Elizabeth Willis
in conversation with Katrina Turner
The poet Elizabeth Willis had the following conversation with Bennington Review Managing Editor Katrina Turner over FaceTime and via email in January and June of 2020.
KATRINA TURNER
Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, that question always seems a bit fraught. I was born in the Middle East, where my father worked as a geologist, but most of my growing up was actually in Wisconsin, and my extended family on both sides was based in Wyoming—so that seemed like our anchoring place in some ways when I was growing up, though it wasn’t actually where we lived.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you think back fondly on Wisconsin?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
In some ways. Arriving there from overseas, I think I always felt some degree of estrangement, an awareness of being different. I guess I’m hesitating because I dislike the ways that the Midwest tends to be underestimated, culturally and politically, but I felt pretty alienated most of the time I lived there, in ways that probably had more to do with me, developmentally, than with the place. Kids made fun of my accent and my clothes, which were either out of date or homemade. My strongest early memories had to do with an intense pressure to conform and a sense that I would never fit in. But I gradually found some of my people there, and I love Lorine Niedecker.
KATRINA TURNER
Have any of these childhood places ever made their way into your poetry?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Yes, somewhat. I have a poem in Turneresque titled “Autographeme”—that’s definitely located in Bahrain. It’s about living on a newly post-colonial island and feeling like a tiny fragment of a message, and it’s sort of about coming into consciousness as a creature, and looking at the strange customs and gender patterns performed by these people I was living among who were my parents and older siblings. So I guess feeling strange was a defining feature of my life…
KATRINA TURNER
Do you feel that you write from memories in general?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I would say less so than writing the present. I have a really hard time with linear narrative sequencing, so if I’m trying to narrate something, I’m always beginning in the present, then maybe going back and looping. To me, memory is always present within the verbal, visual, or emotional field of any moment, I don’t think of it as a separate thing.
KATRINA TURNER
I’m curious, what are some early lessons you remember learning about the world? And what are some early lessons you remember learning about poetry?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I think early lessons about the world mostly had to do with listening and watching. I was the fourth out of five kids. So there certainly was the sense of having arrived in a late chapter of the book that had been written for some time before me and the sense of really needing to pay attention in order to construct meaning and to construct identity, that felt very much part of my experience growing up, in a way that I think was good for writing. I certainly had a very active internal life.
KATRINA TURNER
Were early lessons about poetry tied to these thoughts about the world?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, early lessons about poetry… I don’t know. I think for me poetry always was connected with sound and with song and, really early on, with rhyme, but also with a connection to another person. The earliest poems I wrote were all very much addressed to a particular person. I don’t know if that was a lesson. My study of poetry was mostly happening outside of school. Early on, literally hiding behind my bed and reading. What was presented in my high school and college classes when we studied poetry was mostly not work that I appreciated. So I was constantly looking at other passages within whatever anthology we were reading, to find work that had been excluded, something I could return to, poems that in retrospect were maybe less teachable, less easy to unpack in the classroom. I appreciated the wildness of poems that are more difficult to talk about and more difficult to explain. In some cases, those are the poems that have much more of a necessity to exist as a poem.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you remember what type of poets or writers in general you were drawn to early on?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, as a really small kid I was reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I always loved carrying books around; I didn’t really carry dolls. So there was certainly a sense of the book as a companion, all the way through.
But what was I reading? What was I drawn to? When I got to be a teenager, my sister gave me a volume of Emily Dickinson, the Johnson edition of the Complete Poems. And that had a transformative effect. And then T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems. That’s what I was probably most paying attention to when I was in high school. I didn’t grow up in a literary family at all, so when my older sister gave me books, it always had a slightly subversive quality to it. She introduced me to feminist theory and, yeah, all kinds of things.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you remember knowing or realizing early on that poetry would play the role that it has in your life?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Going back to my earliest experiences with writing, actually forming letters, I think that quickly felt like an important space to me that was mostly private. And it seemed like something I would always have. It felt primary, like it would always be part of who I am, but I never imagined it as a professional option. I was a very fast typist, so as I was coming up, I had secretarial jobs and worked in retail jobs and restaurant jobs, things like that.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you feel like poetry has surprised you along the way over the years?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Poetry is always surprising me. It’s like living next to a river or something, a place you can’t control, where you’re beside yourself, it’s so full of energy. Even working with teaching poetry, that feels to me like a creative enterprise, though I think for me it’s closer to swimming than steering a boat. I think that is part of the surprise. It seems familiar, but you keep rediscovering its vastness and risk and sweetness.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you remember what it was like when you first started to teach poetry? And how it affected your own writing process or your own revision process?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I guess the first time I taught poetry was when I moved to California in 1995. The poetry program at Mills College was growing, and they asked me to teach an undergraduate workshop. And that was an extraordinary thing—I loved the way that a workshop can be this space for certain patterns of collective, collaborative labor. That kind of democratization of authority felt to me like a really important thing that wasn’t happening in a lot of other classrooms.
KATRINA TURNER
And going back to your writing, what are some themes, if any, that you feel are most recurrent in your recent work?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, I’m thinking and writing a lot about different kinds of composition, including familial composition… Communities of affinity, political groupings… So this book that I’ve been working on for a long time now has to do with American history, religious history, family history. Part of the initial difficulty in figuring out what to send Bennington Review had to do with the fact that this new book is primarily in prose. Its status both as a total body of work and the status of any of its parts—I changed my mind about it a lot of times. I’m interested in the ways that a book’s formation can reflect or model other kinds of composition that are social, political, familial, et cetera.
I’m also really interested, partly because of where we are politically, in what we can and can’t see by virtue of where we are historically. There’s a lot of important reckoning that’s just begun to address the violence of American history and the kinds of fictions that so many Americans have told ourselves and told the rest of the world about what America represents and how it behaves and how it handles power. And how that’s connected to senses of divine power.
So poetry is in an interesting place, because it does have a performative civic role. But it also has this relation to truth-telling that’s connected with the news on one hand and the divine on the other, and the fact of the body as a vehicle for “inspiration,” as breath. I’m interested in the history of things speaking through people and in what it means to say the truth—or claim to have the truth—in certain situations. And of course, the status of truth and fact seems especially fraught right now.
KATRINA TURNER
What is it about this current project that made you know it was going to be prose rather than poetry?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I think of poetry as a space that is inherently given toward experimentation. So I’m interested in the kinds of agency that language and literary form have within themselves. I can’t exactly say why I began writing the book in prose, although I think it probably has to do with the ways that lineation can feel emotionally manipulative—in offering so many pointers to where you would put the emphasis—and I wanted the field of each line to feel more neutral. I wanted to get out of the way more, to give the material more space for interpretation.
The way that prose gets associated with truth value I find interesting. The ways we read over the gaps in a passage of prose is interesting to me. I don’t know why it’s in prose, other than that it feels like an alternative history.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you think that your poetry has changed formally over your career?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Yes and no. I think each book I’ve written has had its own formal and focal identity and feels like its own thing to me. A lot of the work I do breaks into one or two dominant modes, and that’s a short-lined lyric, often in couplets, and something in sentences, sometimes like a prose block that might have a lot of space, or a series of prose blocks. I don’t know how to explain that; it’s not as if prose isn’t informed by music or a musical line. A lot of it is mysterious to me. I sometimes find it curious how we talk about craft, because I think there’s an inherent tension between mastery and mystery, and I’m much more interested in preserving the latter than in pursuing the former.
KATRINA TURNER
Is there a book of yours that you look back on most fondly or with one strong emotion or another? Have your emotions toward your books changed over the years since they’ve been out in the world?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Yeah, my sense of each book changes while it’s being made, when it comes into being, and when I get feedback of whatever sort from people. In some ways, there’s been a kind of dialectical movement from one book to another. My earliest work, which seemed clear to me, was often responded to as if it were willfully obscure. So I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to be incredibly concrete and direct. I think with Turneresque, I was also identifying specifically as a lyric poet. There was a lot of talk in the poetry world at the time about linguistic innovation vs. the lyric, assuming that experimentation exists only outside the lyric and that the lyric was a kind of closed-down, self-indulgent mode of confessional communication. It seemed crazy to me, because the lyric by definition is about being carried more by sound than meaning. So I was interested in the flexibility of the lyric and what it could do, and the ways that the space holder of the pronoun can function to do all kinds of different work within a lyric poem. Around that time, I also started exploring the sentence. I was rereading Rosmarie Waldrop’s prose poetry, especially The Reproduction of Profiles, and that blew my mind. I loved the complexity of what she was doing in those poems, and it really affected me.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you remember any of your books being easier or more difficult to create, to make into a thing?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Each book had its own issues. Meteoric Flowers in a lot of ways was a joy because it actually began in written conversation with former students of mine from Mills College when I was there. They created an ad hoc listserv that we used for sharing poems without critical commentary, and in the midst of this great swell of creative energy, September 11th happened. We had also been through the 2000 election together—I was teaching that night—and witnessed the way the Supreme Court decision went down, and there was so much unsettled all around us within the political realm that seemed to heighten the sense of the poem as this charged space of love and resistance. I was hearing the ways language was being used to obscure reality in terms like “American interests” or what is a “terrorist,” all of that, even the violence behind whether a series of events is called a war or not.
I remember reading something about a group of soldiers who was “mopping up pockets of resistance.” Now there’s a domestic metaphor that’s being used to describe something incredibly violent. And the “daisycutter” was a kind of carpet bomb. I was really interested in the levels of meaning and the registers that were being activated to hide what actions were taking place. So, although in Meteoric Flowers there was a kind of formal dialogue in my head with Erasmus Darwin, the sense of urgency in it had more to do with the violence embedded in pastoral language that was being further embedded in the war economy. It was not like some kind of arcane investigation of the past.
KATRINA TURNER
I’m curious how you think politics then fit into or are born out of poetry?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Poetry is so much older than politics. We were making music a long time before we were making statehood. So in that way, poetry is this ancient technology that is quite well suited to recalibrating our understanding of other occasions of language use within our world. If you think about the sounds that you hear when you’re prenatal: voices, music… we are born into a condition of making sense out of chaos.
KATRINA TURNER
Do you think that the poetry landscape today is inherently political? Do you think that there’s a way nowadays to write an apolitical poem?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
You know, I don’t know how to respond to that second question. In certain ways, it feels beside the point. I don’t mean to sound like I’m insulting the question, because it’s a question that has been asked for a while, and I don’t think I’ve been satisfied by any of the answers I’ve heard to it. I don’t think there’s an “outside of politics.” A pastoral poem seems increasingly recognized as a political poem, but maybe it always has been. Issues around sustainability, in particular, show that you’re never outside of the politics of the decisions you make, whatever it is that you’re making—even if you’re making dinner. Certainly if you’re making a poem. But also certainly if you’re making dinner. There are political implications to every choice you make, and that’s part of what constitutes a poetics.
If we begin to think about the ways that our fates are linked, then how we use resources, including what we put into books, is a political act. How are we using those resources? There are a lot of things people can do with their time and with the trees, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Just considering the ways that a poem can mirror community or create a line of connection seems to me really important right now.
KATRINA TURNER
What do you think about timeliness and timelessness in poetry then?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I think it’s a time for questioning the notion of the universal or the timeless. And who commands those terms. Whose timelessness? Whose universality?
KATRINA TURNER
What role do you feel your environment and your location play in your writing? Do you find yourself writing differently depending on where you are at a certain time, or where your head-space is at the time?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Yeah, very much. For me, poetry is always in a kind of call-and-response relation to the world. So there are all kinds of things I notice when I’m in Iowa that are really different from what I experience when I’m in New York. [Note: At this point a firetruck went by in New York and was audible over FaceTime.] Just the punctuation of the fire engine—I mean, here it’s the train—is one thing. Also, when I’m in New York, I’m in Jackson Heights, which is this incredibly diverse neighborhood, and the fact that on the way to the subway I can hear eight to ten different languages is an amazing thing, and that’s part of my aural reality. There are different pressures and different sensory patterns when the demographics of a site are more homogenous. In the meantime, I have become increasingly aware of how culturally diverse Iowa City is, and that’s also affected how I think about this place. There are significant Sudanese and Central American communities here—and there are interesting things happening within those communities that are affecting local politics in a positive way. This goes back to the ways that regional identity is often disparaged, and the ways that the Midwest is on so many levels much more complex than you might think from the perspective of the coasts.
KATRINA TURNER
Is there a location where you feel you are most productive in your writing?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I like writing while I’m in motion, when I’m walking or when I’m on the train. I think there is something about that sense of being in the world among others, in public space, that makes it more available to certain kinds of listening.
KATRINA TURNER
And in these spaces, then, in these spaces of movement when you’re writing, what method do you usually use to record your thoughts? Your phone? Or do you just jot them down later? How does the writing come to be?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Whatever I have in my hand that’s the least disruptive to the input. So that could be typing into my phone, or it might be writing on an envelope that’s in my pocket, or something like that. Sometimes if I’m really focused, I can memorize it as I go. But it’s hard to have the output happen without compromising the input. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to scare it away, whatever it is, the thread, the soundwave, the ghosts.
KATRINA TURNER
Can you discuss the dominant shifts in the poetry landscape over your time as a poet?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
It’s funny, I don’t really think of my time as a poet as a unit—like “this year of…”—but I think there have been useful re-interrogations of the notion of the confessional and of the lyric over the past couple of decades. Certainly there’s been a greater degree of inclusion within the literary world than there has been in the past. This is such a big topic, I don’t know how to begin. I think what literary authority is has changed. I think that the spoken word scene has really brought life in. The world of hip-hop, the energy of hip-hop composition, has affected poetry. Because language is about carrying meaning, it’s a social vehicle, it’s always between people, so any kind of cultural changes that are happening are also happening in language. Sometimes I think the language leads, and sometimes the social reality leads. But they’re certainly in dialogue in terms of what is getting opened up, what is getting shut down, what kinds of reckoning need to happen.
KATRINA TURNER
Could you talk about your poetry in relation to the current poetry landscape?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I don’t know if that’s something that I can answer. There are a lot of poets who are part of my daily thinking about poetry. Fred Moten is definitely someone whose work I read with great interest and feel certain kinds of affinity with. Simone White is another. Lisa Jarnot and I have a long conversation in and out of work. There are a lot of people who inhabit my poetic imagination in that way, and I don’t know if I would want to think of them as forming a landscape. Even a poetic landscape carries with it a sense of ownership that I think could be usefully dismantled. I’m interested in what the landscape itself is telling us right now.
KATRINA TURNER
Are there new writers that have excited you lately?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
A lot. And many who are not so new. Among younger writers, I think Jos Charles is interesting. Nikki Wallschlaeger is interesting. Poets who are not so young but who are doing really exciting work. I’ve been really interested in what Anne Boyer’s been doing for a long time. Who else? I love Morgan Parker. Maggie Zurawski. I’m interested in what my students are doing—and now so many former students—Julian Brolaski and Stephanie Young and E. Tracy Grinnell from way back—An Duplan, more recently, has a wonderful new book coming out, and there are so many more. Romeo Oriogun and ‘Gbenga Adeoba have beautiful books that came out this spring from Nebraska. What else am I reading? Right now, Eleni Vakalo’s book published by Ugly Duckling, Before Lyricism. There’s so much great work coming out—and I have so much to catch up on. I have stacks of books I want to read this summer.
KATRINA TURNER
And back to your own work, I’m curious about how Alive: New and Selected Poems came together. Not necessarily logistically, but in your choices of what older work to include.
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, it came together really in conversation with Jeffrey Yang, who was the editor who solicited the manuscript. I don’t know that on my own I would have put together a Selected Poems. But there’s early work that he argued on behalf of including, for the sake of showing some kind of trajectory. And I think what was interesting to me about that process was seeing how work that I had considered very different formally was actually linked in ways that I hadn’t expected.
KATRINA TURNER
And nowadays, do you feel that what prompts you to write a poem has changed from earlier in your career? Not necessarily that from which you draw inspiration, I guess, but the thing that calls out asking to be a poem: Has its voice changed at all for you?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
That’s interesting. I think that the general experience of writing has not changed very much for me. But just by virtue of being older, things change… You know, starting out, I felt such a desire to be seen in some way, to be reflected, to resonate in some way. Finding a poetry community felt really important as a way of establishing identity and a sense of belonging that I didn’t have in my family or geographical community. It’s just different as you go on. If you think about the constraint of, say, how many years do I have left? To me, there’s a different kind of urgency that has to do with “I want this to matter” or “I still have a lot to learn.” Also a recognition that there are things I know that are not general knowledge and that will disappear with me as other things disappeared with my parents and grandparents unless I write them down.
I think I’m maybe a little more trusting of the process and a little less likely to send work out, actually. The amount of writing I generate that I don’t put into the world is probably greater than it’s been before, proportionately.
KATRINA TURNER
And how much of poetry do you think is guided by an awareness of an audience? Do you think that an awareness of an audience, either in poetry or in the real world, helps to amplify a voice? Or does it morph it, or even minimize it?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
I think for some people, it might help them. That sense of the voice in public space actually makes me self-conscious and more concerned about revision in a way that doesn’t seem so helpful. I’m more interested in where a poem can go if nobody’s watching it. If I’m concerned with my self-presentation—or if a poem is being driven by a sense of how it could enter the world—for me, it gets stuck. I’m more interested in coming to terms with things that are more varied, less easily assimilable.
Maybe it’s a question of what the poem is a vehicle for. I think if you’re just using a poem as a container for what you know and delivering it out into the world… there’s a part of it that’s already foreclosed. I’m interested in what language can demonstrate about relation more than how it can facilitate my voice as an individual.
KATRINA TURNER
How well do you think poetry in general, as an art, handles and carries difficult emotions?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, I think it handles and carries them better than most forms because poetry is so open and so connected to other arts, like music, and because it’s so affordable and because it can be composed in snippets on the bus or in your crummy job or on pieces of garbage that you pick up—so there’s a great potential for immediacy of emotion or insight. I think there is something about its availability physically, its inexpensiveness, the fact that it’s so much about arrangement and usage. It’s not about having a big vocabulary, it’s not about being able to command an enormous narrative arc. I think poetry has incredible capacities that are inherent to its portability—though after saying that, I wonder if in some ways music as an art form might do more, affectively.
I’m interested in the connection between trauma and speechlessness. I’ve been reading a bit about the ways that trauma, when it is being experienced or relived, not only doesn’t activate the speech center in the brain, but blocks it. So the body itself is an archive of memory in a very real, material sense—which I think is part of why I find the methodology of CAConrad’s somatic exercises so compelling. The other day I heard the Miró Quartet playing Schubert songs. They’re beautiful songs, with words, but I wasn’t catching any of the consonants, just the vowels as notes in this larger phrasing that carries a lot of emotional content. So, without understanding the words, you can tell if it’s a love song or an account of a nightmare. So maybe poetry doesn’t have a privileged position on that front. Or maybe that’s why the music in a line of poetry always seems more important to me than the overt meaning of it.
KATRINA TURNER
Can you tell me a little about your poems in this issue, “What Else in Art Do You Pay For” and “My Love Is a Mirror Neuron”?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
Well, they both have to do with thinking through some of the formal questions of relation—across time, distance, biological categories, even grammatical bounds—and they are both about love. I think both poems are concerned with the questions surrounding how we identify ourselves as individuals and collective entities.
It’s strange to return to them now and to feel how much the world has changed since the beginning of this conversation, from January 2020 to June. Picking up the thread in the context of COVID and the recent protests against police violence and systemic racism, all the terms have a more material and immediate resonance. Breath is our medium as poets. And now we’re thinking very deliberately and broadly about how we breathe, the right to breathe, what it means to touch another person, to break bread with them, or to walk shoulder to shoulder in the street, and the need to protect each other, which is paradoxically about keeping a distance. What kinds of risk are involved in the ways we love, or the ways we vote, or the ways we write, how we spend our time.
One of the difficulties of completing this interview has been the fact that we’ve been living quite literally within an evolving crisis, the origins of which are many generations back in American history. How we understand the role we as writers play now—as people who have a certain command of language and resources—is complicated. It demands urgent action on one hand and a thoughtful, measured, deep commitment to thinking things through on the other. You can’t respond to a more than four-hundred-year-old problem like white supremacy with a solidarity paragraph and think that’s what reparations look like; you have to re-evaluate everything you do, whose light you stand in, whose labor helped you get here, and then begin. That’s what I tell myself.
KATRINA TURNER
“What Else in Art Do You Pay For” raises the subject of a poem as an intimate conversation with a specific other. What does it mean for the private conversation to become a public act? Do you agree with Frank O’Hara saying that one “could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” to communicate certain thoughts or emotions?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
It’s interesting that you bring up Frank O’Hara. I think of works like Meditations in an Emergency and how those two primary nouns pull our attention, our agency, our intentionality and energy, in different directions.
The poem is dedicated to CAConrad because it is in many ways an extension of conversations we’ve had, and I think their work often does similar things in different ways. We spent a week together at Naropa’s summer program a bunch of years ago that started a connection between us that has been ongoing. The theme of the week was “Fire and Brimstone,” and there was a great series of conversations about climate change, sustainability, and what role poetry might have in understanding and preparing for what is next, given the problematic arc of human history.
So, yes, in a sense that particular poem is a bit like a phone call, in the ways that it moves between conversation and action. There’s picking up the phone, and there’s picking up garbage, which is probably closer to my sense of poetic composition than the phone call part. I also think that’s the beauty of poetry’s alchemical process, literally taking what’s cast off or free and recombining or regenerating it.
I’m not convinced O’Hara entirely believed that line about the phone call, but maybe. I suppose it’s not unlike the ways that Dickinson’s correspondence blurs with the poems. I’m fascinated by the ways that conversations and letters and poems can feel like gifts. I’m interested in the ways we tend the spaces between us, what these exchanges of conscious energy do, even when they are invisible. It’s the only way a lot of women and workers have been able to produce art for thousands of years, by piecing something together in the midst of other commitments, making one thing without giving up on the tending of something or someone else.
KATRINA TURNER
What do you think it is about a poem that allows it to so easily grant agency to things beyond explicitly human subjects? Why are we as readers willing to live in so many different universes within poems? By bringing up the concept of mirroring and empathy with the title, “My Love Is a Mirror Neuron” is opened wide enough to embody love as a person, love as a feeling, love as an action, love as a reaction. How did you find the balance here?
ELIZABETH WILLIS
These are such good, real questions—where do we belong to, what is our unit? How far out can we go? How and what do we see—and who informs that?
I’ve been thinking a lot about O’Hara's line, “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love,” next to a line of James Baldwin’s, “The world is held together by the passion of a very few people.”
For me, the most important part of that construction is the call to repeated action, repeated decision—as well as the fact that love is the driving force that gets us through crises. Love as an alignment that is embodied and passionate has the power of overturning the most entrenched patterns of oppression.
O’Hara is such a great poet of contradictions. I think his best poems encourage a cognitive struggle to reconcile, a practice of forward movement through the recognition and reconciliation—rather than the dissolution—of differences.
Anyway, I think that’s the magic—in the oldest sense—of language, that it has the power to animate and grant agency. That’s where poetry has a kinship with both legal language and scripture; each of them has a performative function. They are reality-making. I think Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notion of poets being “unacknowledged legislators” is less about direct political power than about bringing into the world new cognitive pathways that can have a powerful impact on the evolution of thought over time, even if it happens slowly and more or less invisibly.
I believe in a poetics of entanglement, a recognition of the ways that we are all involved in one another’s fates and the fates of other creatures on this planet. We are all subjects and objects.
For me, both of these poems are about that in various ways. Not just about who we love, but about the importance of recognizing kinships and alliances and being willing to go for broke for them, because that’s how much it matters.
ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Other books include Address, recipient of the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers; Turneresque; and The Human Abstract, a National Poetry Series selection. Willis currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
