Elizabeth Robinson : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

In moments of duress, I have been known to recite parts of the prologue of the Canterbury Tales to myself.  There is something so sensuous, but also reassuring in the song of spring’s arrival.  For me, especially this moment: “and bathed every veyne in swich  licour.”  As though water to the dry root were both nourishment and intoxicant.

Elizabeth Robinson : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Of course, poets continue to do this all the time, which is why poetry is a constantly meaningful and renewing practice.  Earliest was Dickinson and the bible.  In high school, I heard Gwendolyn Brooks give a reading.  Never will forget that.  Denise Levertov’s “Stepping Westward” is still enormously meaningful to me, both in terms of content and cadence.  Then I discovered Robert Creeley and his economy, his intensity, his necessary but unshowy innovation. So many miracles have followed: Sappho, Lorine Niedecker, Jack Spicer, Beverly Dahlen, Barbara Guest, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Jean Valentine.  Lately, I am deeply moved and catalyzed by Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic.

Elizabeth Robinson : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry can stop time or create various simultaneities.  I feel that one of the great gifts of poetry is that it is an open form of inquiry.  It may include narrative, concrete images, epiphany, resolution—but it may not.  So often, everything in popular culture assumes a conventional narrative patterning, but this differs from the way life really works.  Many of our most important projects (art-making, loving, creating constellations of family or community, for example) are characterized by waxing and waning, by ad hoc patterning, by varying rhythms.  Of course there’s a lot of great literature in fiction and nonfiction that can do this, but I tend to feel that innovation in other genres uses poetic patterning as its model.  Poetry has almost infinite elasticity which makes it an incredibly responsive and resourceful art.

Elizabeth Robinson : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Three things sealed my commitment to (obsession with) poetry:

1. Listening to my father read Victorian novels to me when I was a child.  I often did not understand the content of the novels, but he was a very fluent reader and I absorbed the beauty of language and rhythm from him.

2. Being taught in Sunday School that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh,” which seemed both continuous with my experience of being read to and utterly, transformatively mystical.  The divine in language, language in flesh/enfleshed.  Wow.

3. My mother gave me a book of Emily Dickinson poems when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade.  I still have it.  The poems did everything I needed language to do: feel, speculate about the nature of the world, offer a compelling way of thinking that wasn’t indebted to conventional narrative structure.

Elizabeth Robinson : part one

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Apprehend, a winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Pure Descent, a winner of the National Poetry Series (and the late Sun & Moon book).  Her mixed genre meditation On Ghosts (Solid Objects) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.  Ahsahta Press will publish Vulnerability Index in 2019.  With Jennifer Phelps, Robinson co-edited the critical anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry, forthcoming any day from University of Akron Press.

What are you working on?

For a long time, I felt I wasn’t writing very much, maybe not writing effectively.

I’ve been going through many life transitions and also working very hard at my day job with homeless individuals.   At a moment when things settled a bit, I found that I had actually been writing quite a lot and I suddenly have four complete manuscripts and a bunch of nonfiction.  So it is a time of taking stock: looking at what I’ve written to see who I’ve become and where that might be taking me.  One manuscript, Vulnerability Index (which will be published in the coming year by Ahsahta), is about my work with people who are living on the street and it feels very different from my previous writing—much more narrative and very often comprised of direct quotation.  I’m nervous that I might not be honoring my conversation partners fully enough, that I’m clumsy with this more direct kind of writing.  And I am trying to learn how to translate my way of thinking from poetry to prose in the nonfiction work, which is also about people experiencing homelessness.  Somewhere in there I’m also trying to get back to writing reviews, partly because reviewing feels like such a good mode of participation in community and also because I learn so much when I review a book.