Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part five

What are you working on?

I’m writing a novel. Visually, I’m working several projects that include photography and mixed media. It’s getting messy and weird (not the novel!), which means maybe I’m doing what I hoped, which is to simply experiment with various materials. Another important and necessary thing I’m working on lately is how to maintain a stronger balance of rest and work during these difficult days. There is so much pressure and pain everywhere. I refuse to surrender pleasure. Joy is always at play for me, something both deeply worked for and also, deeply earned. The work of delight is not to miss all the evidence of daily abundance and the details of how to remember and to recognize it in yourself and others. I constantly engage this muscle because I must. I don’t ever neglect or deny wonder. 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part four

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

Toni Morrison – it doesn’t matter what genre I’m working in, including my practice as a visual artist. Her writing and life continues to alter and to inform my own development and understanding of who I am becoming on the page and elsewhere. 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is essential to how poems happen in me. I’d called myself a lyric poet, and I’d also say that my visual art lends itself to the space of what would be called “lyric.”  My ear is my greatest editor – actively listening helps me open and cut the language at the same time. Whenever I’m writing anything rhythm is critical. For me, voice must also be inseparable with the poem’s questions and desires articulated by language.    

Rachel Eliza Griffiths : part two

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

I haven’t shared poems with friends or writers groups in years. I like to have the intimacy of this work all to myself for as long as possible prior to publication. It’s such a private geography. It also takes time and patience for me to let the poem’s voice really fill the language, however uneasy that feels, however intensely that happens in the work. I have to do it alone, aware that I’m not alone because there are other poets, other readers, living and dead, who are in that poem with me. Mostly, I’m reluctant to ask for a second set of eyes and when I finally do it is likely it will be an editor or my agent who is looking at the work. Many poet-friends in my life are generous and willing to read my work before I publish my poems but I’m aware that they are also trying to balance obligations that factor into the daily living and writing of their own work, day-jobs, teaching, time their families, and their overall health. I would rather they give that extra time and energy to themselves, as it is so needed by all of us, especially during this pandemic. It’s a gift, and I don’t take it for granted, that they will be there for me and vice versa, but I tend to save this sort of request for something that’s very special or where I’m feeling more vulnerable than I usually do.

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.