Years and Years

Emily Holland: Bobby! Congratulations on the publication of The Same Man! To start, since this is your debut collection, could you talk about your path to publishing? How did this book come to be?

Bobby Elliott: When I think about this book and how it came to be, the thing that probably stands out the most is that it was written over the course of several years without much of any feedback or external input. That isn’t to say that it wasn’t shaped by mentors and friends – it was – but I needed to write The Same Man on my own before sharing it with anyone.

Part of that stems from the intense and personal subject matter (I was too afraid to share these poems until I’d made peace with them myself), but I think I also needed to dig deep and figure out what I was after in a full-length collection. My MFA experience at the University of Virginia was incredible – one of the greatest gifts of my life – but I was always looking for someone else to validate what I was doing or give it their stamp of approval. That’s, of course, probably fairly common when you’re in a room with Rita Dove or Lisa Russ Spaar or Mark Doty, but I lost a sense of my own creative compass along the way. Getting to my desk every morning before my infant son was awake – with no one to hear out but myself – helped me regain it. 

As for the whole submission process, the thing I’d say is that I only started sending out The Same Man when I truly believed in it. That was after I’d shared it with the poet Michael Dhyne and sent it to some of my teachers and friends as a kind of offering (and an acknowledgement that I’d made something that might never see the light of day), but I was in a good place with the book and felt ready to weather whatever lay ahead. That it landed at the University of Pittsburgh Press and won the prize it won was truly a dream come true – and not one I expected or felt I had coming to me, but one I was wholly blown away by and grateful for. I still am. 

As a Poet Lore contributor, and someone who is extremely active and connected to the literary community, what is the impact of a literary journal on your trajectory as a poet?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a bit now, Emily, and there are a few things that feel clear to me. The first is that literary journals help us reach readers, particularly other poets and writers, and that, of course, is important. They also provide a valuable (and sometimes very inspiring) snapshot of what’s happening within poetry right now, and it can feel rightly buoying and emboldening to be included in that picture. 

But I am also suspicious of the assumed hierarchies and “tiers” of literary journals. As a poetry community, we operate as if work published in one place is inherently more valuable than work published in another, and that’s total bullshit. The value of work is determined solely by how it reaches (or fails to reach) someone else. Period. End of story. 

So, I put my best foot forward at the journals I admire, including “established” places like Poet Lore and Poetry Northwest and places that are considered “up-and-coming” like Shō Poetry Journal, and just hope the work resonates. At the same time, I try to observe how the whole acceptance-rejection cycle impacts me emotionally (always deeply!) and I pull back from submitting when needed, sometimes for months or even years. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t view it as a game; I view it as a volatile, high-risk, high-reward enterprise that probably warrants more reckoning from our community as a whole. And I say that – as you rightly point out – as someone who’s very much a part of it and someone who reads journals daily!

The poem here that was featured in Poet Lore, “Sounds,” pulls us towards a lot of the themes of the collection—small evidences of love, the shadows of loss, and this interplay between the natural world and the world of the speaker and his family. Can you talk about this poem in particular and the role you see it playing within the collection as a whole?

“Sounds” is actually the oldest poem in The Same Man. It was part of my MFA application packet back when I first applied to programs in 2015, so it’s been around now for a decade. I could never write a poem like this again, but I’m drawn to its autonomy, its ranginess, its love of Donny Hathaway and, of course, its love for the person I wrote it for – my wife. 

As a poem, it captures a sense of longing that permeates the collection as a whole, but it also comes at a pivotal moment early on in the book where the speaker is consumed by worry and fear. When “Sounds” arrives, the speaker is just beginning to reckon with the ways he has been relied upon to keep his father alive and the “you” that emerges within this poem, as was the case in my own life, is a profoundly safe, alluring and life-changing presence.

There is such a sense of openness and vulnerability within these poems from the speaker. I’ve always found that a lot of writers have difficulty with this, especially when people the poems include might then read the work. How do you balance the truth of the work alongside the “factual” truth of an experience?

It’s funny, as this book was in its final editing stages with Pitt, I heard two separate prose writers say publicly something to the effect of, “I’ll write about my parents when they’re dead.” While I understand that position, it strikes me as a cop out – and it actually encouraged me to do the opposite and go ahead with this book, which is complex and far from a clean or simple family portrait. 

I’m not, however, saying that I wasn’t terrified about how these poems would be read or interpreted, especially by my father. In truth, I lost sleep over it constantly, but I also recognized that this was the book I needed to write – to, in part, say the things I wasn’t able to say otherwise – and I was hopeful that it might force some really hard, and important, conversations. Thankfully, that’s what it’s done and I’m grateful to both of my parents for being willing to stand in the light of all this book is and not reject it outright or run away from it.

But your question about balancing “the truth of the work alongside the ‘factual’ truth of an experience” is a really good one. On the one hand, I’ve always been clear that this book reflects my experience and memories and is not the only version of events or somehow the “official one.” On the other hand, I think I also have a responsibility to never distort an experience for the purposes of a poem and that’s something I was especially on the lookout for as I was revising these poems. I’ve always been emboldened by Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937” and its unforgettable close (“Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”), but that doesn’t mean we have free rein to mislead or tell a story that simply isn’t true just because it makes for a better poem. 

Are you working on anything new at the moment?

I’m like an athlete with things like this and feel very superstitious about talking about anything that isn’t fully done, but yes – I’m writing poems right now and am hopeful they’re leading me somewhere I’ve never been. 

Do you have any advice for poets just finding their footing in the writing and the publishing world?

To be as aware as you can be of the ways your identity as a writer is impacted by the publishing world.

I don’t think there’s a way around the fact that the publishing world has an enormous amount of power in shaping how we see ourselves (and how we are seen). But you become, and remain, a writer by doing one thing: writing. 

I think all the time about this painter and writer in our neighborhood who’s in her 80s now and still works in her studio seven days a week. She doesn’t publish her stories or sell her paintings – and she is one of the most dignified artists I’ve ever been around, and a damn good model for how we should all carry on.