Geri Lipschultz

Poetry in a Space of “Human Imposed Adversity”

            In her latest book of poems, There Are As Many Songs in the World As Branches of Coral, Elizabeth Jacobson confronts in powerful detail a sprawling panorama of the almost unspeakable darkness that surrounds us, and yet, the art that comes from her investigations is so infused with beauty and oracle and philosophy that the more we read, the more we may feel, and the more we may see, and even be predisposed to action. This is the antithesis of sugar coating, yet still draws the reader in for its elegance, the depth of its engagement, and her authenticity. In this interview, among other things, Jacobson speaks of reimagining hopelessness into the hope for “possibility,” as she offers some of the backstories from which her poems arose—in such locales as Miami Beach and her New York state childhood marked by a retrospective study of a family tragedy and her long-time home of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1.

There are so many powerful poems in this book that it becomes hard to pick one, but the one that appears in “Verse Daily” captures the way you paint despair by cataloging what is not there, and in that way you ask the reader to picture all that is missing—and the speaker (you) are there on that “island made mostly of cement” lying there, looking up…

“And you feel a slight coil of return— a slight lifting

Which you recognize as your species' uncanny ability
            to imagine buoyancy,
                        where there isn't any,
As if this will cure one failure of the self after another.”

That fascinating irony, that ability—speaking of ability—to name it and to own it. This I find so powerful and moving. And you do it again and again and again. But your poems themselves have this “buoyancy,” and a translucence—and the power is so intimidating. In fiction, one gets lost in the story, but when I read poetry, I really feel as if I’m in the presence of the poet, in her world, and yours is so inviting and profoundly rich—even in the darkness, the devastation that you confront. Your attention to the detail offers the reader this feeling of presence, as if I’m right there standing next to you, taking note not only of what’s before me but what to do about it as well. You are such a caretaker, and yet in the large breadth and scope of this book of poetry, you seem to have struck a delicate balance—whether it’s between you and the beloveds of family, or between you and the natural world. I know that’s not a question, but I wonder if it provokes a response in you.

Thank you, Geri, for these insights and for spending such a generous amount of time with my work. This poem, Hour of Lead, which takes its title from a phrase in Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem that begins “After great pain a formal feeling comes— (372),” is situated in Miami Beach: on an island made mostly of cement, where I lived for ten years, and where I watched the city, chaotically, almost comically, dig up all the streets to implement a new sewer/water drainage system for flooding, while at the same time hordes of new people were seemingly desperate to live there and new construction was springing  up to support more residents. When the sewer project was finished and it rained, the streets in South Beach still flooded! Most of the mangroves are gone, most of the shore birds as well, and there is a lot of filth. Miami Beach, when the time comes, will surely be one of the first places to disappear. Hope is a tricky idea. I like the word possibility as an alternative: what is possible for us now as a species, as the shifters of planetary balances that will surely lead to enormous global changes? Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and humans need to maintain some semblance of hope in order to get through the day, even if it is irrational. I really tried to get this feeling across at the end this poem—  that false experience of hope:

There springs a wondrous moment, like a trap that has unhinged:

And you feel a slight coil of return— a slight lifting

Which you recognize as your species’ uncanny ability

        to imagine buoyancy,

                where there isn’t any,

 2.

I don’t know if it will stay in the book review, but I see that I called you a ‘voyeur’ because of your close observation of the lives of the other sentient beings on our planet, the insects and rodents and birds—and those beavers whose “lips….”—not to mention the mother squirrel, with “the eight black nipples protruding from her tan underfur…”. Do you think of yourself as a naturalist? And I wonder when that predilection for the world of animals began for you?

Environmental Poetics is absolutely a genre that I love, and as someone who has wandered opened-heartedly in woods, on mountains and by the sea since childhood, I acclimated to instinctively. I am not a certified “naturalist”, yet, but I do have that inclination.

As a child, like most children, I was so curious about the other creatures in my world and spent a lot of time roaming in a large expanse of woods at the end of our cul-de-sac. The second section of the new book, Lullaby, is a long, autobiographical, sequential prose poem titled A Brown Stone which takes place in suburban New York around 1965. In these woods, the speaker, a five-year-old girl, finds comfort as she searches for clarity and connection to assuage her trauma and grief as a very sick baby has been born into her family.

I spent hours and hours, day after day, wandering in the woods at the end of my street.  Tall tree woods full of oak and maple and sycamore, trees that gave up their leaves to a permanent collage covering the damp floor of the earth. I loved the way my sneakered feet sank down into this muddy canvas. The thick   brown glue of each dissolving season was dense and cushioned, always moist, and seeped up to coat the bottom white rubber edge of my Keds.  A shadowy smell encased me as I roamed. I felt as if I was in a dream inside a giant acorn shell, wondering all the time about where the baby went. The baby fell asleep. The baby never woke up.  The baby is in the clouds now.

3.

There is such a melding of knowledges here, a wide view, a horizon that is vast in so many ways, that I imagine comes from having traveled, having lived in many places, and yet what comes up again and again is a focus on the environment, the planet, the flora and fauna. And then there is that mention of “songs”—of the Buddhist koans—and this brings me to the question of Buddhism there in your work…if you’re willing and also interested to speak of this—a relationship of your Buddhist practice to your work. (Of course, I know a number of writers—I think of Gary Snyder, for one, but I know many of you/our (I know I’m lots older!) contemporary poets and writers also have that relationship….).

So, I did some reading of some of your earlier poems, and I was struck by the poem you wrote, from Issa’s poem about killing mosquitoes even while praying to the Buddha—that moment in your poem about the man who had hunted the elk, how he’d yawned and breathed in fluid from the dead animal—almost dying from the parasite he’d inadvertently swallowed—and of course in the poem, you are writing about killing gophers to keep them from destroying your plants. And so this is our predicament, as you write so beautifully in your artist’s statement: “What we understand and what we cannot know is boundless, and so, I wonder, can I reside in this mystery? Can I stay with what is opaque and, through writing, investigate and discover a way into clarity?” It seems to me that you do—you name, you confront it, and your write out of it—and this reaches the reader. So—now I ask you to answer that!

I was introduced to Buddhism in my late 30’s as the yoga teacher I was practicing with taught meditation along with Sanskrit and Buddhist texts. I live very close to Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and started going regularly for dharma talks, and then I was incredibly fortunate to wind up in a koan salon led by Joan Sutherland, Roshi. We were a small group, 20-30 dedicated practitioners, and we showed up each week to spend time with a koan, meaning we read it and conversed about it, week after week, and watched how it unfolded for us in our individual experiences as well as a cohesive group. “Not One/Not Two” is a koan that I carry in my pocket, so to speak. It expresses each individual things’ (animal, botanical, etc.,) uniqueness as part of the vast whole. This koan led me to a question I asked myself, while putting the book together, about an expansive theme in There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral: How is it that something splits apart without becoming two? I like to think of an answer to this question like this: if everything is one non-separate web of continuous matter and flow, how is it true that we experience individual things with their own distinct qualities and trajectories? I think this term distinction is essential; it is how I understand the paradox of individuation: we are one with distinctions! These distinctions and continuums are in all the poems.

4.

The middle section of the book—the Lullaby (and how I love the way “Song” connects these three parts of your book—as if—if we can write about it, if songs can find their way into our lives, there is hope)—is such a poignant eulogy in itself—almost a eulogy for innocence. So much feels lost in the loss of a baby who cannot thrive—both in the eyes of the older sister, and in the mother’s devastation—its effects on the children still living. Finding the lens for that story, finding the vessel to tell that story as a “Lullaby,” really takes me back to the story of the coyote—a willing to face and contend with a manage the torn heart grief in life, and how you manage to find words for what would seem to defy words. And yet, as writers, one wonders—if we cannot find the words, who will? I guess here, I’m asking about the journey—how that middle prose poem came to be.

The middle section of the book, “Lullaby,” is one long sequential poem titled “A Brown Stone”. Here a very ill baby is born into a family with two young children. The four sections of the poem move through the anguish of this family as told by the speaker, a five-year-old girl. The parents’ devastation is such that they are unable to communicate with the children about the new baby and the way the children experience this alienation is exhibited in their relationship to each other and with a health concern that the speaker has. The poem is as much a period piece, in terms of its location and details, as it is a piece about family dysfunction and grief. I worked on this autobiographical poem for many, many years! The process of continually opening up my memory and infusing it with imagination was fascinating to me.

It was not until my mid-twenties that I remembered that I had had a sister and began to investigate what had happened. She lived in our house, dying a little each day, as she was unable to swallow properly. Basically, she was not able to be fully nourished. Ironically, and sadly, this is also what happened to the other two children in the family; they become emotionally malnourished. Once I learned about what happened, I began to remember things, and as I began writing the poem years later, my memories unfolded, and as they did I was able to see into them with my imagination. It was a galvanizing and transformative process for me. It took me well over ten years to complete the piece.

5.

If writing/ poetry hadn’t called to you, what would have been your chosen direction?

Oh – I would have been a scientist – probably a marine biologist. I entered college with this as my declared major and then during a lab in which we made slides with the live pneumonia virus, I contracted viral pneumonia! I subsequently spent three weeks in the hospital in a special bed which tipped upside down to drain my lungs. When I got back to campus, the three-week winter term was about to begin and all that was available for me to register for was a course on Eudora Welty. I became hooked on her brilliance and did a 180!

6.

From what I’ve read of your bio, I see you as someone who is unafraid of life, who is willing to go out there to meet it—not someone who wants to be a recluse and write from a position of non-action. You are active in your community—both with the flora and fauna—and with the humans. Can you speak about that, how that connects with your poetry.

Teaching poetry to others, whether in marginalized parts of my New Mexico community or to writers who want to go deeper in their own practices, is something I have done for the 37 years I’ve lived in Santa Fe. When there was no clear venue for this, I invented one. Inspired by working with at risk young women from the Pinon Hills facility in Velarde, NM, and at The Youth Development Program for men through Upaya Zen Center’s Prison Project in Santa Fe, I founded the WingSpan Poetry Project in 2013 which brought weekly poetry classes to local shelters for battered families and the unhoused in Santa Fe. WingSpan, a not-for-profit, ran from 2013-2020 and received several distinctions including consecutive funding from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. During the life of the project, we poets/educators who sustained WingSpan, taught regular classes at more than five local shelter facilities. The project closed due to the Covid pandemic. Currently I continue hosting Environmental Poetry workshops in partnership with the local public library and another project of mine, Poetry Pollinators, and I curate the Community Reading Series for New Mexico authors and poetry craft workshops for New Mexico poets at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts.

7.

What gives you hope in this world, and how do you see your place as a poet—in the event you haven’t somehow alluded to this before?

My children and my year-old grandson - they keep me grounded in the day to day – and the persistence of other creatures – their adherence to their habitual routines – often now more of a struggle for them in the face of human imposed adversity. This potency of will is impressive!

8.

Do you know when you experience something that this is something that must be honored in poetry? Do you have any cool instances of this? This inner knowing? Or does it usually happen when you sit down to write, that ideas come to you… how does a poem happen to you?

This is a great question! There is undoubtedly a conviction that this thing I am doing or

witnessing is poem material: holding a dying coyote, watching two shooting stars zip across the sky in a matter of seconds, seeing grasshoppers mating on a wall, a caterpillar floating down stream on a small piece of bark, watching beavers kiss in the pond across the street from where I live or a great blue heron snapping up a baby turtle – all these things are not only strong imagistically, but they are metaphorically impactful to my human mind and experience; they are remarkable, and at the same time, everyday occurrences that I devote my days waiting for! Close perception deepens my knowledge not only of what is observed, but of my own life and who I might be.

So, poems happen like that – an ordinary, miraculous event that may have nothing to do with me. There is an “interpenetration,” to use Gary Snyder’s term, and inspiration comes from this. Although my paying attention to the details of the life around me is key in this process, each poem is its own thing, and each happens and develops in a unique way. I am not wandering through the hours, hunting for meaning, but rather, like working with a koan, if I can remain permeable and trust my life, surprises arrive; If I am quick enough to grab them, a new poem takes shape.