Accompanying Instruments — Blackbird Archive

← v21n3, Spring 2023

Accompanying Instruments

The photos published here represent, to a very small degree, Claudia Emerson’s connection to music. Kent Ippolito, Emerson’s husband, has kindly provided brief contextual information that appears in the captions. He states: “I’m afraid I don’t really know the photo credit for many of these—they were mostly collected on various devices over the years.” As always, Blackbird is grateful to Ippolito for allowing and advising on this Reading Loop in her honor.

grief memory music

Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson is a professor of English and the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is the author of four books: Figure Studies: Poems (2008), Late Wife (2005), Pinion: An Elegy (2002), and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), all from Louisiana State University Press. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Poetry, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, and New England Review .