A Conversation with Bobby Elliott

Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was recently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. His writing has recently appeared in BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons. 

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Colby Cotton: Bobby, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me. The Same Man is a lovely collection, and, to my mind, a rather stunning achievement.

Your collection begins with the imagined suicide of the speaker’s father before the birth of his first son. You write, “I’d been thinking of how lost / you’d have to be / to believe you knew / everything there was to know / about yourself. / And now this sound /  I mistake for my father / going through with it: one / awful letter in his coat pocket / to me, another / to my unborn son.”

It’s a fascinating opening that made me take a walk after I read it. I love the poem for many reasons, but I think what I enjoy most is how it does not situate the reader in the easy dramas of family infighting. It roots us in the more difficult truths of our lives that go unspoken—that which we know, but cannot bring ourselves to say aloud. How did this collection surface for you? How did you come to write this book?

Bobby Elliott: This book only came into focus when I was able to go to that place you’re talking about. It took years, but once I was ready to root out the unspoken and let it come into relief on the page, the poems started to gain steam, and the book did, too. 

It sounds so simple now, but it is, of course, an incredibly challenging and emotionally complex thing to pull off. I think of a poem like Tiana Clark’s “Soil Horizon” from her first book, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, as a model for this kind of effort. It’s brave but also electric and a total feat of craft. 

A struggle for me was that I was writing about someone who’s in my life—my father—so the stakes felt high, and perilous. But at a certain point, The Same Man had an inevitable momentum to it—not in the sense of getting picked up or winning a prize, but in the (far more important) sense of the whole. I was terrified of it and yet, there it was, waiting for me, morning after morning, to keep working on. So that’s what I did.

CC: The father in your collection reminds me of what your teacher, Gregory Orr, wrote about in Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He says that across Kunitz’s work, the father is a fusion between pain and mystery. I don’t want to conflate your speaker’s father with Kunitz’s, but I find in this poem, and in others, there is a constant threat the father holds over the family that haunts the collection. Can you speak to the construction of the father in the book, and his presence across your work?

BE: Greg actually gave me a copy of that book when he retired from teaching at the University of Virginia and your question has had me thinking a lot about the pain and the mystery of the father figure in Kunitz’s poems, in Greg’s and in my own. 

I think you’re right that the father figure in The Same Man haunts the collection. He’s there at the start, and he’s there right up until the last lines of the book. The speaker can’t evade him and the poems attempt to grapple with that often painful, and complicated, reality. Even when he’s not physically present, he’s on the mind, in memory, coloring and influencing the speaker’s life as a new father. Sometimes this is achieved within poems—the opening poem, “Mondegreen,” for instance, or a poem like “Weekend Getaway”—and sometimes this is achieved through the sequencing, with a poem seemingly devoid of his presence followed up by a poem consumed by it. 

In terms of why he plays this role in the collection, I’d have to say it’s that I was setting out to reflect what it was like for me to enter parenthood at a time when I was reckoning with my own relationship with my father. The life-long dynamics between us were suddenly so achingly clear to me and so in need of intervention. And the poems emerged—in part—to help me give voice to that, to let it be known.

CC: As much as this book interrogates fatherhood, it also interrogates masculinity itself. At times, there’s a vitriolic response the speaker has towards the atypical and archetypal masculinity his father represents. One might locate that vitriol in the fear the speaker has of even vaguely resembling his father. How did you come to masculinity as a poetic subject? It’s one we don’t see very often.

BE: The birth of our son made me interrogate my own masculinity and begin to ask myself what kind of father I wanted to be. But it’s also true that poetry had planted that seed a long time ago—I can still remember discovering Li-Young Lee’s work as a 17-year-old and being so struck, and enchanted, by the model of masculinity represented within those poems. The tenderness. The claiming of the “domestic” life as one of meaning and possibility—and as terrain for our poems.

The speaker in The Same Man is, I think, a believer in these things. He’s desperate to avoid repeating the past—both as a husband and a father—and feels a deep sense of fulfillment in building a family of his own. But he’s also rageful and spiteful, too, and struggling to overcome, or make sense of, the past. That dimensionality was important for me to foster on the page because I didn’t want the speaker to be a hero and the father to be just some kind of villain; I wanted them both to feel human, which is to say imperfect and striving, sources of pain and sources of love. 

CC: Many first books can feel dominated by a sense of anxious maximalism. Whereas your poems have an enviously spare confidence. Throughout the book, I was so impressed by the emotional force you were able to find with the short line you deploy. How did you arrive at that short line you use for the collection? Why were these the right materials for the poems?

BE: Regardless of whether it’s in right now, maximalism has never appealed to me, and I don’t think it ever will. What I’m drawn to is Rita Dove’s definition of poetry—“language at its most distilled and most powerful”—and I’ve never felt any need to apologize for that. It probably means that my poems run the risk of being overlooked or thought of as too quiet or not ambitious enough, but I’ve got a good sense of what I love, and what I’m after, and it feels like my poems are reaching who they need to reach. And that, in and of itself, feels very affirming.

I love the challenge of the short, spare line because it puts so much pressure on the language itself to live up to the task of being essential and non-negotiable. It also makes the line break absolutely vital as a vehicle for tension and suspense. Given the subject matter, that felt right to me for this book, which is so pressurized and intense—and, as you noted at the top, in a kind of perpetual war against silence and the unspoken. A long, loose line just wouldn’t do (even if I sometimes envy what that allows) in the same way that an effort to make The Same Man into something splashy or cunning would betray its fundamental work. 

CC: We live in a time in poetry that feels almost hyper-confessional, in that the artifice of the speaker seems paper-thin. Some might say the poets of today have a narrow view of the speaker. In a collection that feels as deeply personal as this one, how do you negotiate personal biography and the liberties you must afford yourself to get the work done?

BE: What you’re saying about poets today having a narrow view of the speaker is interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’m also someone who loves what’s going on in American poetry right now, which I actually think of as pretty boundless in its range. 

The truth is that I don’t have many hangups when it comes to writing autobiographical poems. At their worst, of course, they can be selfish or indulgent. But at their best? You’re talking about “Those Winter Sundays” or “What the Living Do,” and I’ve never heard anyone complain about Robert Hayden writing about his father or Marie Howe writing about her brother.

My students often struggle with the notion that their lives aren’t “worthy” of poems and—for the ones who want to write about, and from, their lives—I try to convince them of the opposite. And my experience with this book has been that the personal nature of The Same Man is a gateway, not a barrier, for readers. That doesn’t mean that everyone enjoys it or finds value in it, but that would be true regardless of whether the poems are personal or not. 

As for the liberties I afford myself, I really don’t give myself many. I work from my life, and I try to be as truthful as I can. If I ever feel like I’m making something up to prop up a poem, I cut it out and either ditch the poem altogether or rewrite the line. Maybe I’m missing out, but I view it as a responsibility—if I want to traffic in the autobiographical—to insist on being faithful. And that’s never felt all that constraining to me.

CC: For all of the pain in the collection, I would be remiss not to talk about the copious amounts of joy in it, as well. As someone who has tried and spectacularly failed to write poems of joy, I can’t think of a more difficult task to pull off. How do you approach joy as a subject in your work?

BE: Early on in my life as a poet, I was a staunch advocate for joy as a subject; even into graduate school, I was making the case to anyone who’d listen that it was the most neglected subject in American poetry. That may be true, but the problem (and this is something my teachers caught onto quickly) was that it conveniently allowed me to sidestep or avoid suffering as a subject. 

Ultimately, I needed to take on suffering head-on in my work for joy to re-enter the fold and stand beside it, or, as is so often the case, to merge with it. No one’s said more about this than Ross Gay (a poet I love), and I think he’s spot-on that the two are inseparable and even reliant on one another. 

So the most joyous poems of the book—I’m thinking of a poem like “Lullaby”—are still freighted with an awareness of suffering. I’m not sure it should be this way, but most readers view bliss as empty calories; it’s tough to get them to buy in, frankly, unless you also name what shadows it. And maybe I’m one of those readers now, too. I don’t know. 

CC: For a young writer that might be reading this, I’m wondering if you could speak to your path to the first book. Were there any people, moments, or luck that fell your way? Now that you’re years out of your MFA, what helped you sustain the work?

BE: In so many ways, I think my story is an encouraging one. I wrote this book during a period of time when I wasn’t sending poems out or on social media. I just read a ton and wrote a ton and lived a ton (and went to a lot of therapy) and, eventually, found my way to my own book. My friends and former teachers were vital for camaraderie and support, but, for the most part, I just put my head down, followed my ear and tried to write the best book I possibly could. Only when it truly felt complete did I share it with anyone (the poet Michael Dhyne) and got serious about sending it out. That was always the plan, but I didn’t rush it or cut corners. I saw it through. 

It’s obvious that the first book prize landscape is brutal and daunting, and I think the only thing you can do for yourself is get to a place of belief. That doesn’t mean your book will magically get picked up right away (or even that your book will be picked up at all), but there’s something to be said for stepping into the submission process only when you’re on solid ground. 

And for as much gratitude as I feel for my press (the University of Pittsburgh Press has been incredible), for Nate Marshall (who changed my life with a single phone call), for my friends and loved ones, I don’t think anything necessarily fell my way. I worked really hard (with two young kids and a full-time teaching job) to get The Same Man across the finish line, and my hope is that these poems help someone else—maybe even someone reading this right now—do the same with their book.