The Need to Name: A Conversation with Emily Patterson
In The Birth of Undoing, poet Emily Patterson explores themes of infertility, postpartum depression, and pandemic isolation all within the grace of a deep attention to the natural world. There is quiet wonder here—rooms blazing with sudden light—and a clarity of language and imagery that anchors the reader in the blur of days as mother and daughter become each other’s whole and separate worlds. Patterson is the author of three chapbooks: So Much Tending Remains (Kelsay Books, 2022), To Bend and Braid (Kelsay Books, 2023), and haiku at 5:38 a.m. (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been recognized and honored by Sundress Publications, Women of Ohio, Sweet Lit, and Whale Road Review, and her children’s poem “Small is the Seed” (Tyger Tyger Magazine, 2024) was set to music by composer Katerina Gimon and premiered at Carnegie Hall. Emily received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. She works as a curriculum designer for Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Rebecca Brock: Your book explores early motherhood so beautifully. In particular, the poem “Sunflowers” captures how all-consuming new motherhood can feel: “those days were for moving thin rivers of milk from my body to yours” and “my mind hazy as a lullaby.” Pregnancy and motherhood seem to have freed you, creatively—three chapbooks and now this collection—as if the act of creating a human being opened you up to everything else! What happened to you creatively when you became a mother?
Emily Patterson: Motherhood was certainly all-consuming in those early days. I wrote in scraps of time on scraps of paper (or in my Notes app, courtesy of late-night feeding sessions). I had feared that I wouldn’t write much, or at all, after I became a parent. But my need to name both the profound joys and the daily difficulties surfaced in a new way when my daughter was born. My “process” was equally chaotic and necessary. Mothering called me into the present, and after the long wait for a child, finding my poetic voice was a release, a celebration, as well as a way to cope with postpartum depression and the aftereffects of infertility.
On another note, my daughter was born in the summer of 2020, and having a newborn during a pandemic felt like turning inward, doubly so. Our days as a family were both wild and quiet. In the quiet—and sometimes in the wild, too—I couldn’t help but write, even if revising came later, and assembling a collection later still. As I continued, though, writing about motherhood grew into a way to separate myself from it briefly, to hone and hear my own voice. In the midst of caregiving, it was also a way to receive care, through the gift of writing time (thanks to my husband and often my mother, too).
RB: Oh, that “need to name” feels so true and familiar to me, as well as the process being equal chaos and necessity. What a gift from your husband and mother, to be seen and known in that way—and it feels incredibly important to recognize your ability to receive that care. In “Sunflowers,” I particularly love the line, “as if the days were, in some ways, already memories,” and how you capture that sense of standing in time as it moves through and beyond you. Do you think that poetry, about our mothering in particular, can hold time for us a bit? Turn the sand to glass?
EP: Absolutely! Crystallizing all those fleeting details in a poem was a way to hold onto them—and really, to preserve my daughter’s babyhood. I was constantly stockpiling images in a not-so-secret attempt to stop time. (I still do this.) It’s astounding how immediately that awareness of time passing materialized for me as a new parent. Poetry felt like a natural way to contain a finite portrait of those moments.
RB: As a mother-writer, I have explored (and am still exploring) my separateness—especially as my children have grown up. I found it intensely moving and profound that you are naming this so early—with tenderness and surrender in poems like the title poem, “The Birth of Undoing,” where you write, “And this is the birth / of pretending / you are mine.” Did you intentionally explore this in your work? Or was this something you discovered to be true as you wrote?
EP: Yes, as my daughter grew from baby to toddler, I became more aware of this shift. It’s that paradoxical push and pull: a child’s need for closeness and dependence alongside their emerging independence and separate selfhood. I explored this more in what became my second chapbook, To Bend and Braid. It seems, as parents, we are always adapting to the shape of our children’s need for us, because that need is continually changing and growing as they do. Later, in The Birth of Undoing, I reversed this in the poem “Asteroidea,” based on an exchange with our then three-year-old, where she adamantly claimed me by shouting, “You’re mine!”
When her father says No, she belongs
to herself, she strikes with sudden
strength, limbs curled and clinging,
and it’s then that I recognize her
claim: the one that, each morning,
I don’t let myself make.
RB: In “At the Garden Center on Mother’s Day,” you write: “See, this is what I thought it meant / to be a woman: one who bears, / not one who wants.” I love the complexity in this poem, this line—because in many ways you want to be the one who bears—but to name the want here is so powerful. Your attention to detail—the list of seeds in this poem, for example, the description of how they will grow, how you will tend them—it all combines to afford your work a vulnerability that is tangible and welcoming. You talk about infertility with a clear voice—naming want with a directness that echoes. Was this intentional from the outset of this book?
EP: While experiencing infertility, I carried that waiting and wanting silently; so with this collection, I wanted to revisit that wanting and name it directly, to give it a voice. There is certainly a paradox within this poem—within the book as a whole, even, as that waiting comes to fruition.
RB: In the poem, “Witness,” you write: “I think of how / sometimes being is the only / doing we have.” In many ways, the whole book is a lesson in this—the surrender to being, to what is, to the now. Doing is often how I’ve defined my mothering. But now, as a mom to teenagers, the thing my kids need most is my being. How much intention does it require for you to stay in that place of being?
EP: For me, it requires a great deal of intention to stay in that place of being. In the beginning, so much of parenting felt like doing—all the endless tasks of meeting a baby’s enormous needs!—but of course that changes, and shifting from doing to being can be disorienting. “Witness” begins with my daughter having a night terror, where I’m unable to wake her and can only wait for it to subside. The poem also references being present for my niece’s birth, when I had the honor of supporting my sister-in-law, and that support, too, was mostly just presence. I expect I’ll always be learning how and when to do or be, especially as a parent.
RB: You published three chapbooks before this full collection. Does each chapbook serve its own purpose towards this larger collection?
EP: There is a throughline, although it’s nonlinear. My first chapbook, So Much Tending Remains, chronicles the first year of motherhood, while To Bend and Braid explores my daughter’s emergent sense of self. The Birth of Undoing incorporates some poems from each in the overall narrative arc. Of course, it reaches back to before—infertility and the waiting—as well as a little more into the future. I tried to choose a few poems from each chapbook to support the narrative progression of The Birth of Undoing, such as “Near the Fourth of July in a Pandemic,” a pregnancy poem; or that illustrated a particular aspect of the story, as in “Walking in the Rain I Wonder When Postpartum Depression Becomes Just Regular Depression.” Truthfully, I don’t think I could have written The Birth of Undoing without first writing the chapbooks; they were not only stepping stones to assembling a longer collection, but also allowed me to capture my immediate experiences as a new parent in a concentrated form. When my daughter was born, that’s when I really began to use my poetic voice, but it took time to feel prepared—in a writerly sense and an emotional one—to write about infertility and our path to parenthood. It’s intensely personal, and I know now that I was still healing from infertility even with a child in my arms. I couldn’t have written about all this immediately, and the chapbooks helped me arrive at that place of readiness.
RB: In the poem “Notes on the Love of a Child, Being a Parent,” you reference art by Judy Drew and take us on an etymological journey of the word “fraught.” Exploring the idea of holding on even as you are letting go, you write, “how I carried it even as I carried her.” The strength of a mother comes through the whole collection, but this poem especially bears weight when you end it with “every mother in me.” Do you often use art as a jumping-off point for a poem?
EP: The Birth of Undoing originally had only a single ekphrastic poem, but on the advice of poet and teacher Mary Carroll-Hackett, I decided to explore more motherhood-themed art. Now each of the four sections has an ekphrastic piece, and I do find that this process opened up forms and insights I might not have reached without the visual jumping-off point. The emotional weight present in Judy Drew’s charcoal drawing of a mother and child is what led me to consider the etymology. The line “every mother in me” feels like an acknowledgment of the weight of both motherhood and infertility—an embrace of those selves and more: the brand-new mother during a pandemic, the mother still struggling with postpartum depression, the pregnant mother, the mother longing to become a mother.
RB: Your book opens with an epigraph by Rilke that resonates throughout: “You sent out beyond your recall, go the limits of your longing. Embody me.” There is a sense of holiness to Rilke’s phrase here, but there is also holiness—as in awe, as in something ancient—throughout your daughter’s wonder and your wonder at your daughter. There’s a crystalline quality to so much of your work, as if I could actually hold your work up to a light and turn it this way and that to see the light refracting through. How does a poem begin for you? A word or phrase? An image or moment?
EP: This is my favorite Rilke poem, and in a way this whole collection is a response to that pairing—an embodiment of longing—but also the physical embodiment of a child yet to be born, and an embrace of the wonder of it all. Many of the poems in The Birth of Undoing began with a simple image: a kite caught in a tree, a patch of sunflowers, cereal scattered on the floor. I think most of mine begin that way, with the language growing around the imagery. But sometimes it’s a phrase—a description, a snippet of conversation, or something my daughter says that invites me into that wonder and exploration. Poems have been my companions as I continually learn how to mother. And mothering has been my teacher in so many ways, including as a poet.