Interview: Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of Chord Box, finalist for both the Miller Williams Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College in Creative Writing and Dance in 2007 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University in 2011. She was also an Oberlin Shansi Fellow from 2007-2009 at Shanxi Agricutural University in Taigu, China, where she taught English and dance. From 2011-2012, she was a Freund Lecturer of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Rogers also received the two-year writing fellowship at The Kenyon Review, where she edited, wrote, and taught at Kenyon College from 2012-2014. She now lives in New Orleans, where she teaches creative writing at Tulane University. (bio adapted from www.elizabethlindseyrogers.com).
TCJWW: Chord Box is split into three distinct sections. How did the form of the book come to be? How do these three stories fit together?
Rogers: Chord Box is united by the tropes of music, voice, and sound. For me, only the first section of the book feels narrative in the traditional sense. These poems I placed all together because they do make a complete thing: a braided story of a music teacher and music student, their respective educations as musicians, and how power and abuse come to shape both their lives. All the poems in that first section work towards moving the narrative forward, or simply giving it more layers of complication. The second section is a bit more traditionally lyrical, and not really building towards a cohesive “storyline.”
The third section of the book, which is about living in China, has narrative impulses, but is really more focused, I think, on the looser idea of coming into a new place and culture with limited knowledge, and struggling to learn the native language. I didn’t feel bound to telling a single story here, or creating an arc. For a while, because this section feels so different from the rest of the poems in the book, I did wonder if these “China” poems were part of some other manuscript. But, ultimately, because the poems deal with the idea of trying to learn a language—a tonal language, specifically—I was able to find enough threads to tie it to the other sections of the book.
TCJWW: So many poems in Chord Box are incredibly aware of sound, from musical notation terms to the onomatopoetic use of Chinese characters. How aware of sound are you when you first draft a poem? Is sound distinctly part of your inspiration, or does it come later with revision?
Rogers: It’s a consideration at the beginning of the process, but also later on. Initially, I think hearing the language is how I ideally begin writing a poem: does this sound right? I keep asking myself, going so far as to record myself reading, even when I’m only writing a first draft. And sound is something I consider in revision: if something hits my ear wrong, or falls flat in terms of rhythm or tone, it probably needs to be altered somehow. Of course, this is all quite subjective.
I’m also very attuned to how silence works in a poem. I think of it like a “rest” in musical terms. I try to build silence into my poems—usually by leaving white space on the page, or through punctuation choices—in order to have some hand in how fast ideas are relayed to a reader, and to sometimes slow down that pace.
TCJWW: Though not formal in the traditional sense, the poems in this book find a definitive form on the page. Poems like “Aubade, Falsetto: 1978” and “Coda 2003” stick to tight couplets, and yet “In Mid-Autumn” spreads all the way across the page. What do you think about when finding the form of a poem?
Rogers: It’s true that I have formalist leanings! Form is holy to me. But each poem has to tell me what form it wants to be in. It’s one of my biggest struggles, figuring out what form the language wants to take. But it’s also one of poets’ most valuable craft choices. I’m very interested in the tension that white space creates, emotionally speaking. The poem you mentioned, “In Mid-Autumn,” is very much about trying to speak a language that isn’t my own, and so I used fragments all over the page in order to evoke a feeling of reticence, and also bewilderment.
The couplet is also a form that creates a lot of white space, visually, in a poem. Couplets have an overly formal and austere quality to them, sometimes even somber (carrying over from the historical elegiac couplet, perhaps?). That can be useful, depending on one’s subject matter. For the emotionally-wrought poems in the fugue section of Chord Box, I was drawn to the couplet because of its “two-ness” quality: one line sort of pushing against the other, each couplet a whole thing but also two separate entities, if that makes sense. Since the fugue section has two narrative strands woven in, there was a nice metaphorical resonance I got by using the couplet. However, I would say I got a little too addicted to two-line stanzas in this book. In my new manuscript, I’ve used the couplet more sparingly.
TCJWW: In a past interview, you described Chord Box as “a buildungsroman in every sense of the word” and as “a book about music, identity, and geography.” Part of the book takes place in China. As a writer, what geography do you most identify with? You currently live in New Orleans. Do you/have you consider yourself a Southern writer?
Rogers: Well, I’ve always called myself a Southern writer, though what does that mean in contemporary times, exactly? I was born and raised in North Carolina, and when I first went to college outside of the region, I became very conscious of having been raised in the South. I was deeply influenced by Southern writers, too, in the early years, because I felt I had something in common with them: the landscape, if nothing else, seemed to unite us. In all of my work, there’s a deep commitment to place, though that place has shifted over time. I haven’t lived in North Carolina since my adolescence, and moving to New Orleans in 2014 marks my first time living in the South as an adult.
I’m attached, writing-wise, to almost every geography I’ve ever lived in—upstate New York, Ohio, North Carolina, northern China, and yes, now in New Orleans—but it is sometimes, I find, hard to write about a place where I’m currently living. Writing-wise, I find a landscape seems to haunt me after I leave it; I think it’s because distance allows you an imaginative capability that isn’t possible when the place is right in front of you. Most of the writing I’ve attempted about New Orleans hasn’t really held up. I’m moving to Washington D.C. this year, and I’m curious to see if New Orleans figures prominently in my writing, somehow, after I move.
TCJWW: What drives you to poetry? Why make a poem instead of an essay, a watercolor, a song?
Rogers: Generally, I think I make art to explore things that I don’t fully understand. Poetry is a great medium for this, as it really relies on this precarious balance between language’s clarity and mystery. Occasionally, though, I do find that I’m frustrated with language, finding it, I don’t know, inadequate as a medium? It’s hard for language to not feel contrived. In an earlier phase of my life, when I was dancing as much as I was writing, I choreographed a lot. There’s so much you can do with movement and the body that I find hard to accomplish with words! This is also why I have always been so drawn to music: it sometimes seems like a more direct translation of emotion and experience than language could ever provide. In the end, I feel that all forms of art have value; I need all of them, to some degree, in my life.
TCJWW: You have a new poem up at Guernica called “Arcadia, Mars.” Tell us more about the Mars poem! What are you working on now?
Rogers: Arcadia (named after the Greek utopia/mythical wilderness) is the real name scientists gave to one of the larger plains found on Mars. In my poem, I wanted to play with the idea of sexuality in the pastoral tradition, the fine line between utopia and dystopia, and how the original Arcadia’s “history” might transform (or repeat itself) in another world. It’s a persona poem, narrated by a woman who has a young daughter.
The new manuscript is largely of the futuristic sort; some of it imagines a colonial expansion on Mars. Colonialism, as we know, its it own sort of apocalypse, so the book has dystopian overlay. It’s not like Chord Box at all; nearly every poem I’ve written is a persona poem, and I’ve really moved away from writing directly about my own experience. However, those tropes of music and sound have still made their way into a lot of the new poems, so there is a lineage I can trace from the last book.
Photo credit:
Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers courtesy of www.elizabethlindseyrogers.com
