collection

In Memoriam Dossier: Elizabeth Arnold, 1958–2024

Introduced by Bradford Case

Introduction
Returning the Gesture: Remembering Elizabeth Arnold, 1958–2024

In the winter of 1990, the poet and scholar Elizabeth Arnold, fresh from her PhD at the University of Chicago and in the midst of her first teaching job in Missoula, Montana, edited a special issue of Chicago Review on neglected poets. “In some quarters,” she wrote in her editor’s note,

neglect of a body of poetry by the mainstream is thought to ensure the value of this poetry for the initiated few. […] But if it is solid, a body of poetry’s value will outlast fashion, whether it is the fashion of the coterie or the academic mainstream. Thus the problematic nature of terms like “neglected” and “underappreciated” and “undervalued,” which seem condescending, when in reality they reflect the failings of readers and critics rather than the poets they describe.[1]

Arnold’s introduction vaunts the unfashionable—poets whose coterie has disappeared, poems without a slot in the canon, even among the “initiated few.” Most of all, Arnold believed, the notion of the poet-critic had itself become unfashionable, lost in a no-man’s-land between the skirmishes of the theory wars. Her special issue assembled not poetry but essays: nine of them, all but one by poets, each a critical appreciation of a fellow poet whom other readers had seemed to overlook.

What Arnold sought to address was not so much neglected poets as neglectful readers: those who read too fast, or too narrowly, or just ungenerously, and so pass over poets who offer us something for which we hadn’t thought to look. That must be all of us, at least from time to time. Arnold believed that the poet-critic, with her devotion to creating new art and from her position on the academic sidelines, could return us to a fuller sense of what poetry had done and could still do. Poet-critics read not just for theory but also for practice; their readings aim not merely to produce a treatise on poetics but to advance the aesthetic experimentation of poetry itself. For Arnold, this was the difference between reading what’s fashionable and reading what’s good, what’s vital to the future of poetry, no matter how “neglected” in the present or the past. “Poems will continue to be written, and the poets who write them will keep making up their own minds about what’s important,” Arnold wrote in the closing lines of her 1990 introduction. “Readers of poetry deserve to hear what they think.”[2]

Arnold herself was a poet-critic, of course. And when she returned to the question of poetic neglect in another piece for Chicago Review twenty-six years later, she mused about the ways in which she might then have identified with the “neglected poets” of her 1990 issue. Basil Bunting, Mina Loy, even Hesiod: these were people she’d felt “were just like me,” she wrote with a retrospective wink. That winter in Missoula, she’d been “miserable—so lonely I’d go out to eat just to be in physical proximity to other human beings.”[3] Arnold’s picture of her lonesome younger self looks like a mirror of those forgotten poets, out in the academic cold, their coteries lost. Perhaps this accounts for the note of bravado in the 1990 editor’s note: she wrote in 2016 that she’d felt herself “defiant in the midst of a world that knew nothing about what I was doing or what I aimed to do.” But Chicago Review was one place that she found had understood her. “Working on the special issue,” Arnold recalled, “held me within the community of writers I’d become part of so incredibly just by chance.”[4] Returning to CR, for Arnold, was like what happens when a generous reader comes back to an overlooked poet, to discover again the world they’d missed.

This feature is CR’s way of returning to Arnold. In summer 2024, a few months after Arnold passed away following a decades-long battle with cancer, Jenny Mueller and Devin Johnston approached us about putting together a folio on Arnold’s work. Mueller was Arnold’s classmate, co-editor of CR, longtime friend, and now literary executor; Johnston was Arnold’s publisher at Flood Editions and a former CR poetry editor himself. Given these writers’ connections to Arnold, we saw an opportunity to remember Liz, as her friends call her, while seeding new critical engagement with her writing. A panel on Arnold at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference this spring, featuring contributions from Liz Countryman, Lindsay Bernal, and Katy Didden along with Jenny and Kiyanna Hill, began a conversation this feature aims to continue. We are grateful to Jenny and Devin for their generosity and insight.

The four essays collected here help us look again at this poet, just as the essays she edited in 1990 aimed to do for others. They come upon some of the hallmarks of Arnold’s poetics: her long, syntactically complex sentences, her exclamation marks of bewilderment and surprise, and her lifelong desire for movement and travel. Liz Countryman remembers Arnold as a reader and a teacher, drawing out the ways her poems model the dynamism and openness to surprise she practiced in the classroom. For Countryman, Arnold’s poetry shows how “movement creates form”: how Arnold’s poem about walking through Philip Johnson’s Glass House comes, like the structure it describes, to contain everything around it, or how her travel poetry spills in sound and syntax through the mind and out into the world. Tim DeMay—another of Arnold’s former students—also emphasizes her constant movement, finding an intervention into critical anthropology in her ever-traveling gaze and her exclamation marks. In Arnold’s “alter-visions,” DeMay writes, “the ontologically different other is a moving target, just like the self aiming the gaze.” As Martha Nell Smith, Arnold’s colleague at the University of Maryland, reflects, those moving targets of self and other sometimes fail to find their marks. Yet Smith shows that Arnold’s poetry redeems such missed connections, rereading each one as “a yoke made because of the faith assuring that the receiver will be there for the catch or has been there for the miss.” Similarly, for Patrick Morrissey, the poet’s exclamations and angular syntax represent an alternative way of giving attention to the world. This is what Morrissey terms Arnold’s “gift”: “to locate life in inhospitable situations and wonder at its persistence.”

Morrissey identifies a double edge in Arnold’s work: both her wonder at the persistence of the world and the subtending hint that it could collapse, that it might suddenly give way. In 2009, Arnold published several excerpts from her book Effacement in Chicago Review. Echoing the themes of displacement and forgottenness subtending Arnold’s larger practice, these poems worry about fading into silence. In a hospital ward of soldiers with facial disfigurements, “no words go / from face to face.” Silence is effacement:

Without a name there’s no

entity

 

to hold against its own cells’

multiple dividings past itself

Arnold’s lifelong battle with cancer—with her own cells’ multiple dividings—shades her worry that not to speak is to slip away from being.

Still, Arnold’s voice resounds in different ways through the work of poets who knew her, including the four contributors gathered here. Three poems by her Maryland colleague Joshua Weiner move like Arnold the traveler—“riding the thermals” yet “undislodgeable,” and with a laughing exclamation to match. Katy Didden’s “To a Sheep Who Lives Near a River Named For a Man Named After a Wolf” carves a different path through Arnoldian syntax, wandering off and then bending back home to find it changed. In the selections from Devin Johnston’s longer work “Escarpments,” which draws from the poet’s own travels with Arnold, natural wonders become the signs and glyphs of poetry. And Lindsay Bernal’s triptych marvels—as Morrissey writes of Arnold, as Arnold herself shows in Effacement—that life can persist in the most difficult conditions. Bernal’s poems, like Arnold’s, invite us to look again at another, face to face, and through her come to face the world.

This way of reading Arnold is, we think, how Arnold herself may have wanted to be read. The poem “Elegy of the Self,” from her 2017 volume Skeleton Coast, begins by describing one of her characteristic re-encounters:

I heard my heart again

not beating like a drum but

 

shimmying[5]

Looking again, hearing again—this is Arnold’s way of encountering the world. It was also her way of understanding herself. Shimmying isn’t like keeping a regular beat: it’s a kind of motion that revels in abnormality, in surprise, in openness to change. “Elegy of the Self” likens its speaker to a jazz drummer brushing a snare, “making // gestures more than beats that way.” The essays and poems in this folio are a testament to how Arnold always gestured out beyond herself, drawing others—poets, friends, students, colleagues, and, yes, critics—into her orbit. “I give my everything away, // you take it,” she writes at the close of the poem. This folio is Chicago Review’s way of returning that gesture.
 
 

Photo Credit: Mark Schafer

 
 
Notes:

[1]Elizabeth Arnold, “Editor’s Note,” Chicago Review 37, no. 1 (1990): 4.
[2]Arnold, “Editor’s Note,” 5.
[3]Elizabeth Arnold, “My Time at Chicago Review in the 1980s,” Chicago Review 60, no. 2 (2016): 206.
[4]Arnold, “My Time at Chicago Review in the 1980s,” 206.
[5]Elizabeth Arnold, Skeleton Coast (Chicago, IL: Flood Editions, 2017), 38.
 
 
Acknowledgements:

Thank you first to our contributors, each of whom generously offered up their work, time, and reflective energies in the midst of missing and grieving Liz. As both former Poetry Editor and contributor many times over, Liz’s impact has long been a part of the legacy of Chicago Review, additionally now in the words of these friends and colleagues. Thanks of course to Devin Johnston and Jenny Mueller for approaching us with the idea for the feature last August and all of their guidance since, and to our team of editors who solicited and developed the pieces. We, the editors, hope you enjoy.

Edited by Bradford Case and Cecily Chen