AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Elisa Gabbert and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Self-Pity, Death, and the Internet

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Elisa Gabbert: Do you ever get that feeling like something bad just happened but you forgot what it was?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast, I'm Cindy Juyoung Ok, feeling ready to add a bit of poetry and light blue and un-blue to your day. I'm chatting with Elisa Gabbert, who joins from Providence, Rhode Island. Elisa is the author of six, soon-to-be seven, collections of essays and poems, including Normal Distance, published by Soft Skull Press in 2022, and the forthcoming Any Person Is the Only Self, out from FSG in 2024. A lover of surprising etymology and under-understood quotes, she wrote an essay on self-pity that debuts a new series in the July/August issue of Poetry magazine called “Hard Feelings.” So let's tantrum-soothe and wear out today as we move into and through self-pity. Elisa, welcome to the podcast.

Elisa Gabbert: Thank you so much. I'm really just delighted to be here.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's start by hearing an excerpt of your essay in the magazine “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms.”

Elisa Gabbert: Perfect.

(READS ESSAY)

I have noticed a tendency in people, when they’re feeling rather bad, to deliberately make themselves feel worse—to dredge up all their grievances, past and present—as if, to justify bad feelings, they look for very good reasons. As Seamus Heaney writes, in his version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, “People so deep into/Their own self-pity self-pity buoys them up.” It makes sense, in a way, this strategy—after I feel especially awful, I usually feel a little better. It’s akin to making yourself throw up as a cure for nausea. Self-pity is a strong self-cure. In a way, it is too reliable—you can get too good at self-pity. If it works when things aren’t that bad, it really works when they are bad. Or, you might say, when you most deserve the pity is when it won’t help.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So, Jeremy Lybarger, the features editor at the Poetry Foundation just started this new series, “Hard Feelings,” and offered this prompt bringing you in to write an essay about an emotion that's considered negative in some way. Why did you choose self-pity?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, so when Jeremy, who is an editor that I've worked with once before. I worked with him on a long essay about Sylvia Plath. When he reached out to me and told me about this series, I just instantly knew I wanted to write about self-pity. (LAUGHS) And, you know, perhaps a lifelong interest, but of particular interest to me over, say, the past six to nine months because I've been going through a very difficult period in my life and I've always felt sort of fiercely protective of certain negative feelings and self-pity is one of them. And so when people sort of discourage you from self-pity or tell you to look on the bright side or have perspective, it just, it kind of pisses me off. (LAUGHS) And I feel that people, not just me, but everyone suffers and is entitled to self-pity when they suffer. And so I was interested in writing sort of a spirited defense (LAUGHS) of an emotion that is so often maligned.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: This idea of having to move all the way through some suffering reminds me of a line from your poem “Dramedy”: “When I'm suffering, I don't ask for help./I'm afraid they'll come and try/To take my pain away.” As well as something you wrote about disasters, that there's this small but undeniable pull of disaster getting further in, maybe like people wanting hot tea on a sweltering humid day or something like that. Why is it that the idea that things could be worse or that things should be worse, the self-pity of an imagined future, helps us in the present?

Elisa Gabbert: I have thought about this so much. (LAUGHS) I always come back around to thinking it's something about control and how uncomfortable it is to not have control. And so we tend to fantasize about things, yes sometimes being much better, but also being much worse because that's the sort of release from the idea of, oh, I might have to fix this horrible situation. I've always been tempted there to think about, well, what if things were even more just absolutely disastrous.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, the lack of control leads to a need for agency and the fantasizing one way or another creates that sense. And maybe there's a feeling that if you go all the way to, through then there's some ending. There's some way that it can't get any worse than that and then it can only get better.

Elisa Gabbert: Right, and I think that's like the impulse behind, you know, when people say like, “I want to kill myself,” almost rhetorically, it's not necessarily ironic or sarcastic even. It's more just like giving voice to an impulse of like, I want to have control over my own demise. Even if you don't actually want to die at all. Like, you know, like if you fear death and you fear pain, you could still find yourself saying that just because it's this like ultimate, “I am grabbing control of my destiny,” kind of fantasy. I'm so interested in the sort of hyperbole of self-pity that, you know, it becomes more interesting when it's just completely over the top and there's just a too-muchness about it. Because there's not really an appropriate amount of self-pity, in a way, (LAUGHS) like it's always considered too much. And so why not too much too much.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. I was once in a bookshop cafe and this woman told a very endearing story about her younger brother, about when they were children and their family was driving on the Long Island Expressway. And he was young and he said, “No one understands me. No one on the LEI understands me.” And I associate self-pity with youth in that way. There's a kind of cuteness because it's like this complicated emotion of, you know, feeling unfairly misunderstood not only by my family but by the highway. I'm curious if you associate it with childhood at all in that way.

Elisa Gabbert: Absolutely. I think, you know, children are sort of the only entities (LAUGHS) that we sort of allow to indulge and really even luxuriate in self-pity to throw tantrums. Like I don't have children, but, you know, many of my friends do. And the more enlightened among them will say like, oh, you really can't like, punish your children for throwing a tantrum because they don't have control over their emotions. They just don't really know what they're doing. You know, again, we come back to control. Like in a way, it's unfortunate that as adults we do have control because we don't want it all the time. Like we would rather just throw a tantrum. And I feel very much like I'm returning to my childhood self and regressing when I indulge in self-pity. But I do it because it works. It helps. It makes me feel better.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's soothing.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. I'm sorry to hear that it's been a difficult several months. I think that self-pity does seem like a hard feeling that is in relationship with maybe even harder feelings, maybe larger feelings.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. It's one of those. (SIGHS) I keep coming back to control. It's a reaction to circumstances which are out of our control. But I think that we do have control to some extent over our emotions. We can kind of choose like what room we want to be in, what mood we want to be in, and we can sort of choose, “I'm going to indulge in self-pity tonight.” Like it's having, you know, a spa night of self-care except the self-care is pity. To me, that is a way to wrestle control from my circumstances. I find that crying, for example, absolutely makes me feel better, um, I must release endorphins or something.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And also, why should it be an indulgence, right? It's just a choice. It doesn’t – there's nothing wrong. There's nothing you're taking away. It doesn't have to be this sort of treat as well, I think.

Elisa Gabbert: Well, you know, sometimes people do feel you are taking something away from them, like you are inflicting your suffering on my personal space by feeling pity around me. It is sort of a way of like flexing and flailing and making your own space a little bigger. So of course one has to be aware and responsible about it, but that's part of why it makes you feel better, right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let's hear the end of the essay “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms.”

Elisa Gabbert:

(READS ESSAY)

Those who despise self-pity always offer perspective. In his essay “Why Bother?” Jonathan Franzen writes, “How ridiculous the self-pity of the writer in the late twentieth century can seem in light of, say, Herman Melville’s life.” But why should the idea that Herman Melville suffered make us feel better? I must admit, it often does—I’ll read any number of descriptions of Melville’s abject career failures. (Here’s another, via Stephen Marche: “His fate was like the sick joke of some cruel god.”) But why should it? Isn’t that a cruelty on our part? Melville didn’t sacrifice happiness to save us. And why should the idea that things could be worse help? Things could be worse may be one of those lies that allows us to live, obscuring the truer truth: Things will be worse. You may not have the worst life possible, but your own, specific life will contain more suffering than it does now. And you’re the one who will have to feel it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So I wanted to ask also about kind of growing up on the Internet. You have written poems and essays that appeared first on blogs, you even had a blog poem sort of series. And I would just imagine that there were different pressures or norms being acknowledged or internalized online that might connect to self-pity or deny self-pity. What was it like when you were first starting to blog or putting your poems on the Internet, and what kinds of writing were you thinking through?

Elisa Gabbert: Oh, it was so different then. Um, it was around 2005, 2006, when I first started writing a blog. The Internet was younger, of course, I was younger too. It felt incredibly free at the time. You know, I had a very small to nonexistent audience at the time and so it was just purely fun for me. I was just like playing around, you know. I still really love writing but that was a way for me to practice the love of writing with absolutely no pressure, no stakes. I was just doing it for the pleasure of it, for nothing else. And, you know, if it turned out people like to read it, you know, that was just a nice little bonus for me. But yeah, it felt very free but also it was a weird time in this kind of indie alt-lit era. It was quite misogynist. I have occasionally revisited some of the blogs that were popular during that time and, or just tried to tell people like you would not believe how different it was just ten or fifteen years ago. Like spaces were very male-dominated and there was a lot of aggression and exclusion and really hostility towards just being a feminist that I feel like that has changed radically in the past ten or fifteen years.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Do you feel like you witnessed that happening slowly, the change, or was it only looking back that you can see how much things have shifted?

Elisa Gabbert: It's really only looking back. I think, you know, over the past five years there was just this massive reckoning happening everywhere, you know, in culture at large but also on the Internet and that just hadn't really happened yet when I first started blogging. And, you know, I think partly because I didn't have like a reputation to protect or anything like that, like I could afford to sort of be ballsy and tell people off and like make a case for feminism.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh yes.

Elisa Gabbert: And I'm sort of like proud of my younger self for doing that. But yeah, it was mostly just total pure play and freedom. I feel lucky that I stumbled into that because I got so much good writing practice then without immediately trying to publish everything in sort of prestigious venues. And I met a lot of fellow writers and editors that I ended up working with down the line, and it was just really good for me. I think that kind of low-stakes work is really, really important for writerly development.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it's also interesting how stakes change. That the fact that it felt low stakes maybe it would be very different now to be that age now on the Internet.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I think young people now know a lot more than I did. (LAUGHS) There's a lot more …

Cindy Juyoung Ok: More to fear.

Elisa Gabbert: … like more information available. So kids in their twenties, just out of college, I didn't know anything. Now I meet kids who are like full-on socialist. They're like just totally empowered. Amazing. I was not that informed. When I got into MFA I had no idea how to look for funding. Like I just went to the place that accepted me and went into debt, which I recently finally paid off. So that's great.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, congratulations.

Elisa Gabbert: Thank you. Yeah, I think kids are a lot more… “Kids,” you know, that's very condescending of me. Young adults, younger adults than me are just more informed now and like they sort of know what's up because there has been this sort of very public reckoning.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's a poem that deals with self-pity so well in Normal Distance, your latest poetry collection, “Desiderata,” which broadly means, I think, things wanted. Let's hear an excerpt from it because I think it connects to today's conversation and to a broader look at self-pity.

Elisa Gabbert: (READS POEM)

Do you ever get that feeling like something bad just happened but you forgot what it was?

I want to say something negative about it.

I want to say something, but nothing comes to mind that’s not a cliché or a lie.

I want someone to apologize to me, but not a specific person, and not for a specific thing.

I want to go to sleep and wake up and not be a terrible person.

I want to donate my personality to science.

I don’t particularly want to suffer and then die in a war.

I don’t want TO DIE, I just want to BE DEAD.

Wish my mind could be freed from this rickety carcass.

I wish “war” didn’t have such noble connotations.

I don’t understand what’s so great about eclipses; we don’t want for signs of doom.

I’ll go gentle into that good night if I fucking want to.

I want nothing so much as a real operatic cry. Like, on stage.

I wish, at the end of each day, the judges would tell me I’m “safe.”

I wish I was in a hotel right now.

I never close the windows on planes.

People who close the windows on planes: I guess you don’t want to feel melancholy and golden and sublime?

I always wanted dramatic, deep-set eyes and a widow’s peak.

Now, of course, I want to walk into the sea.

I don’t want to feel good, I want to feel sad. Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point.

It’s not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy.

(POEM FADES OUT)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's so interesting to think about self-pity as a way of thinking of more suffering because I think sometimes I think of self-pity as a way to sort of logic my way out of a feeling and think it should have been better. Why is this so bad? Like when my grandmother died as I was driving cross-country early in the year and I was alone driving and I was very upset, but I had the self-pitying way of grieving because I felt very self-righteous and angry that she had died of Covid, because she had been locked up for so long, she was in this nursing home in Korea and so she was locked up in 2019. So I had this self-pity and it was, you know, a way to focus this grief. But it was more of this idea of like, well, it should have been better. And your essay talks some more about the kind of way things could be worse in other people's lives, in our future lives and the soothing of that.

Elisa Gabbert: I'm so sorry about your grandmother I just wanted to say. Yeah, I think we want things to be either better or worse. It's like it's reality that is so intolerable. Because reality doesn't live up to either our best hopes or our worst fears. It's just always disappointing, you know? (LAUGHS) I feel this so much more acutely now that I'm in my forties. You know, the whole idea of the midlife crisis, which I used to think sounded very quaint. It sounded like something from like romantic comedy movies from the eighties.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, a sports car.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. That's what people's dads go

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: through when they're divorcing. But now I feel the force, oh, crisis, that's what it is. It's a crisis of realizing the illusion of freedom in your youth. It's no longer a viable illusion. The hallway is a lot shorter. So that instinct of self-pity, you do feel bad that things aren't better, but the wishing for something worse is still a way to fantasize about your life being different because the way your life is is a kind of trap.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So is that realization and is that shift and feeling of crisis about mortality, or is it something more complicated about the present moment and its disappointments?

Elisa Gabbert: I think it is at base about mortality. And I don't know if you've ever read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. I really love Freudian psychoanalytic writing. I've never had a psychotherapist but I just I love the language and just the sort of ridiculousness of it. (LAUGHS) It's hyperbolic. And yeah, Ernest Becker is this sort of post-Freudian thinker who wrote this book in the seventies that was quite influential. And then people just kind of stopped reading it and talking about it as far as I can tell. But I read it last year and it absolutely blew my mind. The thesis is very simple. It's just sort of like, oh yeah, basically everything we do as humans is in service of the denial of death. Like we just can't handle the idea that we're going to become worm food. And that's why we have religion and that's why we have writing careers (LAUGHS) and kids and so forth. It sounds cynical but it's actually a really beautiful. It's just like a fascinating book even though it just keeps making that same point over and over

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: for 300 pages or whatever.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Like, we got it. We got it in the title.

Elisa Gabbert: But I loved it, yeah, and I couldn't get enough. But yeah, ever since I read it I do always come back to yeah, that's probably about the fear of death. Yeah. And I tend to think even a lot of climate anxiety, climate grief in sort of the way it makes our own deaths feel even more death-like. There's this over-death of, oh, wow, not only am I personally going to die and go away and be forgotten, maybe I won't even be in a library in two hundred years because maybe all the libraries will be underwater. That's just like this additional existential insult. You know, obviously I care about the planet for its own (LAUGHS) and its own right.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: No, I think it's very true that there's a mass death drive that's very scary. I mean, similar to mass shootings and the way that changes grief and meaning.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of the things we sort of participate in that are larger than us feel like a bit of a way out of death and imagining that we won't continue on forever, which one way or another we're not going to continue forever like, you know, the sun will explode. But we'd like it to be more forever than it now seems like it's going to be.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think that you would really like analysis

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: if it ever becomes possible. Because I can confirm as someone who also was very interested in analysis and then I had the opportunity to do it because my insurance covered, you know, one session a day. And so I had the opportunity to do it and it was definitely true that people who are intellectually interested by it also are very emotionally engaged by it, that there's a connection for the process.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I think it would be fascinating. I only just learned recently and what you just said kind of verbally confirmed it, that you have to go like at least three or four times a week or it doesn't count.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: That, just my jaw dropped. I have a friend who's doing that now and I called her so she could tell me all about it but I was just like, I don't understand how you have time for that for self-knowledge.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it's very difficult. Part of mine was on Zoom, which is funny or on Doxy or whatever. And so what we would do because she was very classical like it was couch, I never looked at her. And so we would, on Zoom, I would set up the computer to be facing the back of my head, and we would just continue this hilarious (LAUGHS)

Elisa Gabbert: That's amazing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: setup.

Elisa Gabbert: I'm jealous. Honestly, I'm jealous. I wanna like quit my job and just...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I know it is very time-consuming. I was in grad school but I think that if it ever happens that it becomes possible logistically, I think that you would find it really interesting.

Elisa Gabbert: Maybe I'll apply for a grant just (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, it's all research.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I'll come up with a book proposal about analysis and this will be how I get to do it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I also find it really charming how often you've written about enemies,

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: the word enemy coming up in multiple books. I actually think many poets you love have done the same because June Jordan has, Louise Gluck has, Sylvia Plath has.

Elisa Gabbert: Oh, that June Jordan poem about enemies is so good.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, it's lovely. Elisa writes about it very beautifully in the Times. So you have talked about enemies in a serious way, like analyzing our need to use that concept of the other to affirm an idea of the self and a way to project outward. But you also use the term to sometimes talk about very hilarious dynamics, like the more petty side of things,

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: which I love. Is there a relationship to your writing with the imagining of like the more kind of trivial foes?

Elisa Gabbert: You know, it's funny that you say like, oh, I can be funny about it too. I feel like when I'm writing non-fiction about, you know, like the idea of inventing an enemy so that you can define yourself in contrast because humans need war to create meaning. You know, I sort of take that very seriously. But then when I enter the space of a poem I can be much more sort of irreverent. And this is why I can never completely give up writing poems, (LAUGHS) even though I often go a very long time without writing a poem. I haven't written a poem in a long time. But the reason I return to them is because it is kind of like blogging, a sort of freeing space where you don't always have to tell the truth and you don't have to be like fully committed to the things you say because lines are more like conjectures. (LAUGHS) They're not facts.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That is so true. Yeah, words can also mean different things in a poem. They can be separated from their connotations whereas I definitely feel a pressure when I write prose, “Is this sentence true and is the opposite not true?” Which I would never think in a poem.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, I feel the exact same way. And the poem I feel is almost like this theatrical space where I'm delivering this sort of monologue. And even if I'm not thinking of it consciously of like, “oh, this is the speaker,” like I'm writing a college essay. Like there is, there's a speaker, there's a persona. It's like extra-me or some version of me that, you know, I don't have to be tomorrow, which, you know, for better or worse, because I don't think readers always understand that. I have seen writing online where somebody was attributing a thought and a poem to me, the author, which is appalling. But yeah, that's why you should never read anything about (LAUGHS) why people read about your work.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think it's interesting that, especially over time, it would be a quote like, I mean, this happens so often with poets. A quote will get connected to a writer and the context that it's in or maybe the irony or the kind of persona that it came from is totally erased and it's just your name.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. You know that I'm fascinated by that. Like quotes that are taken out of–

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Frost

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. Frost. Yes. Frost lines are so often taken out of context. And now he has this sort of meta reputation as a poet who's always taken out of context to the point that I'm like, well, no, yeah, actually he didn't mean some of that stuff.

(BOTH LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. We went too far the other way.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. Joan Didion also was always sort of misquoted and her lines often mean nothing what they actually mean when you see them in the paragraph they came from, the way they're bandied about. I'm sorry, what was the actual question?

(BOTH LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Thinking about your enemies.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes, enemies. It's funny. That feels like almost a relic of sort of the younger poet me, my younger writer persona where I could be a little bit more adversarial, I feel, than I can be now—publicly adversarial and just saucy. And, you know, I honestly kind of hate it

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mmm.

Elisa Gabbert: that I feel now as like a more like quote unquote public figure, I have to be on best behavior.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What is it that you feel afraid of?

Elisa Gabbert: It's not that I'm afraid. It's that, I mean, I would judge somebody of my, I feel like I have to use quote marks around these words, my stature. I don't know that I have all that much stature but still other people seem to think I do. So like I would judge somebody of my stature if I were younger and less established or just older and less established if they didn't sort of exercise some control over the degree of the negativity they put into the world, the valence of the negativity. Like it's very easy when you have a bigger audience to be misunderstood. And that's ultimately my fault if I'm, you know, I can't control how much people understand me all the time. But if I know something will get misread it's better not to say it. I don't want to risk, you know, hurting somebody's feelings. Like, I don't want to hurt people. And it wasn't that risky to sort of, you know, put negative opinions out into the world at a different stage of my career. And like, I miss the sort of freedom of that. Like I was just chatting at a party and not paying that much attention to who was listening or who might overhear. Like, I don't think it's right anymore. It's not right if like the number of people that I could potentially hurt or offend is like...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's a different scale.

Elisa Gabbert: exponentially higher. Exactly. It's a question of scale, I think. I'm still often very offensive in private. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We have this new segment called “Question into the Void” where poets ask questions not knowing who might answer them, hence the void. In The French Exit you have the line “I want that void IN me.” Today we find ourselves in the void that CM Burroughs, friend of the magazine and podcast as well as of my heart, sent off into the void and now shares with you. So we're going to hear her question.

CM Burroughs: Hi, my name is CM Burroughs. I've been thinking a lot about urgency lately, particularly in connection with new writing projects and how, how one discovers what's urgent. And so my question into the void is what is your process for discovering new important obsessions or urgencies for your writing?

Elisa Gabbert: Oh, I love that. Thank you for that question. It feels so relevant to my thinking recently because I am between projects. I'm coming to the end of sort of a run of projects that I had planned out sort of for years, like first this then that, then that, and I felt a lot of urgency to complete them. There was some level of just personal obsession. I don't know why, but I got it in my head that, like, seven books, even short, minor books, would be my body of work. And if I'm not able to write or publish anything else after seven books, that's still a body of work. (LAUGHS) And if I die, like, people would still feel like, oh, she had a whole body of work. And because I'm just, I’m finishing, you know, just kind of final-touch edits on that seventh book now I have this feeling of great openness, this chasm opening up before me where I don't think I immediately have to start on anything, um, which is a sort of dizzying amount of freedom. And it's forced me to ask this question like, what do I want to work on next? It could be anything. I think, as I mentioned earlier, the thing that kicked off this whole self-pity discussion was going through a difficult time, not having as much available time or energy to write as I used to. I want to make sure it's really worth it. You know, I want to devote my writing time and even my reading time which always serves my writing to something that I truly am obsessed with and driven to devote that small amount of available energy to. And so it's been a very interesting question, and I find that I often, I'm drawn to a form before I'm drawn to a subject. And I recently read a book that I absolutely loved. It was an architecture book called The Built, The Unbuilt, and The Unbuildable by Robert Harbison. And I don't know if you ever hang out in the architecture section of bookstores, but.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I love architecture books.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. (LAUGHS) So it's got pictures on like every page, right? So it's basically like a long photo essay.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Incredible.

Elisa Gabbert: And it gave me like the most delicious feeling of like, it's like I'm reading a super intellectual picture book for adults and like, I love architectural terminology, I love architectural theory. Again, it was one of those books that I just didn't want to end. I just loved it so much. And like every now and then, you know, less than ten times, in my life I've had an experience reading a book where I've thought like, oh, I want to write a book like that. And I'm not going to become an architectural (LAUGHS) theorist, but I do...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The idea of the photos.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes, I want, and I've had photos in some of my essay collections in the past, so not totally foreign to me. But yeah, I want to write a long photo essay-type book like filled with pictures thinking about sort of visual things. And I want those pictures to not just be, say, like paintings or an artist's photograph where it's just it's one thing and it refers to itself. I want it to be photos of things that are actually out in the world. Because what this book did was it sent me down a billion rabbit holes, right? Because I would see a picture of some building or some fresco and...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, you were creating this other text of other research.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes. I kept going to Google to find like more images of the same thing from different angles or just to learn more about these places and these objects and these like gardens and ruins that he was writing about. So, yeah, I love that kind of work, that work that is like both just absolutely addictive and enveloping, but also keeps sending you outside of it and then coming back. That's sort of how I have tended to find my drive to work on a book-length project since it is so much work, is to have this idea of an end form in mind, you know, like, oh, this is like sort of a tradition I want to be a part of. This is a form I want to engage with and I want to figure out how I can adjust my thinking to fit that kind of book.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The container offers a way to think and find the subject, I think, in some ways. And I think you've always been interested in space and memory

Elisa Gabbert: Mm hmm.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: and in a way that reminds me of how in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, not sure about the pronunciation, writes about how the house cannot be inert or governed by geometry once it has been experienced and lived in. And it seems like your work is interested only in those spaces that have been experienced and lived in, right? That have some kind of meaning.

Elisa Gabbert: There's an essay with a lot of Bachelard poetics of space material in my next book so you'll be very excited...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh great. That's perfect. Yeah, it's very ambitious of you to have this seven-book idea because what you described about having that body of work and you know, if you die, it's there. That's literally how I feel about one book.

Elisa Gabbert: (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I feel like oh, I can retire. Like, you know, I'm good. I did it. And here you are times seven onto the eighth. But I'm also curious about how boredom plays into this space that you're in where anything could happen and a book can lead you to a form and the form can lead you to the subject. Boredom does seem to come up sometimes. You pointed out that in Virginia Woolf's work, there's this pattern of boredom's phantom, the specter of it. And you have similarly thought about boredom a lot. The last page of The Self Is Unstable, your book has that memorable moment. “I told a student that desire comes from boredom, but I seek out desire so why do I fear boredom?” So is there a connection for you between boredom and desire as you swing between this kind of like having a goal and going to it and writing these books versus being in that space of wanting something and moving through what that might look like, the questions?

Elisa Gabbert: I have always come back to boredom as just sort of a pet subject and a pet feeling like it is another one of those hard feelings that I've always liked spending time thinking about. I do think that, again, as I've aged, my relationship to it has really changed to the point that I don't feel like I really get bored anymore. It doesn't feel like bored on the same way it did when I was young and time just felt like it was stretching out and dilating in this horrible way. I hated it. It felt like pain to me. (LAUGHS) Which just seems laughable to me now because what I would then call boredom I would now call a kind of restless desperation, which is that something is wasting my time. Like, oh God, my time feels so much more precious and limited now. And this is not how I want to be spending it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Elisa Gabbert: And so it's more crushing, you know, it's like, oh, God, oh, God, I have to get out of this. And the nice thing about being an adult in you know, a sort of free country is like most of the time, if something is giving me that feeling I can get out of it. You know, I try to arrange my life so that I don't end up in situations where I'm going to feel desperately restless and panicky about wasted time. But yeah, I mean, I do think any negative feeling of that sort can be productive like inescapable feelings can be productive. It's like it's harder to get bored, you know, as they say, like when you have your phone with you or whatever, although I get just. The most bored I ever am, honestly ,is looking at my phone. I find my phone very boring. But yeah, I think any of those uncomfortable situations that you're forced to be in whether it's boredom or panic can be productive.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think that the way that they're generative also can change and it sounds like the definition has shifted for you as well. I think boredom has so much to do with setting because I would never describe being bored when I'm alone. It's only a word I use to talk about being in this social society and having some gripe with it. There's this Korean phrase that is like 입이 심심하다 or 궁금하다 is like the mouth is bored or the mouth is kind of wondering something. And it's like when you want to eat, but out of boredom.

Elisa Gabbert: Oh yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And I feel like maybe there's a poetry equivalent to like a boredom that leads to like, the mouth, you know, the pleasure of speech, the taste of words or something like that.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, yeah. I'm interested in those urges that are like, all form and no content, you know, where you're like, oh, I want to read, but I don't want to read any of the books that are available.

(BOTH LAUGH)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes!

Elisa Gabbert: I want to write but I have absolutely nothing to say.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, speaking of the books that are available, I did a research trip this weekend. I noticed that in your interviews constantly people are bringing up Twitter and your recent tweets which I felt like was research I'm not as suitable to do. I don't know the language. So I went to the central branch of the Denver Public Library

Elisa Gabbert: (GASPS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: which you've written about many times as sort of this special home of books for you when you were living here, including, in particular, the uncurated, the anti-curation books in the returned but not yet shelved books, so recently returned purgatory.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes!

Cindy Juyoung Ok And I'd love to read to you some of the titles I saw, I went with my partner, in case any give you ideas, make you a little nostalgic. OK. Constructing Kitchen Cabinets, Brave Intuitive Painting, We Are the Middle of Forever, Stamped Metal Jewelry, Go Back to Where You Came From, Bruce Lee, Coaching Youth Soccer, It's What's Inside the Lines That Counts, Toronto, Have I Told You This Already?, Good Math: A Geek's Guide to the Beauty of Numbers, Logic, and Computation, Rock Legends at Rock Field, and Good Catch: A Book About Fish.

Elisa Gabbert: Oh, I love it. I love trying to figure out which, if any, of the books were checked out by the same patron.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. Like what were the groupings?

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah. I mean, I could see somebody getting into, you know, metalwork and cabinetmaking at the same time.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, they're out and about.

Elisa Gabbert: Any kind of just random selection of stuff, I've always loved. Like, I used to play this game with my brother in the back seat of the car and we had like a toy catalog or something, you know, we would open it to a spread and we would have to pick which thing on that spread we wanted most. And it wasn't like the whole catalog, right? It was just what was on that page or those two pages, which is like somehow made it more fun and game-like. And that's how I feel about the recently returned books. It's like this game-like slice of the library and it's always stuff that I would never go check out the hobby area, the library, if that's even a thing. I don't know the Dewey decimal system that well, but yeah. But I have picked up books like that, like random, you know, craft books and cookbooks and stuff that I never would have sought out on my own.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it's nice to have that kind of encouragement or the randomness. I love that you read in dreams. And I also read whole books in dreams, and I feel like that was the night I created a book and I read it. Have you had any words come to you in dreams lately or recent dreams that have seemed particularly interesting?

Elisa Gabbert: Oooh, let me think. I dreamed that I survived a shipwreck. And I was like, I somehow had the knowledge in this dream that, you know, like the way to survive a shipwreck is just like, I mean, I guess this seems like very basic drowning knowledge, (LAUGHS) but it's obviously to hold your breath for as long as you can and just try to stay still until you can see light and then swim toward the light. So in this dream, I like, I was tumbling and tumbling and tumbling and then I finally could see the light on the surface of the water and I swam towards the light. And I like I'm not big on like, oh, God, dreams mean this or whatever. But I was absolutely like, oh, I'm like emerging from this period of great difficulty and like this sort of endless transition where I was just sort of between states and I didn't have like a permanent place to live and I felt very unsettled. But the funny thing is that so it wasn't reading but it was very linguistic. In the dream, I thought, “swim toward the light,” like that was the advice that I had to follow. So it was like I was giving myself this little adage or aphorism.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, an aphorism.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, to take away when I woke up.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: How loving! Yeah, it was so sweet. And maybe it also helps to make all the unpacking feel a bit more meaningful because you're swimming through all your books and all your things.

Elisa Gabbert: Yeah, yeah. We just. We've been using our living room space because our couch hasn't been shipped yet. It's just like this chaos zone repository of all of our boxes and we're like, slowly getting through them. And it was so weird, it seemed like we were making no dent in the boxes and then there was like one box where all of a sudden just the room opened up, (LAUGHS) and like it didn't seem that bad anymore. It was like that's the moment when you see the light.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think that's how it is. It only takes that one box and it only took the one book and its photographs and you churn and it's the water has changed or yeah, suddenly you're on different ground.

Elisa Gabbert: Yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Thank you so much, Elisa. This was so lovely.

Elisa Gabbert: Thank you. Thank you so much for spending such, you know time with my work. It's just, it's an honor.

(RECORDING OF POEM PLAYS)

Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point.

It’s not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy. I don’t want people to get what they deserve?

What’s it called when you want bad things to happen?

Life is usually good/bad/good/bad. So when things are good it’s like, Well, this isn’t going to last!

When things are bad you can enjoy yourself.

When things are bad do you ever secretly wish for them to get worse?

Like I wanted it to be the same, but more so. I want to feel more of what I’m already feeling.

Maybe it’s a subconscious wish.

Part of me never wanted it to end.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A plush thanks to Elisa Gabbert. Elisa is the author of six collections of poetry and essays, including her most recent poetry collection, Normal Distance, published by Soft Skull Press in 2022, and her newest essay collection, The Unreality of Memory, published by FSG in 2020. You can read her essay, “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms” in the July August 2023 issue of poetry in print and online. If you're not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there's a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. Ten book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe, poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. The show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Reservoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time with a shout-out to all the breaks and voids. Thanks for listening.