Elizabeth Metzger’s second full-length collection Lying In came out with Milkweed Editions in April, 2023. Her next book is coming out with Milkweed in September 2026. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbooks The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, NYRB, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, APR, and Poem-a-Day. Her prose has appeared in Conjunctions, Lit Hub, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from The Corporation of Yaddo and Columbia University and teaches at institutions such as 92NY, Columbia University, and Poets and Writers. Metzger lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and co-hosts the reading series The Long Freeway: Poets Read Los Angeles.
Jeffrey Levine: Much of your work seems to inhabit a charged in-between: between self and other, joy and mourning, speech and what precedes speech, the body as lived and the body as observed. You’ve written, “All my life all I’ve wanted was to be myself / and someone else.”
When you’re writing, how do you understand that doubleness—not as a problem to solve, but as a condition to live inside? What does the poem make possible in that space that ordinary consciousness does not? In other words: When you write from that desire to be both yourself and someone else, what formal decisions—line, syntax, silence—help you keep both presences alive without allowing one to dominate or explain the other? Or put more intimately: What does it feel like, from inside the act of writing, to let yourself be both the one who speaks and the one who is being discovered?
Elizabeth Metzger: Thank you for calling that “doubleness”—it makes me feel like I’ve achieved that wish, but in fact it is the space between the wish, which I have found. Between ourselves and our wish to be someone else, we can reach for another, and beckon that “other” toward us. Perhaps this is the impossible reaching of eros, a force that obliterates the self, as Anne Carson explains it in Eros the Bittersweet.
Maybe the doubling of self is another way of intensifying the oneness of selfhood, allowing it to be both divided and multiplied. Or maybe I get to be a third thing, escaping “myself” yet never becoming the “someone else.” In a way, I always felt like the third thing, including at the playground: I found myself observing others, disappearing among them, feeling different. The psychoanalytic dyad of analyst and analysand is often considered the analytic “third,” and in that field, there is also Winnicott’s appealing idea of being alone in the presence of another. Maybe these are some adult ways of making my childhood wish possible!
Formally, though not consciously, I think my wish to be both informs my line (n, both in the wrestling of syntax and the torque of enjambment (for ex. in the line you quoted). Poetry sees doubt as a way of approaching truth; at times, impossibility is the best avenue to possibility, doubling back syntactically and even semantically, negating one’s assertion, changing one’s mind, letting the “you” shift from one poem to the next in a collections, just as versions of the speaker do. In poems, we are all the I and the you. Maybe that is the doubling I wished for. See how many maybe’s I’ve already used in this conversation. It is not just a space of uncertainty that I write into, it is a space of many certainties, of selves and...elses? While I am sure of how I feel in any given moment, every collection I’ve so far written reveals that ambivalence is one of the stories of my life.
JL: I’m thinking about the poem as an instrument that changes the body. Your work often feels like it’s not simply about embodiment, but engineering it—breath, appetite, recoil, tenderness, the afterimage of touch. When you draft, what are you listening for in the body (rhythm, heat, nausea, calm, ache), and how do you know when the poem has successfully “reorganized” sensation rather than just described it?
EM: That idea of engineering embodiment, as you put it, really resonates for me. I spent most of my life not feeling embodied, or at least not wanting to. When I felt embodied, it came with pain, awkwardness, inability, and shame. My experience becoming a poet was more of an attraction to forgetting the body completely. What a relief it was to find poetry, (when it seemed all my friends were finding boyfriends) to make bodies out of words, little forms with their own brains and limbs, breaths and heartbeats. Beloveds to yearn for and even break up with. Syntax was a sort of mortality that had the choice to be awkward, pained, unable or beautiful because of its straining and failing. As I became more comfortable on the page and reading my work to others, I realized the words were not just voiced in my head but coming out of my real body. Something that comes from the body that did not disgust me, that others might even deem beautiful. I felt my hands shake and my weight shift as I read to others. I felt my cheeks heat up, and my hair sway behind me when the audience laughed. I grew more confident in being a body, the source of my poems, and I tried to carry my body more like my poems.
Becoming a mother helped with this too, finding that desire and fear were both localized in my body. As I “engineered” the poems in Bed, I would say most of my attention was to the sense of sight and sound, but in revising, one becomes aware that those senses come from body parts, and maybe it is this movement from thought/feeling into bodily experience that is one kind of metaphor. For me it works in that direction. Writing poems lead me back to my body, whereas reading poems by others often begin in my body and take me out of myself at once.
In terms of re-organizing sensation, I think of myself as a disorganized thinker and poetry as the only place thought can be organized or trustworthy. I don’t attempt to make strange or original, but rather to mine what I actually mean, trusting that if one says what one means as precisely as possible so the meaning is felt, the language will be original (and probably strange!). The paradox is that one also leaves behind the need to express an idea or arrive at an answer. Moving from thought or feeling to rhythm or image is to trust sensation is the nucleus of meaning. I think of Jorie Graham’s distinction between poems as stories and poems as acts in her essay “Some Notes on Silence,” and I am more interested in enacted than describing. I think also of Keats’ last fragment “This Living Hand.” My poems are not great at saying this is it. But they are never shy of saying here you are.
JL: Let’s consider the ethics of intimacy on the page. In poems that brush against family, desire, maternity, grief—how do you decide what intimacy owes the reader? I’m thinking of the difference between revelation and exposure, between candor and a kind of privacy that is still fully felt. What formal choices help you keep that ethical line alive? I’m thinking especially of the New Yorker poems, which carry enormous emotional voltage without feeling exhibitionist.
EM: I never feel I owe the reader anything. Intimacy, to me, is never a debt. I also rarely think about candor, which feels all about what the reader deems honest. A privacy fully felt? Yes, that. Unless I am baring something I cannot bare (or perhaps bear) as a person, I feel I offer a reader nothing. If someone is going to take a moment to be with me, to be curious enough to share my mind for a minute, I want them to stay forever.
That forever is intimacy, and though the other, reader or child or lover, inevitably leaves, they also do stay forever, in you and you in them. When people say that as a condolence after a death it is shockingly insufficient, and poems are far from immortal to me. They are as insufficient as ghosts—and thank god they haunt us. Only in a poem can you “meet apart” as Dickinson writes in “I cannot live with you—it would be life.” I have never thought of my poems in The New Yorker as a sort of triptych before (one from each of my three books actually). In terms of milestones or evolution, I am glad that what is consistent among them is emotional.
Emotion is the most changing thing about me, but its presence is pretty consistently intense. All three of those poems close with an expectation, a leaning out of stillness: yearning for a brother to be familiar, wanting to show my son a life, and most recently wanting to be remembered. I am not sure if these gestures are ethical. I sort of doubt they are, but in the poems they are urgent needs, and maybe they are only ethical because the demands know themselves to be impossible.
With regards to “As We Made Him” I was inspired by a form that Charles Wright uses in “Lagunitas Blues.” I usually feel unconstrained by language. Feeling, in fact, seems to liberate language. But I wanted to see what would happen to a feeling if I had to repeat my words in a certain pattern. I think this led to a subject matter that was about turning back, about the fear of forgetting as my own kind of remembering. I’m not sure if it’s more ethical, but I think it keeps the focus on the speaker’s inability to know another’s experience or tell another’s story. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the ethics of writing about others correlates to the degree one is actually exposing oneself.
JL: On the idea of reviews as an art form (and as a relationship), you’ve written criticism and you also assign it. What do you believe a great poetry review can do that a blurb, an academic article, and a “take” cannot? If you could redesign the contemporary poetry review from scratch—its length, tone, audience, claims—what would you insist on keeping, and what would you abolish?
EM: This is a hard question and one I think about often. Every mode is worthwhile, but some interest me more than others. A blurb is a way of praising something and helping readers know what they’ll get out of it, why it’s worth it. In a sense, a quick fix. Often, I feel they reduce what a book is, and I don’t trust them, no matter how much I love them and desperately appreciate them. Blurbs are like a planet’s worth of geological activity represented by one diamond. Impressive, inadequate.
An academic article offers an opportunity to put a work in conversation with other works, but often feels strapped down like a body may need to be in an emergency, to treat safely or operate precisely. I rarely feel a “dare” in academic writing, but this is not always true, and often my favorite reviews do borrow something from academic writing: that is, an argument, lens, or point of view. I also think the best reviews offer context, whether of the genre, historical moment, author’s oeuvre, comparison to contemporaries , etc. I also appreciate academic writing about non-literary things. I love psychoanalytic and philosophical writings (most recently Maria Balaska’s Anxiety and Wonder, Thomas Ogden’s Coming to Life in the Consulting Room or L.A. Paul’s What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting)
Many of my favorite essays are something between a review and an academic essay: all of Helen Vendler, Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home.” Those are a nice pairing because one is a poet and one is purely a critic. I want poetry reviews written as much by critics as poets, rather than mostly poets, though of course, nothing is more exciting to me (some bias here) than a poet-critic! I enjoy essays about what criticism can do (TS Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or Kevin Young’s “Deadism”). Craft essays are a guilty pleasure (Lorca’s “Play and Theory of the Duende,” Neruda’s “Toward an Impure Poetry,” or Jorie Graham’s “Some Notes on Silence,” mentioned above).
A little secret as an editor of poetry reviews is that I, myself, find reviews extremely torturous to write. How do you keep a review from becoming a vacuumed ode, praising a book in terms of itself alone? My favorite reviews are less focused on quality (good/bad) but on how the book works, how the poems are made, close reading the language, and then connecting this micro-attention to the book’s life in the world: as art object, moving object, personal experience, whatever. A review should care as much about its voice, its language, as any work of prose. It should be as intriguing to someone who will never read the book as to someone who has already read it. I don’t just want to know the book or poet better, I want to see my world (maybe myself) in a new slant of light.
The review should animate as it dissects. I think of Buber’s I-Thou vs. I-It. The reviewed object should be a Thou. It has a spirit. Maybe the review, then, is the most humble art form, a membrane between book and reader. It doesn’t strive to be art itself, but it becomes art in its attempt to discover and usher. Wait, is the review sort of a saint?
JL: I think of the in-between as a psychic location, not a pause. Your book dwells in an “in-between time,” but it never feels merely transitional—as though the goal were to get through it. How do you think about liminality not as a passage but as a place with its own intelligence, weather, and ethics? What does the poem know there that it cannot know before or after?
EM: I am thinking of a book I mentioned above, Anxiety and Wonder. As a person who experiences both of these states quite often, I was very taken by the idea that these two states are related. As I understand it, they are both objectless states, confronting what we don’t know, confronting possibility. Even your verb “dwells” makes me think of Dickinson’s poetics of dwelling: “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose.” “In-between time,” when you’re in it, doesn’t feel transitional. Rather, it often feels static. The sense of the body not moving makes us feel in-between, but maybe what we mean by in-between time is our purest relationship to time. Time isn’t defined by our life or physical milestones, giving birth for instance. One could say life is defined by birth and death, but everything “in between” is life/time as we know it. That includes the momentous transition of having a baby.
When you’re lying in a room and what changes most is which wall you’re facing, or where the light makes shadows on the floor, time becomes a physical space. Weather becomes the sound of what hits the windows, the tempo of leaves rustling, or the sudden swoop of birds. Once time has become a room—not one you move through, but a space that moves around you—then you are inside the psyche. If you try to paint that place on the page, in words and line breaks, you get what Sharon Cameron calls lyric time, the way a poem can dilate a moment into eternity. I am probably badly paraphrasing, but that is how I think of time in Lying In—a sort of lost time, which relived in poetry, captures a found (invented?) eternity.
JL: Milkweed describes your book as one that plunges into “the pre-language mind,” the inner body, even the underworld. What draws you to those zones where language feels partial or delayed? When a poem moves toward what can’t yet be said, how do you decide what kind of speech is still possible—image, pressure, repetition, quiet insistence?
EM: When I wrote the poems in Bed and Lying In I was thinking of the pre-language mind of the baby. I was focused on translating the baby’s experience into language, a sort of “primary maternal preoccupation” that would allow me to leap into and occupy the baby’s imaginative experience without words. Of course, that didn’t happen, and to the extent I could intuit the baby’s experience, I certainly did not have the skills to translate it. However, the urge to listen to the infant’s non-verbal poem (the infant’s way of making sense of things) offered me a fresh perspective on the infant, as well as on my own (strange) self, and the world inside and outside my body.
Even before birth, I imagined my baby thinking/feeling inside me, obscured yet invented by my own feelings and thoughts. Whatever is metaphysical about interior life was suddenly also physical. My interior life was his/her world. Maybe as parents, we continue to tow a line between empath and imposter, making space for another mind vs. making up that mind? I think of the term “reading minds” and how we often misread minds when we try to read them. I don’t know whether that’s because minds are texts or because, as we read, they are still being written. We can’t fully process what is still in process.
I like the idea of striving for a non-language state in language. There is no other state that is so desperate for language yet simultaneously reveals that our lives are more than language. After everything we say, we find ourselves before language yet again. Language is full of births and deaths, in this way. Syntax has as much variety as a life.
It’s interesting to relate pre-language with the underworld. I am drawn to both and am writing about the underworld these days. Of course, beyond infancy we keep those nonverbal parts of ourselves, and some of us try to tend and attend to them. We call it the unconscious, sometimes the dream. The underworld of the mind is a term I appreciate because it reminds us that death is not an end but a place full of shades. And those shades have something to share. Why wouldn’t we give up the endless small talk of our earthly faces and go seek poems down there?
JL: The gloss imagines Eurydice searching not for Orpheus, but for herself. That reversal feels crucial and, in a way, also and perhaps more emphatically strikes me as the human condition, so maybe not a reversal after all. In your work, what does it mean for a poem to look backward without being nostalgic, or downward without being purely elegiac? How do you keep the gaze searching rather than fixed?
EM: Next time we talk in person, you’ll see—my eyes dart all around, I can’t help it. I am not afraid of eye contact, but I’m afraid it will be too intense for you, so I spread its intensity around. Every time I look, in any (existential) direction, I find a stimulus that asks me to turn the other way. Sometimes this is because the mind associates. Other times it is a distraction or digression that ends up leading back to the original subject in a surprising way. Sometimes, I tell students not to feel obligated to stay in the room. When you’re writing and suddenly you draw a blank or don’t know where to go, just look the other way, turn around. Just leave the room, go outside yourself. And then back in. Sometimes this remains visible in the poem, a volta. Other times it is the emotional risk. Where we lose our thinking or cannot speak—that is the emotional heartbeat or pressure point.
Eurydice follows Orpheus’s music, yes, but when Orpheus turns back to make sure she’s still there, it is Eurydice who disappears, turns back to death. She almost lived again, and yet because of him, she has to stay dead. Why do we focus on his loss? She is the one who is left to silence. Does she ever find a voice with which to sing?
Find your underworld, let the music go, let go of the other’s gaze. A poem is better off not being about a memory or a loss. Nostalgia comes from hope for home. Elegy means mourning song. A poem is the hope, not the home. A poem is the howl, not the loss. As long as the poem reaches, its object will not be reaches. But the act of reaching lasts in the mind. A poem is always searching for itself.
JL: “Isn’t it obvious how we’ve changed?” sounds almost accusatory, almost tender. How do you write toward change that is unmistakable yet difficult to articulate—change that has already altered the speaker before the poem begins? Do you think poems can register transformation without narrating it?
EM: The question you quoted would be accusatory if it was directed at the reader. It is a question for the you of the poem, and I think that addressing the you in a lyric is always an imagined you; in other words, part of the poet, just as the I is. In fact, the I and you in this poem “Desire” are a we in spite of their opposite ways of changing. They share the same source of transformation. While there is a kind of loss, a gap made by the love that connects them (their children), the I still tries to close that gap with desire for the you, even if the speaker is outside herself, divided. There’s a Dickinson riddle poem that I think goes: “To fill a gap insert the thing that caused it...” It turns out the desire for the other is a desire for the gap between them, made and filled by the children. Also a desire to be one’s own body again, too.
Yes, I think poems are transformations, at best, not narrations of transformation. Seeing writing/revising as a brutal blade helps make change happen on the page. There is a kind of sado-masochism in it. You wound yourself to excavate the soul. More physically, to prove dimension, one might cut into something, and by cutting into something, give its dimension. It proves something was there that is now missing. This is true of the page, abandoning the margin, breaking a line. What is left by the blade is, of course, a poem. Because of loss (revision as well as emotional) a poem exists, and we trust that what outlasts us is essential. The words, the form are, as Lucie Brock-Broido would say, “unimpeachable.” After all, transformation is what much magic is based on. There is always loss in alchemy. You can never quite go back once you are changed. That is the beauty of time on form. That is also our mortal pain.
JL: I’d like to take a moment to look back at Bed from the vantage of your later work. Tupelo first published Bed after it won the Sunken Garden Chapbook Award, and Lying In feels like a later, deeper meditation on the body as site, threshold, and condition. When you look back now, what questions were already present in Bed that you didn’t yet know how to ask? And what has shifted—not just in subject, but in your tolerance for ambiguity, risk, or silence?
EM: Though I had many of the poems that make up Lying In drafted before I published Bed, I felt distilling the poems into the chapbook was incredibly helpful for illuminating the structure of Lying In. I saw Bed as one arc, from the bed of traumatic pregnancy to the bed of revived sexuality, a sort of life span in reverse as I became a mother. The babies I feared losing lived, while the beloveds that brought me to life died.
As I considered fleshing this arc into the four corners of Bed, I feared the movement would become more static. It bothered me that there were two losses and two pregnancies, and no one knew why there was blood here or there. I was afraid the stakes would be lost due to the temporal confusion of lived experiences. It’s funny looking back because more than experience, the poems are unified by the way one’s perspective on bed rest changes how one lives in the body and in time.
It was only after a zillion reorderings, followed by cutting twelve poems at the eleventh hour from the final manuscript of Lying In, that I found a solution to this concern. I thought, all I need is one more poem, a long poem, that will offer a reference point outside the personal. I was reading D’Aulaires myths to my son as a toddler. He was too young to understand but he loved the grapes in the image of Dionysus so we read that one. We read about Dionysus’s mother, a mortal, Semele and how Zeus took Dionysus from her body and sewed Dionysus into Zeus’s own thigh, from which he gave birth to the god. I saw a whole story of jealousy and power that I could reflect in the newborn dynamic of me, my son, and my husband. I wrote a series in fragments bringing my life into the myth. It was called Semele.
My friend L.A. Johnson took one look and said cut the myth. I was disheartened, thinking that the poem was a myth, but when I made the suggested cuts, I saw I had been hiding my clearest experience behind another story. The title of the revised long poem became the title of the book Lying In. By taking a reader on a fragmented but chronological journey of one pregnancy, I felt less desperate to organize the other poems temporally. I let them bleed, the losses, the pregnancies, my daughter, my son, all of it. Instead of preserving binaries, ambiguity became a deeper drive, the drive to let go of experiences as separate. I realized that the most agonizing edges we look over are often the ecstatic contours of our lives.