In 2006, on the title page of my copy of her new book Civilization, Elizabeth Arnold wrote these words: “For Liz C., friend, fellow writer in the world.” At the time, I was just finishing my MFA at the University of Maryland, and Liz was my thesis director—a remarkably generous one, giving seemingly unlimited time to our meetings about my poems. Most of that time was spent looking, listening, and wondering. Liz listened intensely to the poems themselves and to the predicaments they sprang from. She recognized and verbalized the questions that animated the poems, pulling them into the light of our conversation, never answering them but always recognizing their importance, and often meeting my gaze with an I don’t know. The heart of Liz’s mentorship, for me, lay in these moments where we both sensed something we couldn’t exactly put words to, something unanswerable, and looked at each other with a shrug or a bit of laughter, the heaviness of a poem’s subject coming up against the lightness of mutual recognition and a pure delight in the strangeness of language. As her inscription in my copy of her book suggests, her teaching rejected traditional hierarchies. In my memory of those meetings, we are bent over a page, at her desk, side by side. Implicit, always, in our conversations was the fact of poetry as a life’s journey, an organic, ever-changing way of encountering “the world” as one moved through it.
I had many wonderful teachers before I met Liz, but none of them was quite like her in terms of her presence in the classroom. At the time, I thought of a teacher as someone who came into a classroom already loaded up with ideas and whose role it was to bestow their insights upon us students. Liz was not at all like that. We all could sense her intimate familiarity with some of the material we read, but even when she had brought in a poem by Pound, Loy, or Oppen, she always seemed to be looking at it freshly, open to being surprised by some aspect of it she hadn’t considered, and always open to our impressions of it. We looked at the poem, and listened to it, together. Liz’s thinking was never closed; it was always happening right then during the discussion. To be in her class was to be included in the active process of thinking about poetry and listening to poems. She made that a shared practice. And in that place of observation and active thinking and listening there was a lot of fun and delight—often, our class would be in a fit of giggles as we attempted to put words to some strangeness of rhyme or scansion. Always, when looking at a poem, we started from a kind of amused bewilderment, and we roamed freely from there.
Liz’s way of encountering poems in her classroom—closely observing the idiosyncrasies of a poem’s language while remaining open to strangeness and surprise—kept our thinking untethered and in motion. Although it’s difficult to recall, twenty years later, the way she approached reading particular poems in her classes, the structure of those discussions stays with me—a steadfast fascination with the surfaces of language, with the arrangement of sounds. In my memory of her free verse prosody class, she has transcribed a few lines on the chalkboard for us to scan; she approaches the board and backs away, varying her position in space, her own movement a sign to us students to keep our impressions of the text fluid and un-closed. I recognize this same methodical observation—the same active, rigorous bewilderment—in Liz’s “After Philip Johnson’s Glass House,” the first poem in Effacement. Here, as the speaker attempts to describe this unusual structure, I can almost see that same shifting of position and perspective relative to the Glass House. The speaker never shows herself with “I,” but the noticing, questioning eye is unmistakable from the first lines:
It could be air, a seemingly postless porch on a ridge edge in Connecticut.
Grounded by the too-wide dark brick cylinder within it?
Low clump of cabinets to the left
standing alone, no walls to be attached. So
freestanding but not free.
Huddled.[1]
These opening couplets highlight the strange interplay of “air” and material in the Glass House—while questions and possibilities (“It could be air…”) lift us toward abstract thought, consonance (“ridge edge”) and short sentence fragments remind us that this structure is “[g]rounded” in a landscape. The house is curiously not a house, the glass walls leaving its inner features vulnerable and “[h]uddled” against exposure, but still “not free.” The speaker doesn’t rest with this observation but persists in noticing, and as she takes note of what is absent from this structure she also begins to savor the sounds of architectural diction, with its hefty falling cadences: “There’s no hammer beam or sally in the house. / No gusset needed, balk. If there are sleepers, they’re sunk.”[2]
After so much sonic weightiness, the poem’s tone transforms and opens when the speaker’s attention moves toward the house’s brick hearth, an inner “cylinder… only that / having anything to do with what might bend toward imperfection.”[3] That word—“imperfection”— and the rounded shape of the cylinder itself seem to set the poem’s thinking and syntax into a new kind of motion. The speaker imagines “Anatolian cuneiforms etched into it?—a cylinder seal to be rolled onto / lake-sized sheets of wax intaglio, a communication thus // entering the mind?” Here, considering the minds’ own permeability, the poem’s syntax pushes out from its couplet containers, the question now spilling across a stanza break. The poem’s penultimate sentence, a feat of grammar, spans seven lines and three stanza breaks, pulling the speaker’s wild metaphor making back toward the present moment of looking:
But the ancient seals are a little bit
bowed, this isn’t, smokestack shadow cast across the scene—
to scare off anyone who might approach
(as if they’d see it!) a room-sized house hanging in thin air,
banks of lush or leafless wild shrubs all around and down
the great ridge (for Connecticut)
may as well be in it. Trees erase it.[4]
Within one sentence, Liz’s poem covers so much terrain, moving from imagined “ancient seals” to “the great ridge (for Connecticut),” from the solid and foreboding “smokestack shadow” to the evanescent “lush or leafless wild shrubs.” In the midst of this journeying, a parenthetical exclamation “(as if they’d see it!)” reminds me of that basic bewilderment, that giddy wonder, with which Liz approached poems and the natural world. By the force of this sentence’s movement, the poem’s manifold questions, perceptions, and gestures seem to be briefly held in connection. But the poem’s final sentence, returning us to the clipped music of the shorter sentence, acknowledges the limits of human sight and the transitory nature of lyric vision. “Trees erase it” reminds us of the vulnerability of the body. I think of “After Philip Johnson’s Glass House” as a poem about the journey of physical seeing. But the “After” of the title also invites us to think of Johnson’s house as a kind of text with a lyric shape, a shape that, despite its squared angles, is organic. “After” makes me notice the ways in which Liz’s poem behaves as the house behaves—a vessel with fluid borders that includes not just what it contains but also the world around it. Despite the material accuracy of this poem, I come away from it with a feeling of desire, and a sense of a body—a body both “exposed” and “not free,” a self becoming almost invisible in its attempts to see. I can’t help but imagine Liz’s speaker circling the house in fascination, moving “after” as in “in pursuit of,” prolonging the ripe uncertainty of observation for as long as the poem’s language lasts.
Liz’s practice of actively looking at poems, of repositioning herself to look at language from different angles, was both instructive and inspiring for me. To an MFA student in her twenties who had been thrust into a teaching assistantship and felt unprepared for that role, Liz made teaching seem possible. I did not feel equipped to bestow insight upon students. But I knew I could listen, observe, wonder. Liz gave me a picture of a what a teacher does that I felt I could honestly aspire to, because it felt ethical. She showed me that a teacher’s knowledge didn’t have to be fixed and absolute, that a discussion didn’t have to wind up where the teacher planned it would, but that each insight—each question—we came across collectively could push our thinking another step outwards. Now, a couple of decades later, as a teacher myself, I realize that the way she did things was actually a lot harder than the hierarchical model. As workshop teachers, through the years, we all collect a bag of tricks—nuggets of truth, ways of framing thinking about poetry that have been effective at one point or another—and it becomes easier and easier to rely on that bag of tricks, the fuller and fuller it becomes. Recalling Liz’s presence in the classroom is a reminder that to experience insight in a room of people—to let insight be truly shared—is what makes teaching magic and memorable. But her kind of openness requires a great deal of endurance, curiosity, vulnerability, faith in others, and passion for poetry itself. And perhaps most of all, it requires a desire to remain in movement.
In their dynamic thinking and in their ways of seeing the physical world, Liz’s poems demonstrate and celebrate the way that movement creates form. Under her traveler’s gaze, images are often recognized by the inner urgency of their movement. In Wave House’s “Elegy,” the speaker ponders “a Gulf Stream of the future maybe: // a stream of water whose banks are water.” And in “On the Plane to Kenya,” we see “white-sand rivers // squiggling across the barely less-white sand” as a speaker, mid-flight, experiences the dissonance between the desert’s painterly surface and the awareness that political violence occurs, invisibly, below.[5] In both these images, movement creates form where stasis would mean obliteration. But if the thinking that occurs in Liz’s poems often seems to be in a liquid state of matter (“I’m like the squiggly creeks // looping through the land,” she writes in “I Almost Died”[6]), then her syntax is the formal aspect that creates that sense of flow. Throughout her work, grammar acts as an animating force; often, the sentence keeps moving, across line breaks, stanza breaks, and over the terrain of the white page itself, so that even when the poem appears visually fragmented, syntax creates a momentum that pulls the reader through the poem’s exploratory thinking with a kind of organic determination. In “Introit,” the opening poem in The Reef, a single, dizzyingly elaborate sentence takes us through a complex and frenetic scene of icy water pouring into a “forest-green fjord.”[7] As the poem begins, enjambment immediately gives a physical sense of this jagged terrain, even before we come across a verb: “Tremendous blocks of ice- / smooth turquoise-tinted slabs /—not quite ice yet, not even / slabs…” As the sentence continues, Liz’s speaker takes note of the ways in which her own vision’s changeability and fallibility affect the moving water’s form. The slabs “go past,” she notes,
as blurred or sharp, depending
on how fast whatever guides
the eye can follow then
flip back, catching the next
unbounded segment of the stream…
Here, though Liz commits herself to accuracy about the processes of sight, we also learn that “whatever guides / the eye” cannot be named—the poem can only note the texture of the water and the speaker’s observational impulses, not explain them. The energy of moving water can be felt in the body but its “finger- / numbing force” also confuses the body’s understanding of what is here. This sense of mystery drives the poem further along its river of syntax, its single sentence continuing to extend desirously even as it begins to sense its own limits:
a stream nearing its hectic end
where it will spill
everything it has into
the waiting, open-ended
once-lake arm of ocean,
the forest-green fjord—
When “Introit” ends, envisioning this same landscape “uncountable / millennia ago,” the reader is left with a parallel sense of the vastness of a single moment of vision and of the rushing movement of geologic time. Like so many of Liz’s poems, “Introit” makes me notice the shape of thought. Or rather, the poem is like a fossil preserving the record of a molten hot moment of transformation, leaving a space where thought muscled its way through.
The continual, pathless travel of Liz’s poems isn’t merely movement for movement’s sake; instead, in their traveling, her poems always seek out an encounter. Her poem “In the Trenches of the Carso” from Wave House begins by imagining Ungaretti, a poet Liz studied and translated, “[thinking] about home, / Alexandria, // where he grew up… Under the bombs in Italy years later.”[8] A question then moves the poem’s focus from Ungaretti’s longing for Egypt toward the speaker’s own experience of Egypt: “Why did it feel like home for me?” The answer is physical and bodily: “The smell of wood smoke” which then transports the speaker elsewhere, deep into her own memory, not merely to the “leaf piles burning in our backyard // in north Florida,” but farther still into her father’s imagination, which the speaker intuits: “his boat racing across the water // in his thinking.”[9] Liz’s poem makes me feel not just the painful paradox of home—a familiarity that can only be known when we are farthest removed from it—but also the proximity of study to memory and the fluid boundary between the scholarly and the personal. Familial lineage and poetic lineage alike are present here, and the poem makes a connective space that stretches to see and touch both. In this way, her poem affirms both the intimacy of scholarly encounter and the obscure aesthetic power of family relationships. A poet might feel some discomfort or risk in collapsing the separation between these two very different kinds of human connection. But Liz’s poetry—much like a glass house in a green landscape—encourages us to question our sense of such boundaries and to reach out, with openness and vulnerability, not just to the people who are closest to us, but farther and farther out—to study and imagine and travel as far out as we can—to borrow a phrase from “Introit”—“beyond beyond.” Even as many of us grieve her loss, her poems still offer the opportunity to experience this singular, energetic mind inviting us into its ongoing movement, bringing perceptions and questions into a formal relationship that feels both fleeting and full of potential. Like a great conversation, side by side, with a fellow writer in the world.
Notes:
[1] Elizabeth Arnold, Effacement (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2010), 1.
[2] Arnold, Effacement, 1.
[3] Arnold, Effacement, 2.
[4] Arnold, Effacement, 2.
[5] Elizabeth Arnold, Wave House (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2023), 22, 50.
[6] Arnold, Wave House, 10.
[7] Elizabeth Arnold, The Reef (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–2.
[8] Arnold, Wave House, 6.
[9] Arnold, Wave House, 7.