Our wonderful, dear friend Liz Arnold flew on the last Saturday morning in February 2024. My partner Marilee Lindemann and I talked for hours, for days, for weeks about Liz, missing Liz, remembering the food, the fun, the long talks, the gales of laughter, the poetry of our relationship—I can still hear her laugh, and have comforted myself with that memory many times. To know Liz was to see that she overflowed with appreciation for the everyday as well as for the most profound, that bountiful quality of hers Marilee recalled on Facebook just a day or two after her passing:
Liz Arnold was a brilliant poet, generous colleague, and dear friend who died this past Saturday morning at the age of 65. She was also a baker of bread, a maker of gardens, a lover of dogs, and—incongruously I thought, but what do I know—a passionate fan of professional football. Martha and I loved spending time with her. A conversation with Liz was an adventure. You’d start off in one place and careen past a thousand others on your way to god knows where, but it was always an exhilarating ride. Dinners in Takoma Park, sunny Saturdays in Sweet Deale near the Chesapeake Bay, one zany Christmas when we all wore 3D glasses to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens—We cherish the moments we had with our friend and celebrate the work and words she left for each and all of us. Gone far too soon, but, lord, what a legacy. What a gift. RIP Liz. Travel on. And, as always, fuck cancer.
The tendency in Liz to “careen” through conversation was more than an impulse: it was central to how she practiced and imagined relation as personal, professional, and speculative. This was equally evident to me whether we were hunkering down at Republic in Takoma Park, as Marilee mentioned, savoring oysters and talking about poetry, or on our patio down by the Chesapeake, when Liz would gleefully point out various birds (“Look, look, an osprey! Oh, oh, there’s an eagle!”).
Consider, to this end, Liz’s epigraphs: George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, George Herbert, Virgil, and Heraclitus, all prominent poets and philosophers. Heraclitus’s epigraph for The Reef (1999) comes to mind as especially generative:
Change alone is unchanging. . . .
The life of fire comes from the death
of earth. The life of air comes from the
death of fire. The life of water comes
from the death of air. The life of earth
comes from the death of water.[1]
In the ensuing epigraph, from Emily Dickinson, I wonder if Liz extends Heraclitus’s equilibrious vision of death toward her poetry and her own body. Here Dickinson tells Thomas Wentworth Higginson, man of letters, her supposed motivation for writing poems: “. . .and so I sing, because I am afraid.” Liz omits the phrase just after “sing” (“as the Boy does by the Burying Ground”), and in this motion, I think, brings us closer to her: she admits the vulnerability of her poetry as a type of impassioned, terrified singing.[2] The Reef—an astonishing collection chronicling her bravery and fierce struggle with the rapaciousness of cancer—focuses readers’ attention on the inevitability of changes, the hope and life springing from death, and the powerful music of poetry to voice one’s fears. In the collection’s concluding poem, “Envoi,” Liz brings us even further into the fold:
we think ourselves with thinking into, only
thinking that we
are that, while at the same time somewhere else
we’re sex, we’re ripping,
bolting body brute across a room,
a parking lot, the space
between us and the sun, or from an atom
to its blurred electrons,
held by falling into into, spun
and held at once
—but to what’s always moving, being moved.[3]
The repetitions of “into” empower us as we move with the poet and her poem. First “thinking into,” thinking as an act of bringing oneself into being, into the sex of “bolting body brute.” We traverse the spaces of a room, a parking lot, the cosmos of heavenly bodies and that of atomic particles never ceasing in movement faster than light. Then “falling into,” and yet being held, by speed, distance, and light; “spun.” That universe within and outside. Liz, thinking like a cosmologist again as she writes that which is right at hand.
According to Liz, if the spinning of the universe, life, and its changes keeps us “held” to ourselves and one another, so too can we lose our grip in the continuous turn. Consider “XX” from Effacement (2010):
I couldn’t hear them
because I couldn’t see
their faces at the table
the morning I lost my glasses.
I couldn’t
see, I
couldn’t understand
what they were saying.
At parties, Joyce took off his glasses,
chose it, not to see.
As if he could then not be seen.
He let himself believe it.[4]
There she let herself be seen, and I’ll hazard the surmise that she knew that, whatever she let herself believe. In 47 sections (I–XLVII), Effacement muses on wrenched disconnections, dislocations of and within various bodies because of the rampages of war, cancer, and other wounds to the body. She expresses and explores agitation, the music of prayers sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, always rhapsodic, and sweeps the reader along in doing so. For Effacement, Liz also chose as an epigraph this from George Oppen:
To a body anything can happen,
Like a brick.
A brick is solid and hard, and devoid of movement after being acted upon. But what becomes of the acted-upon body? Could we substitute one “b” word for another, the lines becoming “to a brick anything can happen, / like a body”? Liz leaves us pondering fleshy tenderness and the short, sometimes curtness of life. Like Dickinson’s Loaded Guns, H.D.’s crystalline images and magnificent mythos, and Audre Lorde’s insistence on connectedness even as we recognize separation, Liz particularizes profundity; her poetry is transformative in its groundedness. It enchants, seduces, pulls and pushes away and then tugs, sometimes jerks us in. Reading her, the dark as well as the light feels beautiful. She’s close and far away, the “faraway nearby” (as Georgia O’Keeffe might say), always dynamic whether in the distance or right at hand or somewhere in between.[5]
§
Liz and I enjoyed a friendly rivalry in our fan passion for tennis players (Nadal for me, Djokovic for Liz until his anti-vax stubbornness became too much for her), and I too used to like football, watching the athleticism of so many, the extraordinary precision of others in a wide range of movements. Being a fan can be terrific fun and for Liz, this fun was informative:
The pass thrown
where the wide receiver isn’t,
thrown at
air, a gap time leaves.
It’s a
backwards leaving,
future-to-past
or forward to the future you might say,
taking skill
—and faith I’ve learned—
to aim at a space like that
knowing it will fill.[6]
From Skeleton Coast (2017), “Knowing” captures a moment in sport we’ve all witnessed—the incomplete pass thrown to precisely the place the thrower imagines the receiver will be, must be. Or no, NO, the poem is not about an incomplete connection, but a yoke made because of the faith assuring that the receiver will be there for the catch or has been there for the miss. In short: the essence of true friendship, of receiving from one another, of catching one another, and of sometimes missing that catch.
In Liz’s poetry, friendship becomes a way of looking. “Vultures,” the penultimate poem in Wave House, serves up a compassionately instructive take on the scavenging creatures that many, if not most, see as predatory. Through Liz’s words we see anew, recognizing that she’s writing about a couple, a “true pair,” their intimacy “synchronized.” Liz taught me that vultures, particularly black vultures, usually mate for life. In doing so, she urged appreciation for the dances, the flights, the fancies, the feasts of connectedness:
The birds moved toward and away together
almost imperceptibly
from what had drawn them
—a carcass, their sustenance, a squirrel
or something bigger,
never forgetting its location
as they watched me watch them.
What could I do?
Nothing but stay,
see, feel
the minute moves of the birds
so near me out of the wild
—they’d tensed into a viscous lens
by way of their attentiveness, their fear.
A true pair,
synchronized,
how long had they been fasting?[7]
Clearly Liz was in love with language, with knowledge, with feeling, with the minute as well as the grand, with seeing that renders far-sight and insight, and reading her we fall in love with everything, with creatures great and small, all over again. We fall in love with thinking about them all over again. Munificently fetching is how she expresses compassion in unexpected places for creatures who aren’t usually regarded that way. “Vultures” evokes responses physical as well as emotional, grounding us in that which we take for granted, want to pass by. Instead, we muse and learn as we look with Liz to see far more than their dirty hungry gobbling.
Liz’s emotional landscapes play with the literal, taking us on mystery rides that have us asking, as she does in Wave House’s “Travel”:
Who will be there?
Who will I be
there?
Who will meet what me?[8]
To these questions, I offer one of the pictures I most relish of Liz. She stands on the pier in Deale, Maryland with her arms—her hands—spread wide, as if to gather paradise, as if she is bee, butterfly, and swan about to fly.
Ah Liz, sweet, brilliant, fierce, tender, wonderful Liz. Writing about her, I reread EFFACEMENT and found myself musing on how the title of the volume disappears into the cover art while “ELIZABETH ARNOLD” sticks out in bold. On the cover of her latest volume, Wave House, the title looms large, and “Elizabeth Arnold” is tinier, appearing almost ready to disappear. For us she will never disappear. Her words breathe and breathe life, appreciation, sight, radical empathy, listening, touching, smelling, and tasting into us.
Liz, like this photo of her in our rocking chair, is both gleefully visible and partially hidden by her own ecstatic gestures. We are still talking about the poetries of our relationship.
Notes:
[1]Elizabeth Arnold, The Reef, Phoenix Poets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[2]See Dickinson to Higginson, April 28, 1862, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), 358–59.
[3]Arnold, The Reef, 58.
[4]Elizabeth Arnold, Effacement (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2010), 30.
[5]Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Faraway, Nearby, 1937, oil on canvas, 36 × 40 1/8 in. (91.4 × 101.9 cm), 1937, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object no. 59.204.2, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489064.
[6]Elizabeth Arnold, Skeleton Coast (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2017), 85.
[7]Elizabeth Arnold, Wave House (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2023), 103–4.
[8]Arnold, Wave House, 32.