Three Efforts at Arrival and a Series of Departures by Elizabeth Robinson
How did you come to write Three Efforts at Arrival and a Series of Departures?
For a long time, when my life was pretty disrupted and I felt that I wasn’t really engaged in a consistent writing practice (like ten years!)—I would just write these poems “on” anything that engaged my attention in a passing way. They were kind of an exercise in attention and against writer’s block. Eventually, I went back and looked at them, and they are hiding out in every corner of my computer in various files. There are at least 200. So I guess I was writing a lot more than I realized. I’ve been mining them lately—revising, ordering them into selections and chapbooks. It’s a little bit like looking backwards in time and making a portrait of who I was and what my concerns were. During that challenging decade, I was always trying to get away from my situation (or get out of it) and into something more productive and satisfying. The poems in this selection may not address that in a biographical, narrative way, but the theme is clearly there!
Could you speak a bit about your writing process these days?
Well, I am more or less back in that place of working madly and thinking I am not writing much poetry but then later finding that I was writing poems all along. Working as the pastor of a church means, among other things, that I write a tremendous amount—sermons, prayers, reflections. It’s really interesting, but it’s often on deadline or for a really charged event like a memorial service—when I am done, I sometimes find myself pretty depleted. So editing has become a new way to think in poetry. I’m really enjoying returning to this large body of work that I’ve had sitting around untended and making little tweaks and arranging things into little chapbooks and, slowly, full length manuscripts. It’s less about the relationships inside poems and more about the relationships between poems right now.
I feel that community and collaboration have been important to your work over time; could you talk about what they mean for you?
I believe that all artworks in whatever genre are the result of community and collaboration. A good poem doesn’t just—poof—jump from the brain of an isolated genius. All sorts of contextual factors feed it. I am intensely grateful for the many ways that my “company” of poets (as Robert Creeley termed it) has stayed with me through, now, decades. And I am also grateful and interested in the way that community expands and contracts, the ways that people help each other get published or even get needs met in a crisis. More specifically and locally, I have been working with Susanne Dyckman for about a decade on a series of collaborations. It has been a startling pleasure to see how our writing intertwines to make a voice that is discernibly different from our individual voices. We’ve been collaborating while working ekphrastically off the works of women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. So in that sense, the collaboration extends past genre and even past mortality. This is one of the wonders of poetry for me—it’s possible to be in active conversation/collaboration with a deceased person. I think of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca in that regard, which is a continuing source of interest and inspiration for me.
What are you finding inspiring/generative right now?
This has been a really exhausting time—politically, environmentally, vocationally, and in terms of the pandemic. I am mostly inspired by the generosity of people continuing to go on with life and writing—you, Valerie, doing this, and all the small presses and periodicals of the world. I mean: rob mcclennan? Does the man ever sleep? I continue to teach classes through the Lighthouse, which is based in Denver, and the joy of getting to talk about writing with people in my classes is very significant. I kind of hate Zoom because I spend so much time on it, but Zoom readings are still a gift. I am in three different kinds of writing groups/conversations, and I rely on all three to keep me sane and connected. The world is pretty frayed, but creative work still matters and draws us together. Generative? I am frustrated that I don’t have very much time to myself at all. One of the groups I participate in makes up monthly prompts, and I look forward to responding to them even when I don’t take the writing that results very seriously. It is good just to have an assignment and make myself take the time to write. And it’s such a blast to see how other people respond to the same prompt.
Thank you for the kind words! I couldn’t agree more with you about rob, and so many others who help us all keep going. As many of our readers undoubtedly know, you’re married to the poet Randy Prunty. Could you speak about how sharing your life with another poet has impacted your writing?
It is so wonderful, day by day, to live with a person who speaks my language. Randy and I both have an abiding interest in poetry, but we came into writing poetry through different communities. I think that keeps our conversation more textured and I really kind of enjoy our differences of opinion—though of course there’s a lot we agree about. Randy made a funny Venn diagram of our poetic preferences that we have posted on the refrigerator. I’ll take a picture and send it to you! We read each other our work and that’s both fun and very helpful. Recently, I was invited to put together a selected poems and editing that was: yikes. Randy helped me to cut the poems that I loved that needed to be cut. We do play language games in a casual way with each other, especially in terms of observing the presence of poetry in our daily lives (e.g., “That would be a good title for a chapbook…”) and it is also a pleasure to read poems together. One night a while ago, while Randy was making dinner, I was just grabbing books at random from the shelves and reading him poems. He would try to guess who they were by. Sometimes we would agree that something was really great or really pretty bad which was pretty liberating when the relative fame (or lack thereof) of the author was omitted from the evaluation.
You’ve worked extensively with unhoused people, and you’re also a minister. How do these works intersect with your work as a poet?
Both of these vocations are very useful in broadening perspective. I mean, for me, poetry has always been about seeking meaning and pattern in the world, but making art can get weirdly narcissistic and competitive and people develop such ridiculous ideas about success and fame. Working with people who are living on the street or being a minister nicely explodes the conceit of fame: there is work to be done and so we try to figure out how to do it. When I was working with unhoused people, I definitely found meaning and creativity in the work, and frankly the community was so much more welcoming and kind to me than were the poets in my immediate surround. The stakes were clear and we were working to save lives. Trying to navigate the horrifying obstructions of social service agencies was a process that took every ounce of my creativity and problem-solving skills and I really came to enjoy finding ways around unjust rules. In that way, it was not unlike creating a poem. And I guess for me, writing a poem is an act of faith—you know, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I want to find out.” And that flows outward to trying to help a chronically homeless person come live inside: everybody is worth a shot and everybody has the capacity to heal. Being a minister is surprisingly creative and responsive, but that is likely related to the openness and welcome of my congregation. We have faith in the divine, we have faith in compassion and justice and in a larger meaning in the universe, and we are actively exploring. I like that all of these processes—working as a church, getting a person housing or medical care, making a poem—entail looking at the limited resources you have and putting them together in a resourceful and imaginative way. I like that there is wonder involved that softens our need for resolution or control. Over the past year, my mantra has been, “God loves an improvisor.” It’s all kind of jazz; you try to learn the chords, and you riff where you can and sometimes it is unexpectedly good.
Here are some links for Elizabeth’s recent online publications:
