Softness Doesn’t Mean Smallness

KARAN

Elise, I was so taken by these poems. They carry such tenderness, clarity, and rage — not flaring rage, but something more quiet, more enduring, more cultural and generational. Your poems are precise and unafraid of simplicity — what Elizabeth Bishop called “delicate things.” Let’s start here: Where do your poems begin? With an image, a memory, a line? And what compels you to keep writing?

ELISE

Thank you so much for that beautiful description, and I absolutely love that you mentioned Elizabeth Bishop! I’ve returned to her work so many times over the years. Like Bishop, I too am obsessed with the overlooked, ordinary, even "unpoetic" things and that’s often where my poems begin. It’s like a noticing that won’t stop tugging at my sleeve until I listen to what it has to say. Anything might spark it — overhearing a conversation, a memory, an interaction, an observation. For me, it’s the things we tend to overlook in everyday life that are especially worth paying attention to. I’m always collecting these fragments (something I did even before I started turning them into poems), not knowing if they’ll “become” anything, only that they’re asking to be held a little bit longer.

KARAN

In “Bad Luck,” you write: “But you can’t call it luck when the whole deck / is rigged— / as if misfortune, not men, / put her in the fire.” The turn here is volcanic — and throughout these poems, there’s a deep awareness of the systems that wound women. Still, you rarely resort to accusation; instead, you embed indictment inside tenderness. Do you feel a tension between softness and fury in your work? How do you navigate that line?

ELISE

Yes, absolutely. That juxtaposition is where the poem often begins to breathe for me. Both softness and fury live at the center of so many of my poems, and it’s purposefully not something I try to resolve. I like to let it fester on the page — I love the messiness of it. I think women are often expected to pick a lane: be gentle or be angry, likable or honest, Mary Oliver or Sylvia Plath. But most of us are walking around carrying an enormous capacity for both tenderness and rage, often shaped by the very same experiences.

KARAN

Your grandmother appears again and again — a steady presence, even when absent. In “Might Should,” the memory of her voice becomes “a shell song.” In “Final Act,” she pinches out the dying flame. There’s so much reverence here, but also complication — silence, sacrifice, withheld desire. How do you think about ancestry in your poems, especially matrilineal inheritance? What are you trying to preserve, or undo?

ELISE

Oof that question cuts right to the heart of it. It’s something I think about (and write about) a lot. My poems about my grandmother — about all the women in my life — are often acts of both preservation and interrogation. I carry a lot of reverence for her. She was selfless in ways that shaped everyone around her, including me. But that selflessness came at a cost to her own life and wellbeing, and she knew it better than anyone. Watching someone you love deal with big bruises like that is devastating, and in her later years she wanted to talk about them with me to encourage me to take a different path. She didn’t want me to inherit that silence. Now that I’m raising a daughter of my own, I feel that lineage pressing up against me all the time. I want to preserve the strength, the softness, the deep care that ran through the women before me, while also examining the parts I don’t want to carry forward. Writing is one of the ways I do that. It lets me hold both with gentle hands: what I inherited, and what I’m determined to break.

KARAN

“Let Me Tell You How a Stitch Only / Snaps When It’s Worn Too Thin” is one of the most quietly devastating poems I’ve read all year. The poem resists the self-optimization culture women are often sold under the guise of wellness. You write: “I’ve learned that a woman / who wears herself, unaltered, / is not perfect, but free.” Do you see poetry as part of that freedom? Or at least as a space where the “unaltered” self can breathe?

ELISE

Wow, thank you Karan, that’s such a huge compliment. I don’t see poetry as a place where I’m necessarily free from anything, more like a place where I’m free to look closely. To examine, to question, to say the quiet part out loud. It’s where I can hold myself up to the light and see what shapes and shadows come through. But even in my writing, I still feel that pull to make it likable, and especially “instagrammable.” Writing is where I try to unravel the thread a bit, even if I don’t know exactly where it leads, even if it ends up winding back around me. In my poems, I really just try to tell the truth without trimming it down to make it easier to hold. So yeah, I guess there is a bit more breathing room in poetry, though it doesn’t always feel like it.

KARAN

“Sky Rats” turns a seemingly throwaway phrase into something deeply elegiac. The pigeons are symbols of abandonment and devotion, yes, but also of training, of returning even when they’re no longer wanted. “Doing only as we taught them: return.” How do you approach metaphor in your poems? Do you build outward from image, or does the emotional logic lead and the metaphor follow?

ELISE

Honestly, I usually stumble into my metaphors. It’s rarely a craft decision at first, more like I’m circling a feeling I don’t have words for yet and the image helps me get a little closer. With “Sky Rats,” it was a little of both. It started with this weird, specific feeling I had whenever I saw pigeons — especially when people shooed them away. I’d feel this small ache of empathy in my chest. A little tug that let me know this might be interesting to explore. Eventually, if I’m lucky, it opens up and shows me what it’s really about. The emotional logic usually comes first, and the image rises out of it like muscle forming around bone.

KARAN

Your poems are masterfully shaped — often spare, columned, with deliberate lineation. “Wild Indulgence” moves down the page like a woman walking her St. Bernards: measured, slightly ridiculous, totally radiant. Do you think of the visual field of a poem — its architecture on the page — as part of the meaning? What draws you to these clean, narrow structures?

ELISE

Totally. The shape of a poem is part of its meaning, part of the story. I’m definitely drawn to narrow, columned structures in a lot of my work. For one, it just feels natural to me. I’m not someone who talks just to fill space— I tend to speak when there’s something I really want to say (a trait likely inherited from my grandmother). And second, I think that shape mirrors the emotional posture of many of my poems: controlled on the surface, but holding something a bit messier underneath.

KARAN

I can’t stop thinking about this line in “First Impressions”: “A gondola without a gondolier is just / a chunk of wood.” It sounds funny but makes so much fucking sense. This poem — and many of yours — centers the female body without aestheticizing it, rejecting the notion that it needs to be “for” someone else. Is this something you’re conscious of — writing the body not as metaphor, but as vessel? And how do you resist the pressure to make it palatable?

ELISE

It’s funny because that line, “a gondola without a gondolier is just a chunk of wood,” was actually the original one I came up with, but at first I thought it sounded so stupid I wrote it down with the intention of coming up with something better. I tried to rewrite it a dozen different ways, but I kept circling back to that first version. Because yeah, that’s exactly what I meant, and in the end, I liked that it doesn’t try to be beautiful or elegant— it just tells the truth. So much of what we’re taught (and what we’ve inherited) is that the female body only has value when it’s pleasing, and a lot of my poems are definitely a push against that, even going so far as to be intentionally unpalatable. A lot of what I write about the body comes from personal struggle and, to be honest, aspiration. These poems are me trying to write it the way it actually feels: complicated, inconsistent, tender, furious. Trying to say something honest in a world that constantly asks women to clean it up, smooth it out, make it prettier.

KARAN

This is a recurring question for us and I’m always delighted by the range in responses: There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem can be categorized into one of these four — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Do you see your poems residing more in one of these? Or do you reject this kind of taxonomy altogether?

ELISE

What a fun question! I’ve never thought about this before, so I’m reserving the right to be completely wrong about it, but I’m going to say a lot of my poems are of the heart. They usually start from feeling — something tender, unsettled, or persistent, maybe a tension I haven’t worked out yet or a question that keeps tugging at me. Most of my writing begins with something that’s been living in me for a while and needs a shape and that feels like heart to me because it holds the ache and the curiosity at the same time.

KARAN

Which poets have most influenced your work, Elise — stylistically, emotionally, spiritually? These could be lifelong companions or recent obsessions.

ELISE

There are a handful of poets who have really shaped the way I write and think about poetry: Danusha Laméris, Ada Limón, Annie Dillard, Olivia Gatwood, Ross Gay, Joy Sullivan, Ellen Bass to name a few. I read Ada Limón’s The Carrying like a bible— annotated and dog-eared and well-loved. Most recently, I was absolutely blown away by Danusha Laméris’ collection Blade by Blade. I read it and immediately flipped back to page one and re-read it because it was just so tender and unflinching. That ability to tell the truth with compassion—without trying to soften it or resolve it—is something I’m always striving for in my own work.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt to help them start a poem?

ELISE

Write a poem that begins with a small tug on your attention— something that lightly taps at your interest. An overheard conversation, a rogue feeling, a quirky detail in your neighborhood. Something where you’re just like, “huh, interesting that I noticed that,” and let the poem unfurl from your noticing.

KARAN

And finally, we’d love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — a film, painting, song, recipe, or spiritual object — that has shaped you or that you return to again and again.

ELISE

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Oriental Poppies is a piece I return to constantly. Every day, actually— I have a  giant print of it hanging in my house. My grandmother gifted a print of it to my mom when I was really little (maybe before I was born?), so I grew up seeing it in our home. When I finally had blank walls of my own to fill with art, I bought myself a print of it. Only now as I consider this question am I really dissecting why I love it so much. There’s something about the scale of it — how O’Keeffe takes something delicate and makes it enormous, totally impossible to ignore. It reminds me that softness doesn’t mean smallness. That paying attention can make anything feel sacred.