River Elizabeth Hall : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

So many. I never read one book at a time. I jump around quite a lot. Oscar the Misanthropist by Judith Skillman and A Quiet Day with the West on Fire by Margot Kahn are two new poetry chapbooks from the winner and finalist of 2021 Floating Bridge Chapbook contest, both of which just arrived in my mailbox. 

Additionally, I have been re-reading Plath’s collected works (one poem a day) since December and making my way through Frank Bidart’s collected works. He has been recommended to me so many times, but I’d never sat with his work until now. I’m really enjoying it, especially his early persona poems. I have yet to write a persona poem and I am very intrigued by the idea.

River Elizabeth Hall : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I’m enlivened, reawakened, stunned and inspired by other writers all the time. I can only answer this question in terms of two writers whose work I have focused on the most in the last two years: Alison C. Rollins and Ocean Vuong. They are the poets whose work I cling to currently and read over and over. I love Ocean Vuong’s mastery of metaphor and his control and pacing. It is something I aspire to. I read his poetry breathless and fully alive. 

I am also endlessly fascinated by the poetry of Alison C. Rollins. Library of Small Catastrophes is one of my favorite books of poetry. She is so incredibly precise, but her work moves so effortlessly. I am captivated by how she can feel so consistently precise and maintain that sensation in longer poems with many sections. She is a librarian and I love how her work naturally influences her poems. 

Jeanine Walker has been an amazing mentor and teacher to me for a few years now. She has introduced me to so many poets, many new forms, so much essential information on craft. Jeanine has probably influenced my writing more than any other poet and I feel so fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to work so closely with her these last few years. It has been a singular experience to have a poet with so much knowledge and experience become so familiar with my work over the span of a few years. She also has a book coming out soon! I am elated for her and I can’t wait to read it. 

River Elizabeth Hall : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you  work ideas and poems with?

Other writers are absolutely essential to my practice. My work enters the world in two ways: either on my own in my regular writing practice or in dedicated writing groups. Nearly all of the pieces I generate alone, will be critiqued by other writers at some point down the line. 

Since I was a teen, I have participated fairly regularly in Amherst Writers and Artists writing groups (www.AmherstWriters.org). The AWA method was created by an extraordinary teacher and writer named Pat Schneider. These writing groups are focused on generative prompts and positive feedback.

At the moment, I participate in two different AWA style groups. One is through the New York Writers Coalition (www.nywriterscoalition.org) and the other is led by Nicole Zimmerman (www.nicolerzimmerman.com). In 2020, I became a trained AWA workshop leader and I now lead two groups of writers through my organization, Seattle Writers Circle. More about my groups can be found on my website RiverElizabethHall.com .

On top of these groups, I am also in the second year of a poetry tutorial with my mentor Jeanine Walker. Myself and three other poets have been working together closely for the last year and half. We workshop and discuss our poems on a weekly basis, read and discuss craft essays, and all four of us are working together to assemble our full-length collections.

River Elizabeth Hall : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

That’s a tough one. To me, “finished” is sometimes an ephemeral sensation. It happens in so many ways. Sometimes, I agonize until I just can’t polish a poem any further and I have to force myself to walk away. Sometimes, it feels like the tuning of an orchestra— each refinement a twist of the strings until all the words, the line breaks, the punctuation, the shape,  and the title sing together in harmony. Other times, I over-tune my poems and then I have to let them rest until I can see why it feels off. I then go back and loosen them up a bit. 

Very rarely, a poem lands with clear certainty and I know that it’s there. It’s so hard to explain. As well, there have been times that a poem has felt finished, and then I picked it up again much later only to see that something clearly needed to change. I’m not sure if I really believe in finished. “Finished” feels closed and I always want to remain open to the possibility that I can take a poem farther. I will never be done growing and changing as a writer (at least I hope not— that’s terrifying to imagine) and so it makes sense that some poems might continue to evolve with me.

All that said, there are pieces that I can’t stand to spend another second contemplating. I think this is especially true for those poems that evoke an emotion I’d like to move past, or poems that declare things I no longer believe. Those can happily exist forever—just as they are—as far as I’m concerned. They’re sort of like that old lower back tattoo you got in college that you’re relieved you can’t see on a daily basis without a mirror.

River Elizabeth Hall : part one

River Elizabeth Hall (she/her) is a poet, and naturalist. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bear Review, Cirque, Main Street Rag, Nimrod, and Tinderbox, among many others. Her chapbook, Call a Body Home, was a semi-finalist in the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Competition. She leads generative creative writing workshops through Seattle Writers Circle, an Amherst Writers and Artists inspired community of writers. For more about her writing and other offerings, visit www.RiverElizabethHall.com.

Photo credit: Tristan Reidford

What are you working on?

My goal is to assemble a full-length collection of poetry by the end of 2022. However, it feels odd to say, “I’m working on a full-length,” because really I’m more focused on building poem by poem, line by line, or even word by word. I am beginning to track emerging themes and subthemes, ideas and motifs, but right now my focus is on making each poem shine as I move along. I’m getting closer to the initial assembly, but if it goes anything like my chapbook process I will probably take it apart and put it back together 50+ times while crying, and then, eventually, one day I will think to myself: 

“Oh my god, I did it.” 

It would be great if it was easier than that, but I’m not banking on it. I am finding that to assemble a collection of any kind requires a great deal of faith in oneself. Faith is something I’m a little short on in general and because of that, this process is an invitation for me to grow as a poet and a person.