Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part one

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, artist, and novelist. Her. most recent collection is Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton 2020). Griffiths' work has widely appeared, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and many others. She lives in New York City. 

How did you first engage with poetry?

Probably in the music my parents played when I was very young. My mother read books to me. She encouraged me to read aloud to myself while she cooked dinner for our large family, which is why maybe sometimes books and reading feel like such a feast to me! Another thing that is a bit hard to describe was that I was always listening to how people described themselves, their lives, other people, and shared stories. Sometimes it was more about the textures, or slang, or the way that they said something simply with their voice or eyes. I felt like I was overhearing secrets about how to live in the world. But it also engaged my growing appetite for observation and attention. Details about the world everywhere I went accumulated in me. I think that Lorca’s articulation of Duende is the closest and clearest to what I’m trying to say.  I don’t think I have a consciousness that doesn’t begin with poetry being right there in my first memories. It’s always been there even if, as a child, I didn’t know how to call it anything else but the simplest of feelings – tree, rain, blue, sun, mother, father, heart, sleep, fire, face.