A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH METZGER
by LARA PRIOR-PALMER
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has published two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review, TLS, and Poetry. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches poetry at 92NY and Columbia University.
Elizabeth Metzger’s third collection achieves what only novels tend to—that sense of being gripped by a force (within it, a narrative) that drives the reader to the conclusion. The Going is Forever unveils three intimate relationships that collide in the speaker’s psyche during the dissolution of a marriage. Through poems of clarity and discovery, a voice of oracular power emerges. Unsurprisingly, Metzger burnishes just as brightly in conversation—read on to hear more:
***
Lara Prior-Palmer: I loved and learned so much from your prior book, Lying In. Then I read The Going Is Forever, and I thought, oh my goodness, Elizabeth has outdone herself. I didn’t know it was possible. I swam through the book. You’ve managed to write about difficult subjects with a lot of joy. I don’t know if that’s intentional or whether you are just a person who exists in joy.
Elizabeth Metzger: That’s a huge compliment, but I never think of myself that way. I do seek joy as a counterpoint to my other intense feelings! I don’t like neutrality at all. I’m so glad you swam through the book joyfully. Maybe what I did seek more than ever was clarity, both in my life and on the page. Though it emerges from the same interior as the poems in Lying In, The Going Is Forever is grounded in real, and often shared, moments. The poems were also physically and temporally written closer to the experience.
LPP: It almost reads like a brilliant novel, which made me wonder how many novels you read prior to writing: the narrative has urgency to it. Perhaps you don’t know where the urgency comes from. I think it might just be your voice.
EM: What a dream! Ever since I read Maggie Millner’s Couplets, I thought if only my life had a story, but then I realized that as my marriage struggled, I was separating and remarrying myself. I know, strange. I read a lot of novels during the pandemic, and even tried and failed a few times to write the novel of my own love story. When I began to write poems about my son and father, I thought, oh no, this book is finally supposed to be the story of a relationship. I eventually saw that the relationships were entangled, and whatever I awakened to was more complicated than leaving a marriage. The family I formed and my family of origin were suddenly together again.
LPP: Right, you could say that your book is about a relationship, about a marriage, about family. And I wonder what you think of Aboutness in general. Do you set out on projects such as this with an about in mind? Many people in poetry are very keen to isolate an “about.”
EM: I resist “aboutness” in a poem, but I guess I sort of envy the “about” in a book. A poem collapses our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others in order to bear them, in words, whereas “about” suggests the other direction, words revolving around something we bear already. And whatever the book is “about,” it would fail as autobiography, but the speakers are all me.
LPP: Of course, that makes so much sense. There’s clearly difficulty in the marriage addressed here, but no blame is placed on any party. In fact, the epigraph by Anna Swir is about the impossibility of leaving one’s own mind. In quiet lines such as “the odor of monogamy” or “we will meet many more times with new lives between us,” we pick up on the speaker’s disillusionment with marriage, but we don’t encounter the anger we might expect.
EM: That’s a relief. I didn’t want to write a book of blame and rage, though I felt all of that, sure. I was more interested in how the self gets demolished by a relationship that has in some way defined a speaker’s adulthood, but also how the self is remade when that defining force is lost. I think of the poems rediscovering the self through various present absences or absent presences: father, son, and husband. I couldn’t know their experiences of me, so in contemplating my experience of these masculine figures, I found a new relationship to my own gender and sexuality. As I began to question my relationships with men, I felt less limited as a woman.
LPP: That’s such a beautiful response. Do you think you can talk about how specifically these three dynamics have changed your sense of gender?
EM: Maybe it’s less about gender. When I think of myself as a woman, I mean I am an adult in a way that previously made me feel like an imposter. I met my husband when I was 19, so maybe there was a real way that I had never faced adulthood alone. On the other side of motherhood, I could stop pretending and finally be. There’s a poem called “They Say a Parent Lasts Until a Child Is Forgotten,” in which my mother asks my father, “Isn’t your daughter a beauty?” He doesn’t know how to answer. That was a pivotal moment for me. For years after, my main desire was to ignore my own desire, to seem like I did not want to be seen. But with my son’s birth, literally the moment he was born, suddenly I was seen as a woman more than I ever had been. Holding a child, I couldn’t be a child. I couldn’t hide, and it turned out I wanted to be seen more and more as my new self. Women talk about how they’re no longer seen the way they were before motherhood, but I thought, well, I’ve never been seen at all! Can I only show myself in poems, I wondered, or maybe this is my chance to write my way off the page?
LPP: I think you have an amazing ability to make bizarre that which has been normalized, such as in this astonishing stanza from the poem “Mid-Thirties Square Dance”: “At thirty-four I have ticked every box I set out to. / My mistake was thinking I could be loved / in little white squares.” The book makes me think of how strange the boxes we step into are, particularly the act of having children, though it has been so normalized. Do you set out to see through the lens of strangeness?
EM: Honestly, I write to try to clarify how I see things. If that is strange, I hope it still feels familiar in some way. Poems aren’t meant to estrange us, but sometimes in order to bring us close, they have to disorient us, so maybe I try to see the world that way. Where is the poem?
I think in many poems I am looking for signs or answers about what to do, what I want, who I am. When I felt least seen, I felt myself seen by trees and mushrooms. Even being ignored by the natural world felt like attention. Was it telling me something, or was I projecting? While writing these poems, I was always wondering, am I willing my life into an arc, into a story?
LPP: That’s a great line; I’ll write that down for your next collection. I want to ask you about metaphor—you seem to have a particular talent for using mundane, everyday objects. In “Heart Gesture,” there’s a random red marble at the beginning, which the reader might believe inconsequential until the conclusion, “he doesn’t answer but / he never forgets me / red marble exactly where I placed it.” Marble itself is a stone of such strength it almost turns the poem into a concrete object. I think you do it again with the beach and shell in “Don’t Make Me”: “And I say No, / you have it backwards, the shell stays / and becomes the beach again.” How has your relationship to metaphor evolved over your career as a poet?
EM: Metaphor is a sanctioned way to be wrong, mistaking one thing for another. The next step is to enjoy making that mistake and making it deliberately. Then it turns out the mistake is often truer than you realized. First, something is like something else, then it becomes something else. That’s the intensity with which I live, or escape. The title of the poem with the pelican, “Heart Gesture,” is in conversation with Fanny Howe: “Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.” I doubted the pelican would swallow the marble because the pelican was an inanimate work of art by outsider artist John Felstiner (which the poet Jean Valentine had on her wall). I doubted, but I still offered. That was my heart gesture. That was also the gesture at the end of my relationship, attempting to animate something that had become inanimate. Is it feeding if there’s no eating?
LPP: One of my favorite lines, “sex was a mistake made while gardening” made me think about the idea of the mistake and the casual, and how your language allows itself to be casual. Some of the sentences come through like wind, as though you’re not really writing them. And perhaps that’s why the collection is so easy to read—even when you have profound insight, it doesn’t feel labored. There’s this couple at the restaurant Horses whom the speaker observes: “She hums in understanding, / which seems to heat him like a lamp.” Nothing about the line declares hello, here’s my giant insight. It just comes and goes, allowing for its own impermanence.
EM: Thank you, yeah, I think if you’re really feeling something and you’re really listening for the next line, then whatever comes will surprise you. Speak before you think. The two lines you mentioned emerged very differently. In the one from “Dinner at Horses,” a man is telling a woman about his relationships and affairs. I envied her lack of judgment. She was granting him some kind of mercy, which we could call understanding. Just to be understood, just to be hummed at was such a gift. The other poem you quoted was my rendering of Adam and Eve as a separating couple. The idea of sex being a result of the expulsion from paradise, rather than part of paradise, made me think about the sex at the end of a marriage, the strangeness of having and not having it, of how its meaning changes for each person.
LPP: How beautiful. You know, I’m sort of just secretly using you as my poetry teacher here. “Listening for the next line.” Very nice. I’ll take that.
Can I ask you about some of the moments where you demonstrate great insight? They often seem to gather around the father figure, for example, “while my father / needled above his feelings,” which led me to think about how patriarchy has conditioned so many fathers to “needle” above their feelings over the centuries. And then the brilliant, “Fathers are sleeper trains to me / nobody takes them.” Beautiful. Do you try for these more conceptual moments?
EM: Try is a hard word. I mean, to write a poem is to try, to get another chance at a moment. I don’t like to feel like I’m trying, but of course we always are. Something you said about the father really moved me just now. This idea that there’s something universal about what fathers are. My experience of having a father felt like not having a father. Some people don’t have fathers, but why was I the only one that seemed to have a father but didn’t? Was it something about me or something I could have done differently? For me, the idea that I had a father felt truer after he died. The poems seemed so unrelated to the marriage story. I almost didn’t include them, but then I realized I had been unloved and left and not left and loved before.
LPP: I’m glad you included them. It read quite perfectly, the whole arc and shape. Of course, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the father is intrinsic to the marriage dynamic. You can’t have one without the other, or they help each other make sense.
EM: I so admire your psychoanalytic perspective. I refused to see the father as relating to my romantic relationship because the whole point was that I didn’t have one and I convinced myself I didn’t really want or need one. Fathers were the one thing I felt neutral about. Not so! Suddenly, with my father gone and my husband also fading from me, I felt free to want to be loved. In a new way, a riskier way, a way that might mean a stranger wouldn’t want me. I think in some very indirect way that coincided with realizing I did actually have a father, but now I don’t. There had been a man in my house that wasn’t my husband, at one point. So that was a weird coincidence.
LPP: In Lying In, it was interesting to hear the speaker think about desire and her development as a woman. You are very good at writing the erotic, incredibly free with the body’s desire to express itself. “I notice my nipples / shine through my sweater,” It’s not a labored eroticism, rather, a natural engagement with one’s body, which is sometimes also just funny: “the Santa Anas have blown my breasts away.” What do you make of this gulf between the reader’s possible sense of your liberation and your own experience of sexuality as delayed and perhaps difficult?
EM: Ha, I would love to inspire liberation in others. Maybe the feeling of delayed sexuality is just what sexuality always feels like for me: I have never felt this way before. Instead of an arc of desire, each desire feels the first of its kind. There’s something I haven’t had that I want. Maybe it’s true for many. This has all probably been exaggerated by the fact that becoming a mother required two celibate pregnancies, and then my marriage was also strained, and even before that, while writing my first book, I was in a long-distance relationship, and I had no idea until people workshopped my poems that my death poems were actually poems of sexual longing and frustration. I blushed a lot when I was read into a nakedness I didn’t know I had written.
LPP: Fascinating, the arc you followed. Every time you talk about being seen, you remind me of its importance in psychoanalysis, the witnessing of another person and the subtlety of such an act. Can you just bear witness to a person rather than trying to help them or rescue them? I think about it also as a staying force. Imagine the world without any seeing—it might fall apart.
EM: Yes, what’s that Winnicott line? “To be alone in the presence of another.”
LPP: Because of the novelistic dimension of your book, and the way I was able to fly through, I wondered if there was a lot of reordering. Is there a poem in this collection around which you feel the collection revolves? A secret that maybe the reader wouldn’t be able to isolate. Or do you not want to give us that secret key?
EM: I like telling my secrets, even if I regret it later. Each of the father poems refused my placement, until I bundled them together at the center of the book. The father is the eye of the storm. And while I hope for doors more than keys, if I had to choose one poem to be the key, it would be the poem “Don’t Make Me,” which ends with the title of the collection. When the son says, “So the going is forever?” he was coming to an understanding of death, but his words also helped me understand what I was writing, the way every poem felt like the last poem written by the “married” me. Every moment in the marriage felt final. But as Rilke says, “keep going, no feeling is final,” so then there was another feeling, another moment, another death, another end. All these little deaths, pain and pleasure. Every poem started with this sense of writing an ending. So the son’s response holds everything together, and I see that as a lens for the collection: The Going Is Forever.
LPP: Wow. You must have become very good at endings by now. Psychologically, professionally, they’re a thing people get trained to do, you know?
EM: Well, as a patient I’m always trying to anticipate the end of a therapy session so that I can leave before I’m left. Thank you so much, Lara. This is a nice place to never end.
