Elizabeth Scanlon is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Poetry Review. She is the author of Whosoever Whole (Omnidawn) and Lonesome Gnosis (Horsethief Books), as well as the chapbooks The Brain Is Not the United States/The Brain Is the Ocean (The Head & The Hand Press) and Odd Regard (ixnay press). Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, and others. She lives in Philadelphia.
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Matthew Lippman: Liz. Oh Liz. What a book. Whosoever Whole. I have read it three times. I can’t say why, but each time I read it I keep thinking about Astral Weeks. I don’t even think about Astral Weeks. It’s as if Astral Weeks just permeates my body. These poems bring me to Astral Weeks. There is nothing really in your poems that is similar to the content of Morrison’s seminal record, so why? That is what I keep asking the God of Mystery and Intuition and Spirit. The answer: there is a sustained, brilliant wholeness to Whosoever Whole that is unlike anything I have ever read. No joke. Seriously and more seriously. This book enriches me every time I read it. These poems are the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves to love, the love that loves the love to love, the love that loves to love. The book has a prolonged and unwavering vibe like any brilliant LP record from back in the day. It feels worked on, crafted, tight, with nothing wasted and built out of a dual reality—that of wholeness of space and wholeness of world. The I and the Other. The Self and the We. Specifically, right now, I am thinking of the poem “For the Decades,” in which you write, “In the beginning, in single digits / I was the Great Depression and you / were the Revolution.” Great idea and then, at the end of the poem, “…my love, my baby, / may we never gloss the crimes / of this era.” Here it is, the endless heart and the big cauldron of the world. Can you speak to these two forces in your work, in these poems?
Elizabeth Scanlon: My heart! I’m so moved that you feel that way, thank you. I’m a serious Van fan (though this has become one of those love the music not the man situations, because unfortunately he has gotten very politically weird in recent years). I consider it a huge honor to evoke Astral Weeks as a vibe. The questions resounding in it—could you find me?—that energy is present in Whosoever Whole for sure. Riding the wave of examining your motivations and experiences, trying to make sense of them, looking for the roots of your beliefs. Musically, Astral Weeks feels oceanic to me: we’re being borne aloft on these massive, building waves of strings and more strings, and it goes on longer than you think it will, but each track resolves so gently. It is like a trance state for me. Cyprus Avenue, yes! The love that loves the love that loves the love. And maybe it comes to mind for you because of the mother/son imagery too—oof, it gets me every time. Seeing that he’s got clean clothes / putting on his little red shoes. It’s a snapshot but it’s emblematic of a whole era in life. A dynamic that carries over into everything, that kind of care, that feeling of responsibility. It is a chord that sustains. Caring. Whosoever Whole is about caring, in a multivalent way. All the ways we engage meaningfully, all the ways we resist scrapping ourselves into little bits of attention.
ML: Yes. Yes. This whole book is a love story. Or, a love letter. Or, an open-hearted journey into precision and mystery. Your poem, “For Chico With Love and Squalor” is one of my favorites because of the allusion to Salinger’s short story. But at the same time, it has nothing to do with Salinger. It has to do with the grounded mystery. You end with:
The asterisk that appears
at the end of a line of fine print
to indicate that there’s something more
you should know, some whispered aside,
insider information, that asterisk
looks like an asshole, or the North Star…
The asterisk is like that watch which makes Sergeant X come back to life, to his ‘faculties.’ It is something more. Just like the asshole and the North Star. Both are emblems of love, the primal and the celestial. I’m probably digging too far down into the nonsense of deconstruction but, really, I feel this way when I read “For Chico.” Chico is the man, whoever he is. Van is the man even though he is an asshole. Perhaps Van is the asshole and Chico is the North Star. I guess what I am wondering is this: who is Chico? He very much feels, again—in that primal sense—some figure of love and hope, something more, and this is why I am so taken by this poem. It makes me want to walk with him, shoot the shit, explore, chill, eat pizza, and go for a drive listening to the Doobie Brothers. Also, your poems strike this balance between being very, very intimate and, at the same time, holding tight to a slight distance as evidence in “Chico.” Can you speak to this?
ES: Chico does recall Salinger, and the Marx Brothers, and Chico in my usage is a whole bunch of people rolled up into one big I love you and I miss you burrito. The title is actually borrowed verbatim from the notes of Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage, and I have no idea who her Chico was but the phrase somehow (how does poetry come from these things?) put me in mind of being a younger person really struggling with the idea of defining your own success. There was a moment in the 90s—maybe it was right around 1995, I want to say—when it felt like a mass exodus took place from the East Coast to the West Coast as young artists were taking those shiny new tech jobs at internet startups in San Francisco and Seattle at that time. You know, the “dot com boom.” It’s an ordinary thing to experience the shift in friendships as some fly off to new jobs in new towns, in early adulthood, but it also left a mark on me. Maybe it was the first time I experienced that class differences really do, or can, have an impact on relationships. It was a chilling feeling, but important to examine, you know? It’s not to say that all of those friends were lost to me, or that I wasn’t happy for them. But it was one of the inciting incidents that began my critical thinking about how your work shapes your life, long before I knew much about how complicated it can get. One day you have no idea that there is fine print, much less that you are supposed to read it, and then you see it everywhere.
But also, I was having some fun with apostrophes, in a Kenneth Koch kind of mood. Have you ever read his New Addresses? It’s a good one. He mostly writes to abstractions, like “To Psychoanalysis” and “To Consciousness,” but I think the form is so appealing—the open letter idea.
ML: I love those poems by Koch. I took the Lexington Avenue subway / To arrive at you in your glory days / Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed / That you could solve any problem. From “To Psychoanalysis.” A little O’Hara in there, yes?
I totally get it. “Acceptance Speech” comes to mind when you write about Koch. This address to everyone, the whole world no matter where you come from, breathe, sing, rush into the multitudes. That poem destroys me. The line, “No one plans to live past thirty-five,” jams me up so hard in the throat when you talk about class and being or pretending to be a grown-up. Thirty-five is the age and after that, who searches anymore? Some people get rich and fat and some work in a smoke shop. In “Acceptance Speech,” everything leans towards death and graves. It’s so wistful and melancholy, and a little angry. All these balls of emotion the poem juggles for everyone. Beautiful. Like wind. That is what makes me love your poems. They are the wind. They are for everyone right under the current of flesh but not quite in the middle of the bone. Where the silence lives. When I read “Acceptance Speech,” I feel all those balls and all that silence in my body. For me, one of the great, in-your-face elements of this poem is that I feel it in my body. Isn’t that the best thing a poem can do for a reader? Who needs the mind? You write:
But in praise of graves:
they allow you to visit them
without comment…
Can you speak to the power of being quiet in your poems? Of that silence under the surface?
ES: Silence is at a premium, isn’t it? I love it. There is so much that we can only acknowledge and not explain and sit with in silence. One of my Big Issues of daily life is managing the soundscape around me—sometimes I want to listen to records all night (and baby, we’ve got records) and sometimes I’ll go crazy if I can’t have peace. Silence, also, is a key feature of solitude, though you can be silent with others, too, but it’s harder to come by that. “Acceptance Speech” is a sort of elegy. Slantwise, because it doesn’t directly address my mother but to me it’s absolutely about the lack of her—she died at the age of 29, when I was six. A brain tumor. And I will always have anger around that, because it is such a raw deal. I feel like this poem is in a continuum with your poem “Larry Levis Is an Alien That Knows God Will Always Be 17”—it dances with the weirdness of that particular sadness. That death knowledge. The poem plays on the idea of award shows, too, of course, and the weird convention we have of this public display of gratitude—which is fascinating, even if it’s fake! I love to watch what people do with these speeches. How do I tell you (you, my mother, or, you, the reader, or, you, poetry) how thankful I am to be here? How do I explain my choices and my existence? You can’t! But you do, or it is worthwhile to try, even knowing that the music can play you off at any moment.
ML: You know, we’ve known each for years but we’ve only met once and then we’re doing this back and forth beauty which is a whole other level of knowing and it’s like I intuited something or you intuited something about this thing we have in common which is not poetry because poetry has been the source and origin of our connection. It’s the music. It’s what music can do to you, how it ‘can play off you at any moment.’ Send you somewhere and you are gone no matter what is happening. That is why music is outer space and the best thing ever. I literally just found out that you have a huge record collection and what am I supposed to say to that? Fuck this, Liz, let’s be DJs on a morning show together, somewhere out in the middle of America where America is as small as a penny under the couch and everyone can hear our segues. The segue of your radio show, which is called Whosoever Whole, that makes me so happy is the one where “Cleaning Windows” fades out into “We are not volcanoes.” The city changes but not in the consciousness of the speaker. The building is built, the walls there, but it’s always the empty lot of possibility. Including the possibility and reality of debt. Of owing and money and searching desperately for that coin in the pocket. The first time I read Whosoever Whole I thought, This is such an American book, whatever that means. And it is. But today, it’s a book about the organism of surprise, how one mode created by one poem oozes into the next poem with its own tenor and tone, different than the first, and it’s all connected. It’s the best radio show and you are the best DJ.
ES: Haha yes! I love this parallel universe version of us. Poet Radio! Someday, my friend. It would be so good. In the early days of the pandemic when we were going stir crazy, my husband started livestreaming an all-vinyl DJ set from our attic called Today’s Vibe (some of which is archived here), and it was sanity-saving for both of us even though that was his project. Just the pleasure of pulling records off the shelf, seeing how they fit together—it is very much like assembling a collection of poems, looking for the connecting threads or the appealing contrasts. As writers we’re always DJing in a way, broadcasting messages, wanting to create a certain effect. Come to think of it, that livestream was all going on in the background of finishing up Whosoever Whole; the last poems that went into the collection were finished in 2021.
It is an American book because I am grappling with America so hard right now. I am feeling really fucked up about this culture, even as much as I love the music and the art and the cities and the people who make all of those things; I am feeling the despair of these times. I want to be a more effective leftist revolutionary—I want to call for a general strike, for a total work stoppage until human rights are codified, until the Supreme Court is corrected. It doesn’t seem like much to ask. It’s not. It’s not even the tip of the iceberg of what needs fixing. But I also can’t deny that this is my frame of reference. I am an American, as much as I may fantasize about going elsewhere (might still, who knows) or being some other kind of celestial non-citizen. I have to keep looking at this Americanness until I can see some way to shift it.
ML: I wonder if it is impossible to love wrong? I wonder if it is impossible to love wrong in America? Out there in the political-cultural biosphere there is no love. There is tyranny and commerce. That’s why it feels like it is impossible to love wrong because any love is good love, has hope in its love guts. One of my absolute favorite poems in the collection is “All the Water in the World.” For a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is because of the line, “Take that Batman.” I will admit, I go around in my days blurting that out to people. Take that Batman! The poem oscillates, vibrates, between deep intimacy, science, the power of water, and social commentary with the Dark Knight at the center. I feel like Batman can’t help us out but the poet, the speaker, who overwaters the aloe plants and kills them, most certainly can. I’m not sure I can say why but “All the Water in the World” makes me feel like community is still possible. The power of the neighborhood. Because of the man in the poem who almost perfects how to make the bean grow in arid climates to end world hunger. That bean, that boat. That swell in the going.
ES: It was really wild to me that you zeroed in on that poem when you first read the book, because that was a difficult one for me, one that I thought about not including. I could never tell if it was done. It refers to a very dear uncle of mine, a botanist, who we lost in the AIDS crisis. I idolized him as a kid, he was so kind, and funny, and a musician—he used to play the piano for me, my favorite songs over and over—and he was the first person I ever knew who was a scientist, who was actively working to fix a problem. The idea that you could say what if we could make protein-rich crops more drought resistant, and then join in that work, to go about figuring it out, that felt like magic to me. It was an early example of meaningful work. He was included on the original AIDS quilt—Joseph G. Sullivan, 1955 – 1994.
I want to remain steady in the work of dreaming the culture forward (as iconic performance artist Taylor Mac says). We have to. I wonder how we will know when we’re getting somewhere? It’s like healing, I think—I sprained the hell out of my ankle last week and I keep asking the internet how to make it better faster or how will I know when it’s well enough to do things, and Google can’t really tell me. Because of course the answer is that you only know you’re healed enough to do something when you forget even thinking that you couldn’t do it. Suddenly, you’re just climbing those stairs. You have forgotten you were hurt or forgotten to be cautious.
ML: Sounds a little bit like what I understand duende to be. You just forget to be cautious and then you are in it because you are not thinking about it which is maybe why the everyday stuff we do is Flamenco dancing at its fluid best. I keep thinking about, and coming back to, Astral Weeks and Whosoever Whole as modal siblings in the spirit of duende, of disappearing into the river of some besmirched harmonic dissonance. Your book makes me do that—disappear out of myself in the same way that “Ballerina” or “Slim Slow Slider” does. I am glad “All the Water in the World” made it into that book and I want to hang with Joseph G. Sullivan now. At dawn. And talk about beans in the same way that I am sad when the last poem in the book, “Aubade” grabs me, shakes me, out of myself. The collection concludes with this beautiful scene of waking, a rising, “the purple sky is the bruise / of wanting.” We want the bruise but we also, always, want the wanting, with each other. That’s the thing, Liz, about this collection. It’s got this urgent pull, call, demand, that we be together and together again against all the bullshit that barrels down the freeway and maybe if we do that, disappear into the dancing of being together, we can save this hungry, starving, embattled world, and, ultimately, each other.
ES: Wow, thank you so much, Matthew. You got it, 100%. Maybe we end on this note because I can’t ask for more than that! It’s always about desire—to be together, to be understood or to understand, to get closer to timelessness—do you like Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers? His song “Closer”? Hoping that maybe we could dream the same dream. It’s like that. He’s always walking that silly/sublime line that I love. I’ll make you a playlist and the conversation will go on forever, beyond us and beyond the generations.
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Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (2024), is published by Four Way Books. His previous collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. https://www.matthewlippmanpoetry.com/