Visiting with Emily Pulfer-Terino
by Claire Guyton
What inspired your poems “Firstborn” and “The Best Ideas”?
My brother and me when he was an infant.
I thought of “Firstborn” while attending this wonderful reading of poems from The Art of Losing, an anthology of elegies edited by Kevin Young, at the AWP conference in April 2010. All of a sudden I wanted to write an elegy for the emptiness that precedes birth, for the unbeing we lose when we enter the world. I also thought of it as a kind of homage to the space always between my life and my younger brother’s, to the strange and fluid dimensions of our experiences.
“The Best Ideas” came at a time when I had 
been teaching poems—several by John Donne, “Assault” and “Wild Swans” by Edna Saint Vincent Millay—poems whose yearning consumed me. I perceived in them this sense that one’s experience of the world is insufficient, and that pleasure, because it is transient, bears with it a grief. I told my friend all about it one night; he said he understood. It’s funny, the next night he told it all back to me verbatim, his face lit up, voice rising, as if he had just then thought of it himself. I hope to convey that feeling of discovery and also a troubled tenderness the speaker feels for her friend.
Tell us about your writing process.
My writing comes in fits and starts; I get an idea, jot a few notes on a scrap of paper, live with it for a while and turn some phrases in my head, then I sit down and do the work. I am a teacher and a resident faculty member at a boarding school, so I have to be really deliberate in creating time and space in which to write. I rent an art studio nearby where I go most evenings to work; there, I re-enter those phrases and notes and see how much they can expand. I tend to be reticent as I start a poem, and it’s really a challenge for me to let go and generate the material. Sometimes I write cohesive lines and stanzas, sometimes just unruly swaths of text I order later. Perhaps the only consistency in my writing process is that I always write aloud, voicing drafts over and over, to try to satisfy my ear and breath. While I can let other issues rest for a while, I tend not to let a draft sit for long if it sounds really off to me.
Do you remember when you decided you wanted to be a writer?
It must have been when I was very young that I decided to be a writer, because I remember devoting myself intently to making stories and poems from a very early age: five maybe? Six? But as a little dilettante with lots of interests I’d dabble in, I let go of that singular focus for years. I resumed writing seriously in the middle of college; a friend had signed up for a poetry workshop and I found myself envious of her choice, so I registered too. Suddenly, there I was again, reading and making poems, in love and entirely absorbed.
What’s the best title you didn’t use?
Titles are usually tough for me! I don’t think I’ve ever come up with one I didn’t use. Typically they’re plain, one or two words, and I come up with them after the poems are written. I would love to develop that gift of making amazing titles!
A wall of current mss in progress at my studio.
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