New Podcast: Poetry & Pedagogy with Professor Emily Skillings

 

Professor Emily Skillings' second poetry collection Tantrums in Air is the focus of a new audio podcast available here.

“Does the poet know? Or was it maybe her idea?”

So wonders an anonymous Amazon reviewer of Professor Emily Skillings’ first book, now re-printed almost verbatim in Professor Skilling’s second poetry collection, Tantrums in Air.

I had the chance to hear Professor Skillings read the poem, titled “A potentially good Book Soaked in Offensive Perfume - ★☆☆☆☆,” as part of a larger discussion about her work and her new residency at Villanova.

Having worked previously as an adjunct professor in the New York area, Professor Skillings joined the English department at Villanova this fall. “Most semesters I was teaching at three different schools at the same time, so it’s really wonderful to have a home base,” Professor Skillings says. 

Given the recent 100 year celebration of Langston Hughes “The Weary Blues” event, which Professor Skillings co-hosted alongside Professor Kamran Javadizadeh, I asked Professor Skillings how the poetry landscape has changed 100 years later and what place do poems have in the 21st century. “There’s something poems do to our attention as humans that I think is really valuable,” she says. “Being able to look at this small concrete image, or being able to dwell inside something mundane and training your attention on those things is really important.” For Professor Skillings, poems offer a freedom not found to other types of artists: “I don’t have to care about marketability as much and [I’m] able to take risks in this way and to be sloppy. I’m always telling my students to be sloppy and cast a wide net.”

Speaking of casting a wide net, the poems collected in Tantrum in Air defy categorization, ranging from sonnets to haikus to prose poems. For Professor Skillings, form is not restrictive but stimulating: “What choosing a form can do is it can free up something in your subconscious…all of sudden you say something to fill the constraints of the form that you wouldn’t normally say,” she says. 

Form might even take the form of found poetry, as in the case of the aforementioned amazon review repurposed as a poem. Professor Skillings told me about the origin of the poem, written for the release of her first book, Fort Not. “I went onto Amazon to see what people were saying about my book and I was scrolling down and I saw this one star review and my heart just sank,” she says. “But as I read it, I was just mesmerized by the language…and I just fell in love with it as a poem.” 

Professor Skillings went on to read a series of sonnets from which Tantrums in Air takes its title. One of the sonnets, which references the first recorded use of the word “tantrum” in the English language, itself acts something like a tantrum, Professor Skillings says. 

We then went on to talk about her teaching style and what a poetry class with her looks like. “I like to teach classes that are just as invested in the process of writing as the products of writing,” she says. “I feel like building a poetic practice is important, whatever that looks like.” Professor Skillings’ students study poems from both canonical and contemporary poems; students also create their own printed collection of poems in the form of what is called a chapbook. Professor Skillings’ students emerge well-versed in a variety of poetic styles.“I’m never gonna uphold one form of poetry over another,” Professor Skillings says.

I concluded our talk by asking Professor Skillings about her favorite poets. Among them: Marianne Moore, Lucille Clifton, and Emily Dickinson.

Professor Skillings is currently working on a book-length poem that is a revisionist take on “Pearl,” a classic medieval poem. Her poetry collections are available in some book stores, and, of course, on Amazon. 

Listen to our full conversation here!

    By Nikola Stojcic, MA ‘28