“To Be Emma Bovary”

Friday from the Archives: “To Be Emma Bovary” the 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Prize poem by Debra Kaufman with art by Kate Worm in NCLR 2016

This year’s poetry contests open next month! We are excited to read and watch all of the written & performance poetry submissions.

Debra Kaufman, who won the Applewhite Poetry Prize contest in 2015, is no stranger to our pages. Her poetry has been published five additional times to this winner. She is the author of the poetry collections Outwalking the Shadow, God Shattered, Delicate Thefts, The Next Moment and A Certain Light, as well as three chapbooks, many monologues and short plays and five full-length plays.

Upon selecting Debra Kaufman’s poem as winner of the 2015 prize, James Applewhite
wrote that “To Be Emma Bovary” is “a delicate and strong linguistic ballet that pirouettes on the page in its slender stanzas and remains in the reader’s mind. The persistence of it in my visual and aural imagination convinces me of its fitness for first prize. This poet has a vivid grasp of past great literature as alive in the present. This poet has taken Emma Bovary’s story as somehow her own, in vivid imagination. Her very selective retelling constitutes a recreation in personal terms, making a slender and lovely and sorrowful aesthetic object from this literary monument from another place and time.”

“To Be Emma Bovary”

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.—Flaubert

Read novels that addle you.
Stamp your pretty foot.
Regarde soi-même dans le miroir.

Dress in a chemisette
with three gold buttons
between the challis lapels of the bodice.

Call your husband a fool, a boor.
Pine, yawn, shop, purr.
Flirt with the no-account viscount.

Mistake lust for love,
a lover for a savior,
a vulture for a hawk.

Go riding with your seducer,
feel the lathered withers
under your thighs.

Lie sated in the forest,
feel the leaf-filtered sun light
your half-closed eyes.

Find his letter
bidding you adieu
in a basket of delicate apricots.

Place your gloved hand
on your debtor’s knee.
Implore, weep in desperation.

Toss your last coin
to a blind beggar.
Admire the aptness of this gesture.

Lament your fate: being
agonist in the wrong story.
Eat arsenic. Die unlovely in agony.