Food, Drink & Poetry: Emily O’Neill in Conversation with David Nilsen
David: In A Falling Knife Has No Handle, you use food and drink as a prism through which to look at other themes in life. Tell me how this concept came about and how the book developed.
Emily: I’ve been working in restaurants most of my life, so it’s always been a vocabulary I’m familiar with. A lot of life takes place in restaurants. Weddings and birthdays and big events for people. When you’re watching that take place from the other side, it’s a really interesting lens into other people’s lives, especially people with different experiences than yours. The book itself started as a series of letters to someone I had just recently started dating who was also deeply entrenched in that world. The beginning of the relationship was very exciting in terms of language for me because I had never been in a relationship with someone I could share that part of my world with. So there was a lot of delight in playing with that language and using it to talk with someone who would understand what I meant.
David: Is most of the book autobiographical, or were you creating from what you were seeing other people dealing with in those restaurant and bar settings and creating small scenes from that?
Emily: I think there’s a lot of both. I definitely use my own experience as the seed of most poems I write. Empathy is required if you’re going to be good at waiting on people, and you have to imagine yourself in their lives reflexively to do your job well. I was taking on a lot of emotional content on a daily basis at work, and I think a lot of that did influence how poems moved, or at least made me think about experiences in my own life that I wanted to write about. It was collaborative with the environment.
David: There’s an old-school cliche of the bartender as ad hoc therapist. Do you find yourself playing that role for people?
Emily: Oh, definitely. People go to bars because they want companionship, and it’s a shared space where people kind of have to talk to you. You never know where a person is coming from. You’re only seeing them between the parentheses of when they walk in the front door and when they pay their check and leave. It’s tough to judge how someone behaves in that space, because they’re there for a reason. Maybe they need a therapist and can’t afford one, but a Bud Light costs $3.75.
David: In addition to literary reviews, I’m also a food and beer journalist. One of the things I find interesting about the field is the way that flavor and aroma can interact so strongly with our memories and emotions.
Emily: Absolutely. I grew up in — I won’t say a super poor family — but we definitely didn’t have a lot of money or high culinary experiences. My grandmother cooked for us everyday, so my vocabulary of smells and sensations and the tactile experience of food is really rooted in comfort food. I think the reason the book was able to happen for me was that I didn’t really start having fine dining experiences until I had spent so long watching other people having fine dining experiences. I know all the nuts and bolts of this, so I’m used to associating this smell with something needing to be run to the table. It’s interesting to see those things from both sides. When I was sitting at a meal with something I was familiar with as a server or a bartender, I couldn’t help but see the mechanisms that brought those things to the table. I think those memories definitely tied into the work of food in my childhood and thinking about where food comes from and who is responsible for nourishing people both emotionally and physically. A lot of the sights and smells and tactile experiences of food are really emotional for me for that reason.
David: In the poem “Are You in the Weeds,” you have the lines, “I bake potatoes twice & they taste / like your mother is still / alive & full of salt.” That was a great example.
Emily: When you cook for someone, you never really know what their memories are of a dish unless they tell you. The history people have with a food is always so layered that it was exciting to dig into those layers and think, for example, how many different kinds of macaroni and cheese I’ve had. How many versions of this grape have I experienced as a wine? How many different drinks have I had in this room? You can see all the slides stacked up into the past.
David: We all experience that, but often we don’t have a very good vocabulary for it. Did you find it difficult to take those things from the emotional/sensory level to actually say something with it in poetry?
Emily: I made a lot of lists when I was writing the book. The early drafts came while I was thinking, “Okay, this was a meal I had in this space.” My partner may have found this a little obnoxious. I would have my notebook out while we were eating, and I would write down what we were saying, and what the components of the meal were, what the wine reminded me of, what the room reminded me of, if we saw someone we knew. And then I would play with the associations of everything that landed on that list. It was a way for me to think about what the history of my food life is. Playing free association with those lists allowed me to ground those lists in reality while also letting them be really lyrical.
David: Did you find that process changed your relationship with food, or was that process more of an expression of what your relationship with food already was?
Emily: I think it helped me be more analytical about why I like or don’t like something. Why a meal feels magical or doesn’t. When I started the project, everything felt magical, and through writing the book I was able to understand what the levels of that were. If something was manipulating me in a way I didn’t want to be manipulated, or if I really did find joy in that space. The poems themselves helped me more directly engage with what it was I was so in love with about going out to eat.
David: Throughout your previous books, you’ve used pop culture references to tie the poems to a specific time. You do that a little in here, but with foods that take on pop culture aspects. You mention Banana Runts, and Rene Redzepi, the chef at Noma in Copenhagen. You mention several craft beers by name, which one rarely sees in poetry. Were those culinary references taking on that pop culture role?
Emily: Yeah. Everyone has things they’ve experienced in a pedestrian way, and when you mention them to someone, you’re wondering, “do they like that or not?” Does someone else like Banana Runts or not? Canadian whisky or not? There are a lot of things I take for granted about my own palate that are not necessarily touchstones for other people. When you read a wine review, the review is only as relevant as your compatibility with that person’s palate. So using the references to food as cultural items was meant to guide the reader in recognizing “This is what she likes, or what she finds interesting, and if I don’t find that interesting, I have to remember to look at it from her perspective.”
David: There’s also an element both in what you’re talking about with wine reviews and sometimes in poetry where there can be such a putting on of airs. We can only name-drop the most impressive things. You have a line in “It Belongs in a Museum” where you say, “most people / here, parading their taste violently.”
Emily: There were definitely meals I had while writing the book where I was objectionable in the space for someone. I have tons of tattoos, I have crazy hair. I think we were having dinner at Blue Hill in lower Manhattan. The reservation was on the later side and the dining room was very quiet, and there was a man and woman having dinner a couple tables away from us. The dude kept looking over at me like, “How dare you be in this room?” Obviously, I could afford it. We were drinking wine and talking to the server about everything we wanted to have. He seemed bothered by the fact I had the knowledge that I had. I’ve experienced that in poetry too. People get mad at me for having published as much as I have without an MFA. The feelings were very similar, like how dare you, and I just think that’s so silly. If someone enjoys the food, why shouldn’t they come in and pay for it? If someone enjoys poetry, why shouldn’t they be able to have a conversation about it with you? So including those references is also a little bit political in my mind.
David: Do you feel like that is changing in poetry, or is that still something that can bar people from being able to participate?
Emily: I think that it’s more possible because of the way the internet functions for people to be able to gather resources to themselves, but I do think there is still hesitancy in some of the bigger magazines to accept voices outside academia without tokenizing them. They might be like, “ooh, look at this slam writer,” which gets slapped on people of color who have never once participated in slam. I used to teach adult ed, and so many people in the class would tell me, “I don’t feel like I have permission to do this because I didn’t do X,Y, and Z things.” You don’t have to check a bunch of boxes before you can call yourself a writer. You just have to sit down and write. I think there are more people hearing that message from various places and noticing writers following non-traditional paths to success. I hope the schools become more receptive to all people the more we talk about where we’re going. I’m passionate about explaining my road to where I got. I have a couple books out through a small press and I’m proud of them. Every day I have to remind myself, no, you did this, and other people can, too. It helps that even though your success is tiny, you tell someone how you got there and maybe they can follow you along.
David: Going back to the way food can bring up bigger emotional things for us — there are many spots in the book where you do the opposite and you take a big life concept, whether it’s death and mortality or love and sex, and you bring it back toward an image of food. You have a line where you say “death // is a meal // to push around the plate” or “I got too lonely & cooked for two by mistake.” You talked about making all those lists initially so you could go from food to bigger emotional ideas. How did that work in the other direction?
Emily: If it’s not clear from the text, I have a sort of disordered relationship with eating. I was a ballerina for 14 years, so I spent a lot of time having to be smaller than I am. That really messed up my relationship with food. Also, I grew up in a really emotionally fraught environment because my dad was very chronically ill. Many of the ways I would exact control over my life had to do with controlling what I was eating or not eating at all. I think food and emotionality have always been tied together for me for that reason. One of the things I did to get myself out of that disordered way of relating to food was forcing myself to learn to cook. I would make these elaborate meals, and then if I didn’t eat them, I had wasted an entire day. I couldn’t afford to do that. I forced myself to enjoy food by pouring all of these resources into it. So I think of the emotional connection between big life events and food, like — what was I eating when my dad died? Was I eating when my dad died? Or what do you eat when you break up with someone, or what do you eat when you’re depressed? There was a period before I wrote this book when I was pretty broke. I would go to the Rite Aid around the corner from my apartment and buy whatever snacks were on sale and that was my food for the next couple days. It was horrible. But I still find in moments of crisis where I’m like — Oh man, I really crave those potato chips — and then I’m like, Why? Oh, of course, because I ate them when I was devastated, of course my brain is going there. I think there are certain crisis meals. Someone is sad and they want macaroni and cheese. It’s easy for me to see the connections between being in a devastating moment and what you want to ea
David: With the lower-brow foods you reference in here — Banana Runts and Crown Royal — most of the time we don’t get to choose the things that are going to be emotionally resonant for us. So even if we want them to be these impressive, poetic things, sometimes it’s mac and cheese or ramen noodles. You can’t do anything about it.
Emily: Totally.
David: You mentioned earlier that you have a somewhat disordered relationship with food. In A Falling Knife Has No Handle you express both positive and negative emotional connotations with food. Sometimes we overindulge or we indulge in things we shouldn’t, and that happens emotionally or relationally, too. In the poem “Kitchen Note: Severe Seafood Allergy, Seat 2,” after referring to a partner who has a severe shellfish allergy, you end with the lines, “worry that / you can’t touch me without hives / & your throat swelling closed.” It felt like a synopsis of that idea to me — “Are we bad for each other? Is that going to keep us apart?”
Emily: Oh, yeah. My partner of many years has a severe seafood allergy. My favorite food is crab. There was a time early on when we were dating when I was mad at him and I ate an oyster. Like, what are you going to do about it? Indulgence is definitely a theme in the book. Shaping the manuscript, I was thinking about the relationship we think we deserve, and the food we think we deserve. When you feel shitty and you eat shit food, it reinforces you feeling shitty. When you’ve been in a lot of bad relationships, it can feel scary to take a risk on one that’s not going to be as toxic, because you’re afraid that you don’t even know how to be in that. There are twin lines running through it. What foods did I eat out of necessity and also because I didn’t think I deserved anything better or more nourishing? And how did I make radical changes to my diet because I wanted to take better care of myself and feel better? With relationships, how many times did I accept really bad behavior because I thought that was the only thing that was going to be offered to me? Now I’m with this person who is not constantly behaving badly and telling me to deal with it. He actually cares about whether or not I’m happy. It can be very alarming. How do you deal with someone who is actually trying to give you what you want?
David: Can you pick a poem out of A Falling Knife Has No Handle and walk me through it?
Emily: Let’s look at “You Drink with Your Eyes First.” I can’t remember who said that. It was someone’s concept about how a cocktail should look appetizing. I thought it was such a funny thing to think about in a dual sense, because when you meet someone, you’re sizing them up. Are they going to act like what they look like? The poem itself is about this bar I worked at in Harvard Square many years ago that was super divey. Lots of dumb shit going on there. I was in the process of leaving a very bad relationship. I had worked with my boyfriend and lived with him. I quit the job I had with him and started working in a restaurant. Since I was on a completely opposite schedule from him then, it was easier for me to say: maybe I should move out. My current partner and I realized he worked in the Square at the same time and would drink at the bar I worked at for the summer I was working there. I was like, oh my god, we probably met each other. Or at least knocked into each other. [ed: See the poem below.]
David: How long was that before you actually got together?
Emily: Years. I didn’t meet him for another year or two after that, and even then there was a long story about how we started dating in the first place. He was a regular at a coffeeshop I worked at. We didn’t actually start dating till three years later. It was so funny to think that even though we becoming friends and eventually dating took so long, there was a prologue even to that. That’s where this poem came from. It’s describing the space of that bar and the things that happened there. I worked there only for four months. I was doing a lot of drugs at the time, so I was very unhappy. All my coworkers were equally high on cocaine and unhappy with their lives. We were making all kinds of empty promises to each other, like we’re going to be friends forever. I don’t think I speak to any of them anymore. It was a fugue state summer. I was drinking a lot of French 75s and wore the same outfit every day and never did laundry. And in the middle of all that scrum and sleeping on my best friend’s bedroom floor, I could have met this person with whom I have a very stable and meaningful relationship. The poem is about how timing is everything. If I had met him at that moment in my life, I would not have been ready to be who I am now. I needed a couple other things to fall in place and for me to calm down before I could be in a long term relationship with someone who didn’t want me dead. There are definitely smells and sounds in this poem, but I feel like there’s so much less food, and it’s because of how little I was eating at the time.
David: Was that intentional? You left that out for that reason?
Emily: For sure. There’s a lot of visual detail of what things looked like and the drinks. He’s drinking Tank 7s and I’m drinking French 75s, and someone offers to buy me a bicycle, and then we get to the coffee shop where he was “a regular / at the bar where the syrups poured / like almost-amber.” There’s no food at all.
David: Even with those drinks, there’s no taste or smell. It’s all visual.
Emily: Right. Colors. The title of the poem is about what it looks like. What does someone seem like. This person who has changed my life was completely unremarkable to me. I couldn’t say there was a day that I saw him. We never were able to figure out if we ever did meet each other. We laugh about it all the time. He was absolutely in the room when I was working. Boston’s a tiny city like that, especially in the industry. You run into the same people over and over. There are so many people I recognize. He’s just not one of them.
David: Shifting gears, each of your books and chapbooks have felt pretty conceptual and thematic. Do you feel it’s necessary for you to approach a project with a specific concept in place, or does that happen naturally as you move from one interest to another?
Emily: I think the concepts emerge as I’m writing most of the time. For Pelican, I wrote that book over the course of seven years. I was obsessed at the time with my dad’s mortality. That was the biggest emotional factor in my life at that point, and probably still is, even though he’s been gone almost ten years now. That concept was ruling my writing whether I intended it to or not. Everything I wrote was in service of thinking about mortality and grief and thinking about how they altered my experience of the world. I felt so much older than so many of the people I was in contact with as peers because a lot of them weren’t dealing with those questions. It made me feel separate in a way I had to write about. Falling Knife came out of the fact that everything I was doing with my time had to do with restaurants and I had been kind of embarrassed about the fact that that was my vocabulary, and then I realized I didn’t have to be embarrassed. I’m supporting myself, I don’t have to ask anybody for anything, and I really love this world, so I’m going to write about it. The Scream book (You Can’t Pick Your Genre) was definitely a purposeful concept that I attacked because I was really depressed. I was just in my bed watching Scream and its sequels over and over because they were comforting to me. I love horror movies. I was going through a really bad break up at the time, and I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to talk about how abusive the relationship had been. It was easier for me to write about fucked up power dynamics and the illusion of safety that comforts suburbia in an abstract way about someone else’s experiences. That helped me to write Polaris. I think of those two as companion chapbooks in a way. Polaris is about the actual relationship and You Can’t Pick Your Genre includes the poems that helped me get there. They’re very interdependent in my mind.
David: I wouldn’t have realized that without you saying it.
Emily: No. The vocabulary of images in those are so different that it’s fun to tell people that, just because they’re usually surprised. They were written almost simultaneously. I did not want to show anyone the poems in Polaris because I was so brutalized by the person I had been with. After the Scream poems were taking shape, I felt confident about that book. I was looking at all of what I’ll call shrapnel poems, where they had nothing to do with Scream. I realized there were two books.
YOU DRINK WITH YOUR EYES FIRST
when the color makes
your molars ache or the roses
come too late & are left
behind for the cleaning crew when
you would have Tank 7s at my bar
the summer I wore the same boots
no matter the heat / black leather
stacked heel & Levi’s cut-offs
rude as every photo I haven’t sent yet
I was leaving him & free to swan
dive or better still belly flop into French 75s
mid afternoon & Kentucky Trevor promised
me a bicycle & that he’d be back to see
whose horse finished first
& I can’t stand not knowing
if I knocked into your elbow
with an empty tray / or why I got engaged
a 2nd time just after I got laid off
but before you were a regular
at the bar where the syrups poured
like almost-amber & I wasn’t good at pretending
I didn’t want to go home with you again
which is why we’d stand just beyond the door
talking & I’d smoke before 3 which I never do
because you made me nervous & you knew
about it didn’t you? couldn’t you always
read the heat passing through me in waves?