Lynn Emanuel

Lynn Emanuel Poems

Lynn Emanuel Biography

Lynn Collins Emanuel (born March 14, 1949) is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections include Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook (University of Pittsburgh Press). She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for The Dig, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Parnassus, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Slate and Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry anthologies in 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999, and 2000, and the Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006). Emanuel is Director of the Writing Program, and Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also taught at the Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is married to the anthropologist, Jeffrey H. Schwartz, and they reside in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.)

The Best Poem Of Lynn Emanuel

Inventing Father In Las Vegas

If I could see nothing but the smoke
From the tip of his cigar, I would know everything
About the years before the war.
If his face were halved by shadow I would know
This was a street where an EATS sign trembled
And a Greek served coffee black as a dog's eye.
If I could see nothing but his wrist I would know
About the slot machine and I could reconstruct
The weak chin and ruin of his youth, the summer
My father was a gypsy with oiled hair sleeping
In a Murphy bed and practicing clairvoyance.
I could fill his vast Packard with showgirls
And keep him forever among the difficult buttons
Of the bodice, among the rustling of their names,
Miss Christina, Miss Lorraine.
I could put his money in my pocket
and wearing memory's black fedora
With the condoms hidden in the hatband
The damp cigar between my teeth,
I could become the young man who always got sentimental
About London especially in Las Vegas with its single bridge­-
So ridiculously tender--leaning across the river
To watch the starlight's soft explosions.
If I could trace the two veins that crossed
His temple, I would know what drove him
To this godforsaken place, I would keep him forever
Remote from war--like the come-hither tip of his lit cigar
Or the harvest moon, that gold planet, remote and pure
American.

Lynn Emanuel Comments