Elizabeth Robinson: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Elizabeth Robinson

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Elizabeth Robinson

Five Poems

Legend

after Piero della Francesca’s fresco,

“The Legend of the True Cross”

This records what no one is meant

to see: a whimsy, the non-space

below the border of the dado.  Here,

at the level of a child’s eyes (should a child

ever be permitted into sacred space),

some canny hand shaped a fish

and a bird, both swimming—or

flying—in the same green medium

where they are clearly not meant

to be.

By what means do we see the presence

which is not there?  We see it only

at this intersection, what some call

a “cross.” Because a cross is a contradiction

that cancels itself out.  St. Francis

would bless the irreverence

of these creatures who reclaim the sacred

by their ambiguous movement through it.

And should a fragment of wood rot

into the green water or, splintering,

disappear into the green air?

Something that we never saw is gone.

It is only there that the cross

is true.

Ascending

Remember this.

Light moves like a ladder.

Remember that you

are ascending the ladder.

That you are a window.

Remember nothing more

than this, that you

are nothing more than

this. Pollen, rain, pure

air on the window.  Abolish

memory. When the light wilts

you climb up, you climb

down. Your cheeks yellowed

with pollen. In the recess

of your mouth, you climb

up, your tongue slick with

the light.

Not-a-Monster Rhapsody

Sing bones or bonds, sing

apophatic catalog of

un-monster.  Sing broth

and sing stirring. Sing spoon

slapped against the back of your

thigh.

Stirring our tune

is the prick of the thing

waking up, waking up.  Who

has an appetite for

waking up.  Sing gruel.

Sing viscous, though not

vivid.  Not, naught, knot,

nod at this.  Sing jewel, sing

fuel.  Sing:

you are what you haven’t eaten.

Haven’t eaten

yet.  Sing of what wasn’t

ever there.  Un-monster air.

Zip, zed, zilch, zero-ogre

no-golem, nada-beast

burnt on the tongue, the tune

that eats you

you haven’t sung.

Temblor Rhapsody

When nothing moves, nothing

shoves, nothing

shows itself.  A little

seam in the crack

of nothing: smiling

the thin fissure of its

face. “When” returns to

“then.” An image of

nothing knotting time

in broken space.

Interview

February 15th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Elizabeth Robinson, Poet, Pastor, Educator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Though faith and spirituality are important for a great number of poets, there aren’t many who work as pastors or priests. Could you talk about when you were ordained by the United Church of Christ, the values and mission of the Church, along with how your own work is helping establish them?

ER: I went to seminary many years before I was ordained. Originally, I went to seminary for what I hoped would be a site of integration for my spiritual, creative, and ethical inquiries. I grew up going to a Baptist church which was meaningful to me, but ultimately theologically too limited. When I was working on my M.Div., my vocational intention was to become a chaplain because at that time I knew many people who were sick or dying with AIDS; I felt my creative work might be an avenue, a process, to facilitate healing and/or a deepening of spirituality for people who, at that moment, didn’t seem to have good resources. Life took me in other directions, and I hesitated for a long time to get ordained because I felt that I couldn’t honestly commit to all the precepts of a lot of Christian churches.  In the end, I do feel comfortable affiliating with the United Church of Christ because its theology is dynamic. The two mottoes, if you will, of the denomination are, “God is still speaking,” and “No matter who you are and no matter where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” I arrived there by way of my work with unhoused people in Boulder, Colorado, discovering how incredibly responsive local churches were to the urgent needs of vulnerable people. I understand very well the problems with organized religion, especially given the rise of Christian Nationalism. Yet my experience is that faith offers individual and communal resources for justice work, community-building, imagination, and speculative work. That speculation and inquiry are both how I write poetry and engage with a kind of hope that is not contingent on specific outcomes.

DG: Teaching has been an important endeavor in your writing career and you’ve done so in different contexts? Which classes have you taught, what does your instructional approach look like, and what are the challenges/rewards of being in a class?

ER: I have done a lot of teaching and I see teaching as, ideally, a way to build community. I am continually excited by how many writers in my classes have continued with their writing and are now being published, publishing others, teaching, and setting up reading series. I have done some teaching of world religions and ethics, but most of my teaching work has been in literature, often with some attention to the intersection of mysticism and writing. My approach is to encourage writers and readers to center in their curiosity and see where it leads them. I once heard another teacher say that we should always start by telling a writer what is strongest in their work because often writers don’t recognize their gifts. I think that’s so accurate, and it is also a lot of fun to begin by telling people what you love in their work. These days I mostly teach through the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, based in Denver. (I do all my teaching via Zoom.) It is particularly gratifying to teach there because I get to work with mature writers who are very self-motivated. No grades! Just lots of wonderful writing and conversation. I like teaching workshops, but, even more, I like teaching classes that use writing by others as an instigating starting point. Right now I am teaching a class on four modernist women poets: H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. These writers knew and corresponded with each other, but their writings are so dissimilar. I enjoy teaching classes on writing movements—imagism, objectivism, Black Mountain, Language Poetry—so that people can feel the contextual questions that enlivened those writers and also play within the opportunities and restrictions each group created.

DG: The striking aspect of your work is in its employment of white space and fragmentation. Is there a difference in what it represents on the page (perhaps contemplation or distance) as opposed to when you read (maybe breath or hesitation)?

ER: In some conceptual way, I experience writing a poem as entering an open space in which anything may occur. So in some sense that space is using the architecture of the page to create a site of possibilities. I think of poetry as capacious, but also mysteriously inhabited by many voices and presences. It really is a kind of mystical experience for me. I know a lot of people have had this experience, but I love opening a file on my laptop and thinking, “I don’t remember writing that at all. Where did that come from?”

I’ve also been really influenced by the critical thinking of the poet Barbara Guest (see her wonderful short poetics essays in Forces of Imagination from Kelsey St. Press). She writes about how every poem contains the traces of what wasn’t written, what the author erased, contemplated including, imagined as possible. In that way, every poem is a little haunted by its own ghosts which feels true to my reading of poetry.

I would like that open space to be reflected in reading the poems aloud, but in truth I don’t pause as much in the reading as I feel would honestly represent the poem. I guess I’m afraid that it would be awkward for listeners. 

DG: In the past, you worked very hard help the unhoused population in Boulder, Colorado. Are you still involved in this service and has the situation improved or gotten worse?

ER: As the pastor of a church, I can no longer work full time with people who are living outside. I now work with a local multi-faith housing task force and we tend to do more policy work. We also work closely with an organization, Winter Nights, which operates an extended program for unhoused people; families are housed in tents in a rotating sequence of church facilities, supported with employment and education, and, ideally, housed by the end of the year. So we house those families for some weeks each year. We also raise funds each year to build a house for a Guatemalan family. And we are soon to build our second apartment building on church property for low-income senior housing. It’s quite different from the work I did before, but each setting provides for its own approach to addressing the crisis. I feel the situation is getting worse and it is particularly concerning that many older people are losing their housing.

DG: You’ve lived in different parts of the US, such as Rhode Island, New York, Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado, and California. Would you say your writing changed as a result of each respective environment, or was subject matter influenced by other considerations?

ER: This question is very resonant for me! I do feel as though each place I’ve lived has impacted my writing. That’s partly, of course, because of the people I met in each place and the textures of their work. There’s also a more elusive way in which a place or geography has its own feel or spirit. When I lived in the Hudson Valley, there was a kind of hauntedness that I felt permeated the atmosphere and gave me permission to write associatively and porously. In Colorado, which is very harsh environmentally, I think I began writing with more humor and irony as a kind of push-back on that harshness. In Oklahoma, in more practical terms, there just weren’t a lot of experimental poets around so to remain in the conversation my poems became a little more narrative and little more conventional (or at least that’s what I thought at the time). I’m really grateful for the way that living in a lot of different places has augmented my writing community and really shown me the great varieties of poetry that are flourishing in the United States. I know and keep in touch with poets in so many different places. I have certainly missed out on participating in long term participation and a deepening of community because of that, but I’ve also been pushed to consider the riches of very different kinds of poetry and my writerly parochialisms have been challenged.

DG: Which poets from outside the US canon do you enjoy and how important is it for poets to read outside their immediate geographical and linguistic parameters?

ER: Among living writers, Cecilia Vicuna is important to me because she models such a rich and integrative process of writing, performance, spirituality. I was recently asked to write a blurb for an anthology of innovative poetry by Polish women writers, Viscera, from Litmus Press, and it was a happy revelation for me—such sharp, sometimes funny, decentering work!

I am a little surprised to realize how important non-European surrealist-inflected writing is for me, as I don’t consider myself someone who writes surreally. But I love Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Remedios Varo, Marosa di Giorgio, and Aime Cesaire.  I also love Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays and poetry. As an undergrad, I started reading Paul Celan’s work and his beautiful, eccentric, dense voice is something I carry with me.

Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm of the Hand Stories seem like another form of poetry, as do his novels, all of which I highly value.

Sappho is a central resource for me as a poet.

From my earliest childhood, I was expected to memorize the bible which is certainly an other-cultural resource though a lot of, especially, U.S. culture has coopted it in disturbing ways. I was attracted by the sheer strangeness of it—burning bushes, manna, arks, the alternately plaintive and outraged voice of the psalmist, the parables of Jesus. Its mysticism and power seemed to me to arise from its resistance to being assimilable.

DG: Your work has dealt with themes of power, gender, identity, and class. Given your fascination with history, along with the political victories activists have won over the years, that things are better now than they were in the past, but it doesn’t exactly feel this way at the moment. How concerned are you about the current political landscape in the US?

ER: I’m gravely concerned about the rise of fascism in the United States and about the flood of propaganda that is coming out of the Trump administration. I don’t lack hope—I mean, look at the people of Minneapolis! I feel what I believe is a reasonable fear, and I hope we can all muster courage, kindness, and solidarity to resist this. Early on in Trump’s second term, I read an article about preserving democracy that discussed the power of joy in sustaining people through oppression. And also how effective humor is in disrupting repressive power structures. So, like everyone else, I’m feeling bewildered, and I’m trying to figure out what writing poetry can do right now, but anything that we do that is compassionate and creative is important, not superfluous.

Most fascistic language is very constricted and cliché. They have their plan and talking points, right? I think that creative language and art are good for fighting the cliches that swamp and want to brainwash us; we can be disrupters by offering the surprise and suppleness of human thought even when we are under siege. Every time I go to a protest, I’m moved and encouraged by the signs protestors bring to it, for example. I’m not sure how to write into this moment, but I have confidence that the insubordination of poetic language offers a resource that will help bolster community and resilience. People in power underestimate art to their own detriment.

DG: Apart from writing, you also, with Colleen Lookingbill, ran the EtherDome Chapbook series, which published chapbooks by emerging women poets without previous collections to their name. Could you talk more about these activities and also whether, in your view, opportunities have improved for that community of writers?

ER: Colleen was my great friend and a wonderful partner in this project. We decided that we wanted to start a small press and do only two chapbooks a year, and as you note, each by a woman poet who had no previous book or chapbook publications. We had no idea what we were doing, so the modesty of the project made it easier for us to learn as we went along. We each selected work completely independently of each other, so, for example, I might choose something that Colleen didn’t entirely like and vice versa. I loved that freedom and also how much I learned about poetry from being stretched to think about writing which I might otherwise not have attended to very closely. After publishing the chapbooks, we would ask the authors where they would like review copies sent, and typically the two authors gave us lists that did not overlap. This augmented the effect of sharing work across writing communities.

I have to say that this was such a joyful project. We had to stop as Colleen became more ill with cancer and eventually died, but I would like to have gone on forever. It involved me in a writing project that enriched my writing but wasn’t about my personal creative projects and was, in that way, so refreshing.

Ironically, the submissions we got were almost always from men! That suggests that there is something in our culture that supports men pursuing publication more assertively. Has this changed? I guess I’d just say that the boundaries are always shifting. There are so many remarkable women writers and it seems as though there is more attention to representing people of diverse ethnicities, gender identifications, sexualities now. I still feel satisfied that we made a commitment to getting people into print and I remain in personal and creative conversation with many of those poets.

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

ER: I have a book coming out toward the end of 2026 from Solid Objects: Being Modernists Together. It features a wide variety of modernist figures, and sometimes I place well known modernists in conversation though they didn’t actually know each other. Between poems, I’ve interpolated short biographical comments that lift up odd facts about the subjects’ lives. It was great fun to put it together and permitted me to live for a while among amazing artists and thinkers of the early 20th century.

I have also been playing with the idea of rhapsody, on the premise that rhapsody can work with the material richness of language to amplify emotion and tone. In the past several years, many people in my life have died, so I’ve also been thinking, perhaps counter-intuitively, about how rhapsody and elegy have commonalities. Both struggle to express the inexpressible and potentially distort or alter our usual linguistic habits and grammars to do so.

Reading—I am, like all of us, obsessively reading the news. I’ve found it useful to reread spiritual classes as grounding during this upheaval—Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God. I continually dip into writing by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, but recently discovered Dorothee Soelle, a (no longer alive) German theologian. I am reading poetry all the time, but when I have a lot going on at work, I tend to read mostly things my friends are working on or books for which I am writing a blurb—which is a great way to get involved in a truly close reading of a manuscript.

Author Bio:

Elizabeth Robinson has published several collections of poetry, most recently Vulnerability Index (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books), Excursive (Roof Books), and with Susanne Dyckman, Rendered Paradise (Apogee Press). Robinson was a winner of the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend, and her book On Ghosts was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry in 2013. In the past five years, Robinson has been awarded Editors’ Choice awards prizes from Scoundrel Time and New Letters. A 2023 Pushcart Prize winner, she was included in the 2025 Best American Poetry.