What does it mean to live, to pass through this world, through one’s own life and the lives of others? These questions serve as the center of Grand Tour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), the debut full-length poetry collection by Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award winner Elisa Gonzalez. The collection is, in part, a grand tour of cultures and cities, politics and places, from Ohio to Poland to Cyprus to Puerto Rico. But Gonzalez’s attention never strays from the personal, the emotional, “the distance,” she writes in “Notes on a Divided Island,” “I cover / without moving.”
Gonzalezexplores this idea of distance in different forms. There’s the distance between the self and the world in which one lives, between one’s perception of the world and the world as it is, between the self and those one knows best and least (sometimes simultaneously), and, in a series of poems written to herself at other ages, between the person one is and the person one has been.
Grand Tour is a stunning exploration not just of what we perceive but the shifting, illusory nature of perception itself: “a pain like light against a wall;” “a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased;” “[s]hades come to life in the gloom of walls and mouths.” These gorgeous shards, these brief and passing perceptions, are all we know and can know, a world made “perfect in its repetition of vanishing,” as Gonzalez writes in “On the Night Train from Gdańsk.” Though our lives may be brief, complicated, and fragmentary, they are all that we have, and through Gonzalez’s poem, this fragile beauty is made blazingly, brightly clear.
I had the honor of speaking by Zoom with Gonzalez about traveling between places and genres, the ethics of perception, the beauty of the em dash, and how her poems come to be.
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The Rumpus: In addition to this collection, you also have a debut novel and a debut nonfiction book forthcoming. Can you talk a little about writing in three genres?
Elisa Gonzalez: Starting in childhood, I was writing in every possible way that I could, but my serious writing began with poetry. When I was in college, that was the genre that I focused on and began to understand as more than play or catharsis and self-expression. I’ve slowly come back to prose in the years since then. I’ve always enjoyed the distinctions between the genres and the way that the differences allow you to tell stories differently. When I’m trying to figure out what the form of something is, it isn’t like, “Oh, I have an idea. Should this be a poem? Should this be a short story? Should this be an essay?” Things more naturally present themselves and you see what the right container is. The ideas that I have for fiction don’t seem to lend themselves well to poetry or nonfiction. Although all writing can be difficult and full of suffering for the writer, I do enjoy the process of moving between genres and seeing how ideas and images can play out so differently.
It has definitely been challenging as I’ve been trying to write two or three books at the same time, or at least imagining toward some books while working on others. It’s sometimes very hard to go from working intensely on some specific problem in a novel and then move to write an essay or revise a poem. I’m sure they’re all coming from the same creative well, but they don’t seem to be taking the same things from me. Sometimes the switching can be challenging, but I feel lucky to get to do it.
Rumpus: You begin the collection with an epigraph from Carlos Drummond de Andrade: “After all, the good life / still is only: life.” In your notes, you write “Not a word in this book can be severed from its dedication.” How do you see this connection? How did it inform the collection?
Gonzalez: Some of the poems in this book were written quite a long time ago, and some were written relatively recently. The book itself came together fairly quickly. I had finished a very early draft of it in 2021. Then my brother died, and for a while I didn’t write anymore.
It was a really cataclysmic shift, and I couldn’t imagine going back and working on those poems. It’s like they were written by a different person from a different life vantage point. All of those earlier thoughts and sufferings now seemed so differently inflected and, in some cases, trivial; I don’t think they are, but that is very much how it felt. I just thought, “I’m going to write new poems and I’ll figure out how to tell a different story and that story isn’t going to be about death necessarily but will be inflected by this death.”
I wrote a few poems that were more explicitly about him, but I didn’t think those poems belonged in this book. A couple of people told me that they thought that that was wrong, that they changed the inflection of the rest of the poems. That epigraph seemed to presage this, in the sense that life includes death and that part of the texture of living is the variegation—the suffering and the loss. That seems very much the essence of being alive, and it seemed important in these poems to create a ferocity of attention to different modes of living, or to the ways the varieties of experiences we have expose us to different parts of ourselves and of other people. That feels very important to me, and it’s bound up in that little epigraph in a way that resounds in the rest of the book.
Rumpus: There are several poems to your younger self in this collection. What was your experience of writing these?
Gonzalez: The poems addressed to younger versions of the self are inspired by some poems that Brenda Shaughnessy wrote in Our Andromeda. She has an amazing series of addresses to younger and future versions of the self. I began thinking about why you would address another version of yourself: You wouldn’t necessarily just go back and recapitulate things that they already knew, so what is the urgency of the communication? Why the desire to communicate? I also felt that created an instability of time, a portal so that the younger self’s perceptions could communicate with me as well, through the process of trying to revive memory or to inhabit that age’s particular delusions. All of these poems—the ones that I’ve written, not the ones that Shaughnessy wrote—are concerned with misconceptions or profound beliefs that turned out to be not exactly what I thought, if not wildly wrong, then to have developed differently. That seemed important to have in the book because of their negotiations of different distances, distances between childhood and familial life that feel very distinct from adult life, and then the more literal distances and dissociations within the self. It seemed necessary to explicitly confront the fact that the poet, the speaker, and all the spaces between those people and myself are all in negotiation as well.
Rumpus: One thing that I found really compelling was that these poems move so beautifully and perceptively through different countries and cultures—Egypt, Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio—and we see not only the different places but different shades of the self in different locations. I’d love to hear about how you approach writing about place.
Gonzalez: I didn’t used to think of myself as a poet who writes a lot about place, but that is clearly not true. Even beyond the contours of this book, there are many ways that different places have worked themselves into various poems. Since I was a child, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of travel. That was one of my primary goals for myself in Ohio, that I would move through the world, and I’ve organized a lot of my life around trying to make that happen. I’ve traveled a lot alone as well, more than I’ve ever traveled with other people, which I think is not that common. And I like traveling alone. I also really wanted to live outside the mainland United States and I eventually did, when I got a Fulbright to go to Poland. And then from there, I went to Cyprus, and since coming back to the U.S., I’ve been fortunate to be able to spend significant amounts of time in other places, including Puerto Rico, which is where my father’s family is from. I think that my orientation toward being curious about other places is so primordial that I can’t remember where it came from.
In Cyprus, I was living along a border, a demilitarized zone that cuts right through the capital city of Nicosia. The border infrastructure is constantly present. If you’re walking to the crossing to go through the checkpoints from one side to the other, you have to redirect, almost zigzagging until you get to the checkpoints, because you’re tracing the path of the wall. The old roads are interrupted. While I was there, I saw a lot of people doing what travelers do—taking a lot of pictures of the infrastructure, even though you’re not technically supposed to, with the barbed wire and the soldiers in the space. I watched people take the same photo over and over. It made me think, “You know, I don’t want to take that photo in a poem or in a story.” The idea of going somewhere and touching on the strangeness of reality of everyday life and then making it part of something like an Instagram post or a poem feels extractive to me. I do think that a stranger’s vantage point can be valuable and create interesting reflections or ideas, but it feels important to doing that in a way that was ethical.
I worked very hard in all of those poems to try to clarify the connection to the place and also to include as much as possible of things that aren’t what people think of whenever they think of the place—including Ohio. It’s challenging to write about things that you’re learning as you’re moving through the world, especially when you’re in a place that isn’t your home or that you’re not intimately familiar with. It can be tempting to try to analyze the experiences that you’re having too quickly, perhaps, rather than being as open as possible to the experiences and allowing conclusions to follow more slowly.
Rumpus: It’s really interesting to hear you speak about the ethics of perception. There’s a lot in the book about the misconception and misperception of images, particularly in art: recognizing the shape of a water stain in John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, seeing J. M. W. Turner’s painting as a “watercolor of twin flames” then learning it’s called Boats at Sea. How do you approach writing about art? Do the same shifts of perception occur in literary art?
Gonzalez: I’m very concerned with shifts in perception. In terms of writing about art, I feel like we’re surrounded by potential interlocutors, whether or not they can actually talk back, and so bringing different things into poems—whether that’s paintings or music or Aristotle, or someone saying something in the street—feels like a way to open the poem up to audiences besides me. Of course, I am the perceiving figure, and trying to sort out the relationship between things to see them as accurately as possible seems like a process of recording the disarrangements, corrections, and negotiations of perception. That also seems like an important kind of record of living. Being able to be disoriented and reoriented both seem very important in poetry and in real life—being open to being changed, or to having an idea of something changed. It’s also just trying to be honest to the experience of moving through the world, which is not just being alone with my own thoughts but constantly reacting to other things that are happening.
Rumpus: In “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” you describe Homer’s similes as “holes cut in the cloth between the world of war / and another, more peaceful world.” This image appears throughout the collection: “prayer’s bright holes,” slipping through the cracks, capitalism as “so full of holes and hope.” Do you see these holes as a way to move between worlds? How do they function in your poems?
Gonzalez: I’m very distrustful of language’s ability to capture everything, so that sense of making the gap apparent—the hole, the absence, what cannot be communicated—seems essential to me. There’s also the hole as kind of aperture: the bright holes of prayer are like opening a space between the listener and heaven, or some idea of heaven. There’s the hole as a kind of tunnel or wormhole. There are so many ways in which absence can be a way of moving between, taking something away so that something else can emerge.
The image definitely developed through some unconscious preoccupations, but it does seem very important to the book. I wanted a sense of slippage in the way that the poems were arranged, which I think is perhaps connected to that overall image. I didn’t want the book to go from childhood to adulthood in a straight line with a logically, linearly developing self. I mean, there are so many books that are more explicitly linear that I think are wonderful. But I did hope for some confusion, not in a frustrating way but in a way that reflects something important about the experience of life. I mean, we might form a narrative, but the actual chaos of memory and perception is not especially sequential.
Rumpus: What’s your approach to structuring a collection?
Gonzalez: A lot of trial and error. A lot of printing out and rearranging. I did do a lot, obviously, on the computer, but you just can’t see it until you start looking at things as if they are, in fact, pages that you’re flipping, I find. I did try something that was more sequential, with the overall story moving from restriction to a more open sense of the self and the world. Then I and some trusted readers thought, “This is boring.” I began to realize that some of the commonalities between the poems are more interesting if they’re further apart. I think the book really did unlock for me when I realized that I was going to include the poems “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” “Puente de Piedra,” and “Mirror,” which were the three most recent poems, and to me they are haunting. And then I thought, “Well, if everything in this book is going to be haunted, then I can kind of put anything anywhere.”
Rumpus: I love the way that you describe it as a haunting because a haunting is a stepping out of time and linearity, in a sense.
Gonzalez: Exactly. I was also talking to my friend Kamran Javadizadeh. He has this wonderful piece about Keats’ letters called “Improper Time,” about the space of letters as a space of improper time. You write a letter and by the time someone else gets it and writes back, there’s been a gap. The present of the letters is no longer true or, is also true. It made me think about communication as the creation of alternate time and about what’s being concealed or revealed through these gaps. The idea of playing with time was also bleeding into the structure here.
Rumpus: What’s your process with individual poems?
Gonzalez: I’m never quite sure how a poem arrives. I think this is quite boring and prosaic, but I do give myself assignments sometimes to try to keep myself writing, even if it’s not necessarily going to be good. For instance, “Failed Essay on Privilege” started when I was in Poland and I was panicking because it was the first time in my life that I had been given money and time to just write. I suddenly had so much time to manage and was thinking, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be in charge of myself. What am I doing? How am I supposed to decide what’s worth doing?” It was becoming paralytic. Then I thought, “What if you wrote some poems that were essays? Like, you just gave yourself a topic, but the essays still have to be in the shape of a lyric poem.”
I have in the past explored a certain question to see if it’s possible for me to write a poem about it. For instance, “Epistemology of the Shower” started with me challenging myself to write a poem about bisexuality and coming out that wasn’t annoying and cringe-inducing. Other times it’s more formal, like with “Notes on a Divided Island.” That was to some extent a question of fragmentation: could I get a whole poem out of a set of fragments?
I revise a lot. I’m not the kind of person who, by the time they sit down to write, has worked everything out in their head. I discard a lot and I don’t mind it. I do sometimes start over entirely—or take one line and go from there. A huge, huge part of my poetic process is just millions of pages of paper.
Rumpus: There are often wide leaps leading to the final lines. I’m thinking especially of “First Tuesday in May,” a poem describing an encounter with missionaries as you help your mother carry your dying grandmother to the van. It moves away from the central situation to a stunning final line: “Did we use dogwood switches? Did we use stones?” How do you create these kinds of leaps, and why do you use them? What do you think makes a strong ending in a poem?
Gonzalez: The other day, I was talking about a C.D. Wright poem in which she used the language of logic for things that aren’t logical. I’m interested in disrupting logical progressions while still trying to stay in the world of a poem. There’s quite a lot of emotion pressed against difficult situations, and I am trying see where an emotion naturally takes me, finding a way for that to be reflected in the progress without getting every single step in there. Surprise is really important to me in poems, though not every ending needs to be shocking or surprising or a giant statement. I think I should probably practice quieter endings, but I think that poems that don’t really change from beginning to end are not poems that I want to write. The poems that excite me the most from other writers are poems that progress in ways I can’t predict. In “Epistemology of the Shower” and “In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia,” I kept asking myself, “Okay, if you keep going, what’s the next step?” Those poems became better by putting pressure on the idea of finality. I also really love an em dash, an open-ended sense that the poem could go on forever, like the conclusion is maybe a pause or a resting place.
Rumpus: I can’t live without an em dash. I love an em dash.
Gonzalez: The most perfect punctuation mark, for sure.
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Author photograph by Simon Bahçeli
