“I can’t help generating meaning”: Elisa Gabbert on her career as a poet and essayist

I consider Elisa to be among the foremost essayists of our time.As someone who is both a poet and an essayist, she writes in a way that few others do. Regular readers of her work will have noticed, for example, how her prose contains both the crystalline logic of well-reasoned argument and the subtle music of verse — how it features, simultaneously, the rational and the rhythmic, marrying thoughtful reasoning with sonic richness. It is thus no surprise that she regularly publishes in places like The Paris Review and The New York Times (where she has been a poetry columnist since 2020), or that she recently released her third book of essays.If you haven’t previously encountered her work or had the opportunity to study what makes it so distinct, this interview offers an excellent starting point. I’m grateful to have connected over it.Link to interview: womenofletters.substack.com/p/elisa-gabbert—Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.— —Song: “Walk Through the Park,” by TrackTribe