Emily Strauss - Second Place Winner
Emily Strauss
Since Emily was first introduced to poetry in high school through Robinson Jeffers she has developed her writing voice and she has tried to live alertly, so as to speak of actual life, not ideal life-- the concrete rather than the abstract. Her work is the result of personal experience and a product of its historic times. She feels lucky to have lived mostly in peace and wholeness.
The natural world is usually her model or framework. Emily’s theme is often the tension between nature and humanity, the understanding of man's machinations as reflected in the world. She finds herself returning consistently to the red desert world of the American West-- focusing on the particulars of rock and geological forces-- the silence of the landscape, the solitude of the observer. Emily tries to make the sensory life of the earth breathe through her poems by using highly concrete images.
Ideally, Emily wants her poetry to reflect the state that characterizes reality at a level that language cannot reach. Nature starts out from darkness and nothingness to ultimately reveal the loneliness of place and relationships. Poetry can illuminate the darkness of the gaps between humans. Listening to the land, we remove that darkness and know ourselves more clearly; or by reading poetry, since poetry should be experience distilled to a crystalline drop.
Emily understands that her task as poet is to concentrate on the natural images she observes closely and to capture the ideas that those images release to her.
Read Emily's prize-winning poetry:
Click here to read more of Emily's poetry.