Elisa Gabbert on the Philosophy and Process Behind the Poem and the Essay

I’ve been reading Elisa Gabbert’s essays and poems and criticism for years, but I only met her in person this past February at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Kansas City when I was on a panel with her partner, the writer John Cotter, on the topic of writing about your significant other in your memoir (Elisa shows up occasionally in John’s memoir Losing Music). It was a topic that felt apropos when I began reading Gabbert’s new essay collection, Any Person is the Only Self, a couple months later.

The collection begins in the public library’s “Recently Returned” shelf, where jewels like Rachael Ray’s My Year in Meals reveal themselves, and ends with a surprisingly moving description of rewatching of the movie Point Break, but in-between are many moments of thinking about writers (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Susan Sontag among them) writing about themselves and others—and, of course, about writing itself. “I love reading writers on writing,” Elisa writes in one of those essays. “I love writers on their bullshit.”

A writer deeply interested in meta-cognition—that thinking about thinking that is so well suited to the essay—Elisa is also a seriously funny writer, one who knows herself and her subjects well, and loves a tangent as much as she seems to enjoys figuring out what she thinks about what—or, as she phrases in the book, figuring out the “grammar in the thought” (a variation on Joan Didion’s statement that she writes to find the “grammar in the picture”).

We had this conversation in late May, agreeing to write to each other instead of talk because we both think better when we can write our thoughts out.

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Sarah Viren: When I reached out a couple days ago to set up this interview, you said you’d just finished recording the audiobook for your new essay collection Any Person is the Only Self—and that it had been, to quote you, “fun.” What was fun about it? Did you learn anything new about the book, or yourself, via that process? 

Elisa Gabbert: My word “fun” doesn’t do the experience justice, on reflection. It’s such a brief, intense, and intimate project. You’re in this little room—it’s actually a room within a room, with two doors, and air between the walls, for sound insulation—and the mic is so incredibly sensitive it picks up any rustles when you fidget, or if your stomach growls the tiniest bit, the kind of sounds that must be happening all the time, but that you never hear or notice in regular life. I’ve never been so conscious of my body below the neck! For five days I was utterly focused on every word of my book, on every comma and parenthesis and em-dash, and how all those choices I made should sound, and there was a director and an audio engineer, not in the room but in my headphones—kind of in my head. And they were equally focused on all of these things. For days afterward, I felt like I missed them. I was sad it was over. I think I must miss performance—it was almost like being in a play. I also think it will change the way I write forever. My sentences might get shorter. I might stop using so many words I don’t know how to pronounce.

SV: You wrote for the Paris Review not long ago about a period of silence, in which you hadn’t written any poems or “thought in the form of a line” in more than two years. That idea, both of silence and of a poem’s source, stayed with me as I began reading your essay collection. Poetry, you write, arises from those moments that William Meredith called “astonishment of insight” in one’s daily life, and I found myself wondering where essays begin for you. What relationship, if any, do you see between writing poetry and writing essays? 

EG: I find poems are much harder to force—you really do have to wait for a poem, because a poem never starts with a subject or theme. A poem starts with a line, almost always, some fragment of language that seems to hold all the material the whole poem will need. I do collect certain types of idea, and certain images, with the hope of somehow getting them into a poem, but I always need a line to arrive before I can start. And usually, the insight comes after the line.

I think essays are different in that they do usually start with the theme or the subject matter, something I know I want to think about enough to build an essay around, and I can work in that thinking and note-taking stage for a very long time—but when it comes to the actual writing, there’s a strong similarity in that the writing is much easier when I know how I want to begin, when I hear the first sentence and then can imagine how the structure and tone will all follow from there.

SV: One aspect of essays that I love is the recognition that sometimes arises when reading another person’s thoughts on the page. I had a number of those while reading your book (I also was surprised later in life to realize how much Proust was my jam; I also wanted to be an architect when I was young; I also am a squid, if I buy John’s squid-vs-eel theory of humankind). My favorite of those moments came when I read about you reading books I’ve also read—mostly because of the layering of that reading experience. Will you talk about the experience of writing not about books themselves but about reading books, which feel distinct?

EG: I love those moments of thought-recognition in an essay too! I think in some ways, for me, both writing and reading are essentially acts of communion. My friend Catherine (who makes a few appearances in the book) once described a bit of writing as sounding “like a real person wrote it.” That’s become part of my internal definition of good writing. There’s some kind of force we can feel, like heat or electrical currents, when writing seems to come from a real human voice, a real mind, with all its specificity and arbitrariness, its sometimes irrational or even indefensible quirks.

I don’t think the “book review” or some strains of academic criticism necessarily allow that much subjective reality in. But a great literary essay is about seeing books through a specific person’s eyes, their particular point of view. I love knowing all the contextual details of a reader’s encounter with a book—how old they were, why they read it (for school, to impress someone?), where they were living, how long it took them. What else was going on—were they happy or despairing at the time? I love knowing there are people like me who remember those things if they remember a book at all, because reading and writing really kind of are the great experiences of my life, the times when I feel most myself, and also most connected.

SV: You write elsewhere in the collection about the notion of prose having architecture, and paragraphs feeling more like rooms to you than stanzas in poems (even though stanza means “room” in Italian). You say, for instance, that the first paragraph of an essay “should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.” Could you extend that metaphor a bit and talk me through how you see architecture working across the essay form? I’m thinking, for instance, of something you half-jokingly told David Naimon in an interview for “Between the Covers”: that your longer essays need exactly forty em-dashes because that is the amount of space necessary for asides or tangents. 

EG: My essays often spawn other essays—I wonder if you find this too. There will be some aside or a tangent that I later go expand into an essay. (I sometimes think essays are merely excuses for asides.) Anyway, I did later write a whole piece about the architecture of essays. I have this theory that essays need both structure and mood. Some essays have rigidity of structure and not enough mood; some essays are all mood in shapeless space. Great essays have both. And architecture offers a really useful model for understanding the difference. You wouldn’t want an essay to feel like a newly constructed house with no furniture in it.

But you also wouldn’t want, or I wouldn’t want, an essay to feel like a half deflated bouncy house, or a party in a giant warehouse with too many smoke machines. I want some mystery and chaos, but the essay should have the capacity to lead me somewhere. The structure of the essay provides the walls or doors or passageways that let the reader feel change, change of mindset or change of mood.

SV: I was about to ask about the book’s title, but your thoughts on mood and structure remind me of my favorite essay, “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge: Notes on Rilke, Architecture, and Mental Space.” The book as a whole appears to have been written largely during the pandemic (whereas your last essay collection, The Unreality of Memory, predated the pandemic and yet was seen by some to have predicted it). There are glimpses of that pandemic world—you missing conversations with friends, you worried about loved ones elsewhere—but also a strong evocation of the mood of that time.

I felt that acutely in the Rilke and architecture essay, which begins with you reading Rilke by a window before dawn when you can’t sleep and ends with this gorgeous meditation on the way that life abuts death; and despair, joy. In-between is a discussion of space and architecture—in reading, in writing, in our thoughts—that I loved. Can you talk about writing and thinking during the pandemic, and how, if at all, this collection feels representative of that time (or not)?

EG: Ach, Sarah—there are so many reasons that writing this book in this decade was difficult for me. There was all the collective fear and grief, of course, this world-scale tragedy, but also more personal struggles and complications… I think it’s partly that I had to come to terms with my own limitations, as a writer and just as a human. I just don’t have as much time or energy to give to my writing as I used to. I used to have this vague idea that I could will things into existence just by working harder, just by wanting them enough, and now I really know that’s not the case, that we don’t have that kind of control over our fate. I know this idea isn’t new or original, but that’s immaterial. I had to go through the pain of that realization myself. That personal crisis may be more of the book’s shadow subject than the pandemic.

SV: “Any person is the only self” is a line from one of the essays in the book that circles around the story and writing of Sylvia Plath. This particular line falls between several quotes from Plath about wanting to live after wanting to die, and at first, I read your words as hers, only to go back and realize they were yours, a confusion I enjoyed. There are other sentences in the book about the self that I also loved, but what strikes me as particularly brilliant about the title line is the way it gets at both the world—all of us or any person—and the singular self, at the contradiction between being singular but also plural, and at the knowledge that we all share the experience of having a singular experience of this world. Can you tell me about that line, and deciding to use it as the title to this collection?

EG: That’s such a beautiful close reading of the title! It’s a sentence that came to me in the writing, one of those sentences that just arrive whole and don’t require any fussing over—an unquestionable sentence, in the sense that I never had any urge to move it, delete it, or edit it. And now, of course, it feels to me like the inevitable right title for the book, but I considered a lot of other titles before I landed on it. I love titles that have a kind of openness and indeterminacy, and I have often imagined people asking me what the title means, and then having to tell them I’m not entirely sure what it means.

But insofar as I understand it, it’s just as you say—we can only know the world through our own consciousness, our own I. But we also know that everyone else has, everyone is their own I. In a way, there is only one I. It’s a thought that I’ve been turning around in my mind for many years, and every now and then, it strikes me anew. And I see it as related to the project of my life, all this writing and reading, like all of literature or maybe all of art, all music, children’s drawings, a cave painting, is a massively diffuse expression of the general I. And I am a part of it.