#elissa gabbert

[dk-thrive]

“The woman (Plath) is perfected,” the poem’s first line reads—“not perfect, perfected,” Clark notes, “like a work of art, an experiment, something controlled.”

— Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self: Essays (FSG Originals, June 11, 2024)

[dk-thrive]

— the next line could always be anything

The poet Andrew Weatherhead once tweeted, “The best way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” This joke says something serious about poetry. It calls attention to the line as a fundamental unit, which in some sense always stands alone — the next line could always be anything.

When I’m writing a poem, and I get stuck, it’s often because I’ve forgotten this principle: The next line could always be anything. The poem has free will; the future in the poem is not beholden to its past. This is true for any piece of writing, but poetry seems to foreground those choices, those leaps outside logic or predictability, as if the possibilities of what comes next are more infinite in a poem.

I’ve started thinking of this moment, this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem — even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme — but it can’t be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos.

— Elisa Gabbert, from "The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next" (New York Times, January 25, 2022)

[dk-thrive]

I must be changing all the time, but day to day, or year to year, the intervals are too small to notice.

When I stopped rereading books, I didn’t stop rewatching movies. It doesn’t take as much time, for one thing. And movies I’ve watched many times are a very great comfort to me. It’s what I do when I’m too sick, exhausted, or anxious to read… This is part of the difference between books and movies. Books take so much more time to invest in, to get interesting again, that they give me time to change. I must be changing all the time, but day to day, or year to year, the intervals are too small to notice. I’m not the same man, but I almost am… I still contain a child and a fool inside me; I have all their memories. I know more, but I still know nothing.

— Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self: Essays (FSG Originals, June 11, 2024)

[spudcity]

About Suffering

Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce that you’re suffering. There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer” helps. I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.” Happiness is suffering for the right reasons. First-order suffering is second-order happiness. You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer. We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering. Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother. In the past their suffering was less absurd. The problem is, everything’s worse. Like, paper or plastic? We’re all still going to die suffering. I value being alone with my thoughts, but it’s weird to say, “This thing that makes us suffer less, we have to stop doing it.” Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless and alone? How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly? At least the rich get to suffer in comfort. It makes the life feel longer. Live to suffer another day. One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous luxury. Velvet upholstery. Suffering is happiness, after forty minutes of desolate shuffling. The point is, life is suffering. About suffering, no one is ever wrong.

–Elissa Gabbert

[mttbll]

"It can be valuable to know your own moves—your go-to tricks and turns and images—as a defense against overusing or misusing them, against writing formulaic poetry. As a reader, it’s valuable to know a particular poet’s signature moves, as well as what moves are popular in a given cohort or school, and over a given time period, in order to speak convincingly and compellingly about style and trends. But moves aren’t just something to be identified and then avoided. There’s no chess—and no dancing—without moves." —from Elisa Gabbert's "The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry," one of my favorite essays in Monkey and the Wrench, edited by Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher.