Becoming My Own Other: A Conversation with Elizabeth Metzger about Her Newest Poetry Chapbook, Bed
Tiffany Troy: Can you introduce yourself to your readers of the world?
Elizabeth Metzger: I came to poetry even though my family was not really literary. My mother especially was not a poetry reader, but by luck she introduced me to Emily Dickinson’s work when I was around four, and that music has stayed with me. Obviously, I could barely understand a lot of Dickinson at that age, but that has characterized my relationship to language ever since. It’s not about a literal meaning but about filling in a kind of music that maybe even precedes intention. Now that I’m a mother of two children, sort of reliving the journey into language, I realize that my coming to poetry isn’t all that different from how we come to see and express ourselves as children.
I’m from New York, though I’ve been in Los Angeles for about six years. I never identified with New York, but I definitely don’t identify with LA either, since I never learned to drive. In some ways I guess I would prefer to say I come from childhood and I am currently living in motherhood but dream of moving back.
Tiffany Troy: Now that you mentioned Dickinson, I am thinking about the narrow stanzas of your couplets and how the cadence sounds Dickinson-eque. How does form inform your collection? For instance, couplets traditionally conjure the idea of a pairing up or togetherness.
Elizabeth Metzger: That’s interesting because I’ve never been able to recognize Dickinson in my own work. Not in the formal aspects, at least, of quatrains or tetrameter. I definitely do draw from Dickinson’s relationship to words, or at least share her obsessions, such as with the posthumous, along with her oblique or slanted angle on experience, and overall irreverence.
Usually I don’t think of form as “informing” the collection so much as emerging out of the poem. Any poem I really believe in has worked more in that direction, and often the resulting form doesn’t even look like a form. It doesn’t follow any particular intention. Form is a kind of evidence to me that I am writing what I need to write—when it starts to look right, intuitively. Franz Wright is an example of a poet I was really moved by formally, with his intuitive form. He’s not at all a formal poet, but I think what looks messy in form at first in his work is actually unimpeachable in its exactness. It breaks rules but the moment you think of reprimanding under your breath or whispering god no, you know it cannot be written any other way.
It’s the same reason so many of us love fragments. We feel obviously that fragments were not meant to be fragments but somehow we also feel how time has broken them down and kept them, how that makes us feel that we know the whole. The fragments teach us what is missing. That’s how I think of form.
You mention the couplet, and couplets do have this feeling of togetherness. They come together in the same way that the original idea of rhyme literally brings things together through sound. I like that idea of togetherness, because I am often in a relationship to a “you” as many lyric poets are. I think of one-line stanzas as onelets, which is what Lucie Brock-Broido called them, officially it’s called a monostich. Whether it’s couplets or ragged stanzas that follow the shape and pacing of a thought, I see the most power in the onelet, that vulnerable island where you can strand yourself or be rescued for a beat.
Alternating couplets and onelets often is not all that different from the way terza rima work, the way Dante keeps us moving forward. You have to keep going because of the unevenness. You’re left on one foot and you have to cross the stanza to get to the next. I’m not much of a narrative poet—let alone an epic poet—but I do feel twos and ones without a prescribed pattern shares that oddness, moving the poem two steps forward, one step back. A tercet but with an extra gap in the middle to…I don’t know sneak back within.
Tiffany Troy: I agree that the combination of couplets and onelet create a lot of movement, propelling your poem.
Drawing from what you said about how lyric poetry often feature an addressee, how does the “you” function in your poems.
In particular, the addressee is at times the lover, at times the friend, and at times the child. At other times, the readers may not be so sure. This ambiguity, in turn, seems to allow the speaker to “keep secrets other secrets have rubbed away.” Is this a conscious process and how do you determine who a specific poem is addressing?
Elizabeth Metzger: Another wonderfully complicated question. I’ve struggled with whether or not it’s necessary for the reader to know the addressee’s identity and to what extent, not so much in the writing of the poem, but in the ordering of a collection. When I’m writing a poem, the addressee is often fairly consistent in my mind. If I decide I want the reader to know the you has changed from one poem to another, the title can be an obvious signpost, but I don’t always want to put up that boundary between poems. In the series of poems that make up Bed, what I care more about is the relationship between the I and the you, the fluctuations of intimacy. I think most relationships contain multitudes just like selves, so I celebrate the ambiguity as long as it doesn’t lead to confusion!
There are two you’s elegized in the book, two of my most intimate others in life and still in death, as strange as that sounds: Max Ritvo and Lucie Brock-Broido—those relationships were proof to me of this. What is a friend? It can be one degree before stranger, or/and it can also contain mother and lover and brother and son. Of course, you can’t take any of the roles literally because then that would be, well, a lot of trouble. But to me, intimacy is defined by containing all the others. It’s like you have one archetype and everything else lies within it so that the label doesn’t mean much at all. So, the “you” and even the speaker become lived metaphors in a way, suggesting, reminding, or even becoming someone else.
Thank you too for bringing up the line “the secret other secrets have rubbed away” in this context. In that poem, “The God Incentive” I’m actually thinking about a relationship with God. Also unlike many poems, I conceived it in the midst of bed rest rather than after. I was faced with many critical moments of uncertainty—at times it felt like a spiritual trial. Nobody could tell me for so long beyond fifty-fifty odds if the baby I really wanted to survive would survive. And since survival is a questionable idea before birth, I sort of felt I was on my quest to survive. I had to understand at a certain point that there would be a birth but that birth was not always live. During the many sustained months of lying down and lying still without a lot of interaction with others, the things that I would stare at all the time, like the bubble of air in the IV or a leaf outside the window become obsessions. They changed me more than I realized.
I don’t usually say I believe in God, but I found myself praying. At first, I thought to believe in God only when you really need Him is probably the most sacrilegious thing you can do. But then I started to think whether He’s real or true or not, it’s got to be those crisis moments, individually and as a civilization, that first brought us to believing. The need to. The desperation. The line “secrets other secrets have rubbed away” is all about that mix of doubt and desire for evidence, proof of God’s existence, and the almost superstitious choice to keep prayer private. As long as it’s internal, hidden, the you is real. I was thinking of those velvet stadium or opera seats—they reveal touch, the smudge of someone else’s presence. But it’s so impermanent, too. If you brush your hand against the velvet in the other direction, it’s good as new. It’s not really light or shadow, not a stain, just the evidence of someone passing through. That sort of captures my relationship with God, as inarguable and ephemeral maybe as any “you” in a poem.
Tiffany Troy: Thank you for bringing up the context in the drafting of the poems. I found the role of the silence and the unseen in your collection profound. Bed begins with the mahogany door, which opens the door to some many different ideas and things. You can address the question in multiple ways, but I am wondering how does you being in bed rest and praying to God and finding faith in those critical moments inform your decision to include the silent or the unseen in your collection? How does the idea of silence and the unseen function in your collection as a whole?
Elizabeth Metzger: Your questions are like fractals! I can’t help hearing multiple questions with a million answers that beg more questions. Going back to Dickinson, silence is something I’ve always felt was essential to poetry. Dickinson literally uses the em-dash to make silence a physical presence, part of the syntax. I think silence is where language meets and often generates emotion, in the particular place you choose to break a line or stanza for instance. In that sense, white space is not just a representation of silence but the closest we get to controlling time, steering the reader’s pace and process of reading, and of so feeling.
If you take your favorite poem and turn it into prose, the emotion changes. That doesn’t make prose less—for some poems, prose is actually best. But even then, the white space around it matters to me. A lot of poets think of poetry as treading close to the unsayable, but it’s not all about language’s failures or inadequacies either. The silence we incorporate in breaks and stanzas, or within a line, are also powerful ways to govern how much time the reader spends somewhere, and that control of time, even as we are forced to submit to time, is the way we can create emotion. It goes back to the fear of death, the allure of eternity, of stilling time. It’s that very effort that proves us mortal again.
You asked about the unseen, too, and of course it’s related—I think of clarity a lot because I often feel confusing to myself, overwhelmed in spontaneous conversation, like I can never quite say what I mean, even and especially simple things. It never comes out the way I want, which is one reason I am drawn to poetry! I like to think about how clear means two things: transparent, it can be seen through, and clear, understandable, direct and exact. Words are clear in both senses—even when the words seem to tell you what they mean, they let you see through to something deeper on the other side. For something to be visible, does something else have to be invisible?
My last poem in the sequence, called “On a Clear Night,” actually ends with the lines “No matter how much I tell you,/ there is as much I cannot tell you.” It’s an appeal to the lover or co-parent after having a child. The speaker and her partner are brought together by what they share but also changed by this new child. The speaker’s relationship with a baby who is preverbal changed my way of thinking about how love is shared through language. It’s strange to suddenly recognize that even though we have shared so much with each other, there’s this whole different kind of relationship we can’t have partly because we came to each other through language. You can’t actually know the others’ mind and that’s love, to accept that you can only get as close as you can, to celebrate it even as you mourn it. And that’s poetry too.
Tiffany Troy: You incorporated a lot of dialogue and found speech in your poems. There’s always a consistent voice of the speaker and then there are voices of other people, like “Honey you exaggerate,” Max Ritvo’s “Look up” and “Look down” and the ambulance sound “we oh we oh” incorporated into your collection. They serve as foils to the speaker’s voice, illuminating the speaker in the same way that silence is a presence.
How did you go about choosing what to include or exclude? How did you place and juxtapose different voices next to each other?
Elizabeth Metzger: First, some poets are models of that to me. Maybe the best answer is to read Jean Valentine. A lot of her poems come from dreams, and in dreams people who she had known in life (or didn’t) would speak to her. But it wasn’t so much that she was recording dialogue or “choosing” what to say. She heard these voices, but one might still say she made it up. That other voice can be acknowledged or blended into the speaker’s voice to varying degrees, such as through italicization or spacing. This is one thing I love about poetry, that you can include many voices, even in the very internal and often very singular lyric mode. So it’s not like a dialogue in a play or even a novel where you have to tag who said this and who said that. In poetry, it can all be of one self still, even if there are multiple voices. We all have multiple selves.
In the examples you mentioned, “Honey you exaggerate” was a phrase I imagined hearing, a fictional memory how I was seen in my original family. In other words, I don’t remember that actually being said, but it captures tonally that feeling of we love you, but you exaggerate, being emotionally excessive or out of proportion. We shape and transform the amorphous through metaphor. Because the poem explores my family’s perspective of me, it felt right to portray myself in their voice.
In “Godface,” Max came to me awake, a sort of hallucination, I guess. I was really sick at this point in my pregnancy, dizzy if I stood up, due to hyperemesis gravidarum. I hadn’t had a sip of water weeks and was dependent on IV. Max came to me while sitting on the toilet! The only place I went when I wasn’t in bed. It was so disorienting after lying down so long, when we as humans are used to being upright, that I had to hear Max’s voice in order to settle my anxiety, to know where to place my eyes. Hearing his instructions allowed me to get outside myself and so it felt important to let him speak in the poem, the same way he interrupted that real moment of mind.
The sound “we oh we oh,” is probably the most fun example, and the most extreme. When my son was eleven months or so, we visited New York, where I’m from. He loved trucks so we would run down the sidewalk chasing firetrucks and ambulances, imitating their sounds: “Whee-o whee-o.” On one occasion, we were doing this, and more and more police cars and ambulances kept coming. I was completely swept up in that baby vision of pure excitement. Then, I overheard a doorman tell a passerby the horror of what had in fact happened. A woman had been hit by a taxi and killed crossing that street, the street where I grew up. I was so stunned and sickened that the whole experience immediately shifted and created an abyss between me and my clueless son, still making the ambulance sound giddily in my arms. He must have been so confused by my change but there was so much language, understanding and of course death lost there between us. When I wrote the poem, I knew I needed that sound but it just seemed so silly in its onomatopoeia, whee-o. Then like a painful gift I realized I could record that same nonsense with “we” and “oh.” To my son, the ongoing sound, but to me, that togetherness “we” broken apart by that “oh,” that gasp of recognition.
Tiffany Troy: Thinking back to what you said about archetypes and of how it felt as if many of the addressees of the speaker—the you—contain multitudes of selves and it is that complexity which gives meaning to life and important relationship, and perhaps also how perspective is completely shifted during a period of bedrest, how does the traditional idea of motherhood, or even humanity shape your collection?
Elizabeth Metzger: Motherhood is definitely a fraught word and concept. The fact that we all exist because of the bodies of women has long invited misogyny. We are reduced to bodies or considered worthless or failures when our bodies don’t adhere to societal expectations. But for me, what intrigues me starts with the word “mother.” I can’t help but hear “other” in it—of course I had my mother, my first other. It’s typical to revisit one’s own childhood in the early stages of parenthood, and what came back to me was also how I had imagined other peoples’ childhoods, other people’s families and in particular, their mothers. Here, I was going to “give” a childhood to someone, be at the beginning of a new life but as the other. Even though I still feel weird about being identified by others as a mother (why does it often feel insulting?), I remember the same feeling when I was identified as a child. I remember thinking, these people all think they know me and that I’m a child. I didn’t really feel I was, though. I actually longed for a childhood, but I felt I was acting it out, that childhood was my make-believe. Of course I was having a childhood, but the idea of my life as being a precursor to some other life in which I was more real, or more myself, seemed impossible. I never wanted to be an adult, per se, but I did want to be a mother. That also has to do with society’s messaging, and I loved my dolls until they failed me for being irresponsive and not being real enough. I knew I couldn’t give myself a “childhood,” but by observing other children, I could eventually create childhood for someone else and give my own child the sense of self and authenticity I craved.
Maybe what wanting to be a mother so early is really the impulse to create my own self, to be a writer or poet. So as much as I reject some of the social limitations we impose on the word “mother,” I can’t help finding it a holy word because of that sense of becoming my own other. “Mother” is not separate or in contrast to “artist” even though society often defines mother as supposedly selfless and artist as supposedly selfish. I see the two as having creativity in common. As a teenager, while everyone else was looking for boyfriends, I was looking for mothers, these (usually) teachers who brought me through poetry, art, and literature to a new way of being in the world. It was a little bit of a secret that they were my mothers, but that’s how I thought of people who understood me, or gave me an understanding of myself, a reason to want to be in the world. In a way, they fed me my own hungers. Without mothers, I could never understand that beauty had anything to do with belonging.
While becoming a mother, many people reassured me with the famous words of Winnicott, that to be a good mother you only have to be “good enough.” On the one hand, it’s reassuring. On the other hand, I don’t want this man’s concept to make me wonder if I am reaching that threshold. I still search for mothers, and I think it’s limited to see it all in relation to my own biological mother. Mothers are many, like poems, but when you have one you are at the center of someone else, and it’s not always positive. It can be painful, but even the pain can show you the center of yourself. Being a mother did not change this quest. The word mother has many meanings.
Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today? Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
I want to say that having this kind of conversation about one’s own poems but also just about poems is really it is that same kind of intimacy that makes me comfortable with the “you” being multiple or the onelet standing alone on the page. Just the thought that my poems could be in conversation in someone’s head is a special intimacy that never trespasses solitude. You can have both at once. That’s so beautiful to me and such a gift to experience, so thank you for making me feel that and reminding me of that power!
When the pandemic first started, I turned away from poetry, to prose. I wanted to make up for lost time, to live and catch up with life after bed rest. This was a new kind of prolonged isolation, which threatened to make motherhood feel very separate from my life as a poet. Prose felt like a way of denying it. I didn’t have time to pause or break a line. I just wanted to keep going, like the sentence could be a surrogate for living. In the end, most of it didn’t feel like art because I stopped being able to distill experience or filter what was worth reflecting on. I guess it was like a diary in that sense. Now I am writing poetic sequences or longer poems sometimes that are made up of fragments. That has been really rewarding because I’ve tried to write a series for years and my will always fails me. In the past my poems haven’t even let me take them past the end of a page.
The last thing I want to mention is that Max Ritvo and Lucie Brock-Broido are the two poets and dear ones who haunt Bed. They probably will always haunt me and my work and their poetry are the answer to so many of these questions in a more beautiful way than I could ever paraphrase in the moment, so for anyone reading this interview who doesn’t yet know their work, reading both their work would be the best place to begin.
Tiffany Troy is a poet, translator, and critic.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of the chapbook Bed (Tupelo Press, 2021), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize, The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Horsethief Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. Her prose has recently been published in Conjunctions, Literary Hub, Guernica, and Boston Review. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
3 November 2021
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