Whether it’s pairing up with her mother, Julie Andrews, on over 30 children’s books; co-founding the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor; sharing her life with her husband, director Stephen Hamilton; teaching on the faculty of Stony Brook Southampton; or a plethora of other examples where she has collaborated, contributed, and committed herself to the Greater Good, “team player” is probably the best archetypal adage for my stepsister — author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton.
But with her latest venture, a small but poignant book of poetry, “Door to Door,” Emma has walked off the ledge of partnership and landed squarely on her own two feet — in fact, one of her poems already took first place in the prestigious Bridport Prize literary competition.
Owning up to a lifelong case of imposter syndrome, Emma took time to sit down and bare her heart on September 13, the day that her book of poetry was published.
What turned your head to poetry?
Actually, I started out with poetry before anything else. In my teens and twenties, while trying to be an actor in New York, the things that I would write for my own amusement were always poems. Usually doggerel, in the family tradition, because my father, Tony Walton, wrote a lot of doggerel, and that was sort of what I was raised on. “The King’s Breakfast” kind of stuff.
“I do want a little bit of…”
“…butter for my bread,” exactly. I remember submitting to agents and trying to get them published as children’s books. Nothing ever happened with that, but I just kept writing. When I was a kid, it was A. A. Milne, Shel Silverstein, Spike Milligan, all of that. Now as an adult, it’s Mary Oliver and Billy Collins and those kinds of poets.
So what happened?
In 2009, our publisher, Little Brown, asked my mom and I if we would consider curating an anthology of poems for children, and we did, and I had an absolute blast. I read thousands upon thousands of already-published poems, trying to whittle it down. And we had sections, sections of poems about animals, and poems about nature, and poems about going to sleep and things like that. I ended up including a couple of my own poems in that anthology, and also my mom’s poems as well. And that kind of reawakened my passion, and it was around then that I decided to pursue my MFA at Stony Brook Southampton.
There I was, writing and teaching children’s literature and all of that in this MFA program, but I had no degree. When I signed up to do my MFA, it was largely because of a really bad case of imposter syndrome. I was like, “I really need to do something about this imposter syndrome. I’m going to see if I can get my own degree.”
I signed up for my MFA and I did it one course per semester, because there was a United University Professional’s tuition waiver that allowed you to take one complimentary course per semester. But accidentally the very first class I took was a poetry workshop with former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. [Laughs.]
I had signed up for a poetry workshop with Julie Sheehan, who ended up being my thesis advisor. But for whatever reason, Julie’s class didn’t run and so they put me in Billy Collins’s class and I was totally terrified. And the first poem of mine he read in class, his first words were, “I don’t think this is a poem.”
That must’ve scared the shit out of you.
Totally wrecked me, but here I am 11 years later and he was my second reader for my thesis, and he is now a good friend.
But anyway, after that class with him, I realized, “Okay, now I really love poetry.” And because my MFA was for me, because I did it for me to get over this imposter syndrome, I wanted to do something that I loved that was not about commercialism, not about, “Maybe I can use this and get published, or maybe I can figure a way to fit this into my professional writing life.” So I had no expectation of doing anything with it.
You write in the voice of several historical figures, including your own maternal great-grandfather. How did that come about?
So now dissolve, I’m in poetry workshop with Julie at the MFA and we are reading Marilyn Nelson, who is a really extraordinarily exquisite poet who wrote a short poetry collection called “Fortune’s Bones.” It’s about a real-life person named Fortune, who was a slave in Connecticut, in service to a doctor. When Fortune died, the doctor dissected him and kept his bones as a teaching tool. And Fortune’s wife, who was still alive, had to go into the office every day and dust her dead husband’s bones.
Oh God. How horrible.
I know. “Fortune’s Bones” is a requiem. It’s a series of poems, and each one is written in the voice of a different person. The first is in the voice of the wife, and she talks about going in and cleaning his hands, the same hands that caressed me, and so forth. And then the next voice is the doctor and he talks about dissecting Fortune, and then of course it ends with Fortune’s voice. I was so blown away by this and then Marilyn came to talk to the class and I got to meet her. I was just mesmerized.
And then Julie Sheehan, as a result, gave us this exercise to write a poem in the voice of a historical figure. And it could be a famous person or it could be just someone we knew of. I chose Prentice Mulford, who is buried in Oakland Cemetery and was one of the founders of the New Thought Movement. Just a fascinating character. And my great-grandfather, who was a pitman in a coal mine in Northern England, but also sold his poems door to door. Hence the title.
How is the book structured?
The way it’s described is it’s a book-length sonnet. So it’s structured in five parts, like a sonnet, like four stanzas and a rhyming couplet at the end. And it generally progresses through my life. Part one is called Homeland and those are all poems about my origins. Generally speaking, in a sonnet, the third section is a B section that kind of departs from the others in style or tone or focus or whatever. So, that’s what the Prentice Mulford poems are. Most of the poems in the book are just straightforward autobiographical poems, but there’s this B section that’s just all Prentice Mulford poems, about living in a swamp in New Jersey and commuting to his job in the city in the late 1800s. Just a little insertion of randomness. And then there are two rhyming couplet type poems at the end.
What was the publication process like?
Julie Sheehan, my advisor, said, “Poets send poems to poetry contests, and you should really send a couple of your poems out to poetry contests.” So I was doing that. And at the same time, mom and I were having weekly meetings with with our management team and my agent, Janine Kamouh, a fairly new children’s lit agent at William Morris said, “I want to see your poems.” That imposter syndrome really kicked in, but I sent them to her. She wrote back and said, “I think I know an editor who might be interested, this editor at Andrews McMeel, she publishes Rupi Kaur.” And Rupi Kaur is a poet that I totally love and admire. So I was like, “Really? You would submit my poetry to the editor who publishes Rupi Kaur? Oh my God.” And she did and they said we want it. So it was one shot across the bow from an agent who doesn’t usually represent poetry.
Tell me about the Bridport Prize.
Well, that’s the other thing that was amazing. As Julie told me, I did send out some poems to some different contests and one of them was to the Bridport International Prize.
I sent this poem called “Over the Tannoy” specifically because the poem is a dialogue between me and my great-grandfather and it’s set up with his words that he actually wrote, because he was a poet too. Although it’s not one of his poems. It’s his words in one column, and my response in another column, and then if you read them across, they become another poem altogether.
And I sent that one, not only because it was British in terms of its roots, but because the poetry judge, Raymond Antrobus, was born hearing impaired. And he had specifically requested poems that had visual interest on the page as well as auditory interest.
So then I forgot that I had sent it out all of these poems. [Laughs.] And then I started getting these phone calls on my phone from a UK number. I thought, “Who is calling me from England? I don’t recognize this number.” It turned out I had won first place. It got published in their Bridport Prize anthology, that poem.
Are you working on more poems now? I would think you would do a poem about today, about the fact that your poetry book is being published. It’s very poetic.
I should. It is poetic justice of some sort.
If you ground yourself right now, what are you feeling? I mean, it’s your publication day — there’s a reading and a booksigning party, for you, alone. This is really different.
I would say I’m feeling pretty naked, vulnerable, because this is just me. There’s nobody else that I can buddy up with or hide behind. And also a lot of the poems are very autobiographical. This is really just bearing my heart and my thought process. And I still have a lot of imposter syndrome, even though I now do have my MFA. I still am like, who am I to call myself a poet?
Well, that has to stop today.
I know. I know, but that’s mostly what I feel. It’s a little bit like I’m showing my soft belly to the world.
It’s a very nice belly. Lucky world.
[Laughs.] Thank you.For more, visit emmawaltonhamilton.com.
