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THE WRITINGS OF EMILIE GLEN 4: POEMS FROM MANUSCRIPTS.

This fourth and final volume collects all the unpublished manuscripts left by New York poet Emilie Glen. These 180 poems, lyric and narrative, far from being the "bottom drawer" of the poet's work, contain the same urban savor as her longer works. Some of these poems were read by the poet repeatedly at the poetry salon she ran in Greenwich Village, and prior to that, at the salon she ran at her high-rise apartment on the Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s. As always, her most engaging poems are miniature short stories, all set against a noir Manhattan that includes both shocking murders as well as moments of unexpected beauty among fire escapes, trash cans, alley cats, and the migratory birds in Central Park. The book includes several surprisingly experimental works and a true account of a horrifying psychopath who ran a Greenwich Village coffee house.

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FROM THE FOREWORD BY BRETT RUTHERFORD

The poems from her Greenwich Village years that are personal, depict tenement life from the vantage of her fifth-floor walkup (bathroom in the hall), where she moved to be near her troubled, alcoholic daughter, and where she raised her grandson as a single parent. She finds beauty amid the fire escapes and limited vistas, writes sadly about the death of her daughter, and celebrates trips to Coney Island with her grandson. The poem, “Fridge Saga,” was a delight to hear, and proof that she bore her tenement burden with good cheer.

The poems from Columbia Street on the Lower East Side pre-date the move to the West Village, and see New York from the rooftops. There, she still had her piano, and ventured forth to play in cafés. Emilie had related to me, in horror, the time she spent working at one coffee house run by a flamenco player. In 1967, she published a poem, “Shadowed Corner” (see Volume 2), about the owner being stalked by a death vendetta. Among Emilie’s papers I found a longer poem, describing the women in the café, so terrified of the crazed owner that they are considering poisoning him. It is one of the most intense and personal of all her poems, clearly written in present-tense terror. On inspection of the manuscript, I discovered that it was copied from a mimeographed page, much like one of her early hand-made chapbooks. It is possible that Emilie published this and withdrew it, as it does not appear in any of the chapbooks gathered in Volume 1. She might have withdrawn the work under threat. The poem sees day again here, with its original title, “Register His Hands, He’s A Killer.”

While most poets write much, maybe too much, about the literary life, Emilie seldom does so. She doesn’t gossip about other poets. She doesn’t peddle manifestos. And she doesn’t complain about rejections and the dismal return on investment of the poetic life. One atypical, wry poem, “Crack Our Code,” makes fun of bizarre poetry journal titles. The most surprising poem in the book, to me, is “Middle Of,” an experiment in stream-of-consciousness.

The book could be read as a journal or scrapbook of its time and place, and Glen does not shy away from recounting lurid crimes, such as a murder inside the Metropolitan Opera House. She recoils from environmental catastrophes such as Three Mile Island and the madness of wars and politics, but she is not inherently a social poet. She is aloof, an ashcan painter among poets. In the last years, her poems of personal loss nearly overwhelmed her journalistic instinct, but I think the eternal child still emerges under it all.

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Published March 2017. 152 pages, illustrated. The 228th publication of The Poet's Press. 6 x 9 inches, paperback. ISBN 978-0922558872. $14.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon. Or, CLICK HERE to purchase the PDF ebook for $2.00 from Payhip.

Version 24 February 24, 2024