Elisa Gabbert & Chris Tonelli Talk at The Conversant!

At The Conversant, poets Elisa Gabbert and Chris Tonelli discuss many great things, including the "writing habit, notebooks, public transportation, clouds, Frank Gehry, being boring, the anxiety of influence, AWP, readings and performance, irony, failure, epiphany, and the 'perfect poem.'" What is the perfect poem?! Do tell:

[Elisa Gabbert:] ...Did you read Ben Lerner’s recent essay in the LRB? He says even poets hate poetry because the actual poem in the world is always a failure when measured against the ideal of the poem in your mind. (I feel like you could say the same about novels or paintings, though.) I’m drawn, perhaps, to poetry that is aware of its own failures, but keeps going anyway. Life is meaningless, but you still seek out meaning.

I think in your poetry, there has always been a kind of darkness—doubt might be the best way to describe it, a kind of persistent philosophical pessimism—that mingles with humor and that’s why I’m attracted to it. That darkness seems intensified in your more recent work, distilled down. Like in “Murderer” (from Increment): “In the dark / I am a murderer / not murdering.” I love those lines. So real, so fucking dark! But the poem is not without irony: “The lawn has my house / surrounded.” I don’t think irony detracts at all from sincerity. In fact, I take people/art that is never ironic LESS seriously.

[Chris Tonelli:] Oh, Plato (Uh Oh, Plutonium!). But to be honest, I’m not sure I agree with Ben in that regard. And maybe this isn’t something I should admit, but I have poems that are perfect to me. Or rather, they perfectly accomplish what they set out to accomplish. Granted, I probably don’t have the highest of ambitions for my poems, so that’s not all that hard to achieve, but I definitely have a handful I’m perfectly satisfied with/by. And I never thought to really think that way until Emily [Kendal Frey] asked me one time if I had any perfect poems. At the time I thought, “Clearly not…if you have to ask,” but then a few came to mind that always sustain me all the way through (keeping in mind that all the way through for me is like six lines max … apparently I suffer from premature transcendence). You certainly have oodles of poems that do the same thing for me (“The Dream Before Love Ends,” “Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin,” “Ornithological Blogpoem,” etc.), but for you … do you have any poems you find perfect?

EG: I never really thought about it that way, but I guess I could call a few of my poems perfect in that, like you say, I am perfectly satisfied by how they came out. (Maybe it was easier with the blogpoems to achieve “perfection” because of the rules built in; a few perfectly meet my invented standard for “blogpoem.”) I remember once in a workshop Gail Mazur said of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “It’s a perfect poem.” I didn’t really know exactly what that meant, but I’ve thought about it for years: What is a perfect poem? Is my favorite poem a perfect poem? (My favorite poem is “Depression Before Spring.”)

We're still figuring it out, too. Read more at The Conversant.