Emily Warn

Emily Warn Poems

Emily Warn Biography

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.)

The Best Poem Of Emily Warn

Psalm

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.
No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes.
No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars.
No Lord I know what is within magnified.
Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night.
Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns
for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole
as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three AM
in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You.
If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins,
balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two,
it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped
watched dimension quarters us into early middle late.
Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning
is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea
each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.

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