Emma Young’s precisely detailed poetry is born from broad feelings. Her poems come from the specific softness of summer dusk, from the heartbreaking tenderness of a home town, from the porous release of touching ones toes.
“I’ve always said my goal in writing is that though I do use specifics, I would love it if the people who were reading them could understand it on the level of their experience,” she said.
Ms. Young’s first collection of poetry, Book To Share, has just been published by Two Plum Press, an independent publishing house located in Portland, Oregon. Book to Share is a slim volume with six sections arranged in (mostly) chronological order. To fill it, Ms. Young combed through poems from her self-published chapbooks and her archives of unpublished works. Some of the poems were written this year while others date back a decade. The process was a bit like time-travel.
“It was like revisiting the person who wrote it,” she said.
Ms. Young, 30, is currently the poet laureate of West Tisbury, a post she began in April of 2015. She is also a letterpress printer and graphic designer. For the chapbooks, she would create small books for a collection of six to ten poems, all completed during what she calls a cycle. A cycle is usually not a measure of time but rather a feeling, mood or moment. Early evening was the inspiration behind her chapbook Goodnights. “They were poems written in that dusk space of the day,” she said. “It was mostly written in the summer, where you have these big busy days, the Island is very manic, it’s hot, and there’s that beautiful twilight where it’s not dark yet, but everything is slowing down.” She had given a copy of Goodnights to Andrew Barton who runs Two Plum Press when he was in New England. After reading the poems, Mr. Barton suggested publishing a collection, and Book to Share was born. Though many of the poems can be found in Ms. Young’s chapbooks, the collection also gives life to poems that were previously unseen.
“Which was actually really important to me, because with writing, if it doesn’t get published or shared, it disappears,” Ms. Young said.
Much of Ms. Young’s life deals with the tangible. As art director of Edible Vineyard, Ms. Young’s designs are printed on magazine pages. She also creates invitations, stationery and business cards with her letterpress. Her designs come alive in cookbooks and logos. Outside of art, she works the land at her small family farm, gathering eggs and nurturing onions, shallots and garlic out of the ground. But her true medium is a bit more ephemeral. And yet it was poetry that opened the door to her other vocations.
“I wouldn’t do graphic design or printing at all if I hadn’t been a writer or poet since I was young,” she said. “It was the poetry that led me to the graphic arts.”
She discovered poetry in elementary school during a routine poetry unit with fourth grade teacher Jill Lane. She took to it immediately. A small group from the class would meet at night to work on poetry prompts such as a bleached white conch shell.
“One of my hits was a poem called Green, it was all about the color green, and I feel like I’m still writing the same poetry basically, ” she said.
Some poems in Book to Share are from a yet unfinished chapbook titled Adamantine. She came across the word in Buddhist texts where it describes the unchanging and unbreakable spirit in each individual.
“I realized it’s the hardest thing in the world to write about that, because it’s not what your favorite color is, or where you are, or what your doing, or what you’re seeing — the physical things that help us place ourselves in the world — but what is it about each of us that is adamantine.”
Poems come to her in bits and pieces but always in moods. A line may come when learning to surf on the waves of Squibnocket, while pulling up an onion at her family farm, while out walking. There is no sitting down and making a poem come out. Three months may yield six good poems, but she’s never thought of poetry as work. It’s expression and art. And something that she always does. Though the poems come to her occasionally, she writes everyday.
“Writing is a very consistent part of my life, but the poems are very specifics moments that I can’t force,” she said
She journals in long-form, writes prose and pens letters regularly. She corresponds with friends scattered about the country, family and with a great-aunt who endlessly supports and inspires her.
Ms. Young feels bolstered by the creative community on the Vineyard. From her group of friends who workshop poetry together, to the library that stocked her chapbooks. Living a creative life takes some bravery, she admits, but for her, writing doesn’t take much.
“There has never been any fear involved with poetry,” she said.
Book to Share is available at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore and online at twoplumpress.com/book-to-share.
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