller, Kathy Westwater, Bebe Miller, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Sarah A.O. Rosner, Miguel Gutierrez and Netta Yerushalmy. The last time I performed it was with The Commons Choir, an interdisciplinary activist group led by choreographer Daria Faïn and architect Robert Kocik. Their work investigates and reinvigorates the idea and space of “the commons” through language, sound, and movement.

I miss dancing a lot, and I haven’t been able to keep up with it since I’ve been in graduate school. When I was an aspiring professional dancer and performing I didn’t have the energy to write poems well. Now I feel the opposite is the case. But having been a dancer has made me a better poet, as I feel I am able to access sensation, gravity, gesture and space in a heightened way...

Read on at HuffPo. At top: Emily Skillings's Backchannel.