Emily Warn is an American poet. She was born in San Francisco, grew up in Michigan, and was educated at Kalamazoo College, the University of Washington, and Stanford University. She moved to the Pacific Northwest 1978 to work for North Cascades National Park, and a year later moved to Seattle where she has lived, more or less ever since.[1]
Her essays and poems have appeared in Poetry, Parabola, The Seattle Times, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, BookForum, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Writer's Almanac.[2] She has taught creative writing or served as writer-in-residence at many schools and arts centers, including Lynchburg College in Virginia, The Bush School in Seattle, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, and Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.[1]
Her most recent book of poetry, Shadow Architect (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), is an exploration of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet — the alef-beit — in which she considers the limits and generative power of language. Within the set boundaries of this alphabet, Warn unites her own distinctly American poetics with the language of sacred texts and commentaries.[3]
She currently divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington.
With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps,
with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash,
I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You.
...
To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
...
The King asks, "Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?"
The Seer answers, "Emptiness, without holiness."
...
Hope fills me this morning as I fashion letters
into a tree that sighs, that stays put yet moves,
reaching to its limits, swaying and settling,
...
You slow down to watch cumulus clouds stream across the
sky. You choose a more circuitous route home and pass a
tree with white bags tied around random apples. The apples
...