Elana Wolff's 'everybody knows a ghost,' in conversation with Brenda Clews

Interview Launch of everybody knows a ghost by Elana Wolff       

Underpinning “everybody knows a ghost”, is not an afterlife that is very much like this one, except nicer, a heaven, a place where people continue to dwell and from which they “visit” us …. ghosts aren’t the traditional kind — they’re not apparitions, they’re not ectoplasmic! but are a quirk, a slip in spacetime, a coincidence, a “winging… crow”. In the poem, Crow, a sign of Kafka, flies “past Elana’s “windshield” when she asked which word was better to end a poem on. In, Restless, “a hum, a buzz/the evening breeze along the trees,//the brush of something sudden//from behind … a nubby work-shirt?/That flutter-//body feeling, too, tip-//toeing in the gloaming—so restless,/undomestic.”

         Elana offers a definition at the beginning: “Disembodied spirit ˂ faint semblance ˂ haunting memory ˂ slight trace”.

         As we read, we understand that ghosts are not supernatural apparitions coming from the afterlife per say but are integrally embedded in nature, “Infinity in a grain of sand,” to quote Blake — for Elana, the glint on the sand is where eternity is. It’s fleeting. A moment of recognition of the ecstasy of the sacred. They are a frisson, glimmers of a flower, rain just on the poet and her husband, a waft in the breeze, a sudden sense of connection. Essence blossoms from existence. In, Don’t We Look Marvellous, she writes, “The body becomes the vehicle// for the invisible.”

         In, Three-prong plugs have grounding pins: “No nose/though it's implicit. Pareidolia fills it in. The wall,/as wide as women's wings. They're beautiful,/so beautiful, that if I try/to write them down – to pin them into simile,/I'll have missed.”        

         Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where your brain perceives meaningful images, patterns, or faces in random, ambiguous stimuli.

         “Maybe I can swing one/into aleatory/shadow –/that's a thing –“

         Aleatory is something that is dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain event.

1. Do you essentially agree with this exploration of ghosts in everyone knows a ghost? When did you begin to understand that this collection of poems radiate around a unique concept of ghosts? How did you decide on the title?

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I’m going to say that your work is rooted in the natural world, and I would even go as far as to say, in significant ways, yours is a pastoral poetry — and, with a nod to  Kafkaesque metaphysical ideas that are like muscles in your writing’s locution of us as thinking, sentient beings in the world in which we live. To come to this understanding of you as a poet in the pastoral tradition shocks me. Yet, in every poem, the garden is an underlay and always emerging in floral and fauna, the elements swirl, there are many finely crafted images of flowers, plants, clouds everywhere in your book. Look in any poem, the beauty of nature finds voice in your images.

In one of my favourite poems, Aries in the vernal vault, which I’ve already read, so I’ll only quote a few lines, “The earth a weighty/ darkness, an immense and leaning// dark from which a vital light/ arises. The light may be invisible// and yet one feels, the shining// darkness of the larging/ heart ajar.”

It is here, in the emerging opulence of the light of nature that I find moments of ghostly connections, the little miracles that enable us to feel and realize we are part of something so much greater and that there is a loving guidance, is that a good way to say it?

2. Do you agree on the approach to your book as a painting or music of ghosts within an emergent pastoral? I’m thinking the painting would be like yours are, hints of forms, colours, a mystery within and the music sometimes askance, syncopated, as if rocks and flowers and birds are forming the breadth of the pieces, like Thor’s jazz that we used in the Kafka videos. That this kind of pastoral vision, as I’ve attempted to articulate, is central to your work?

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Now to form. The way you structure a poem’s metaphors is unlike anyone else.

Your writing is wholly unique in the way you offer a poem.

I would say, without going into detail, your poems don’t rely on the traditional device of extended metaphors to structurally hold a poem together. Your scaffolding more like wires & beams & trolleys in a perpetually renovating locale of ongoing construction.

Images seem sung between breaths. They hover, are split, joined with long dashes, they gather to express a poem’s topic, its themes, they pile and fall into place but, to this reader, it feels as if all could change any moment. The fluidity of your poetry is like light dashing through water, or “Light from water where we bothered it.” Things are said obliquely, never directly. You can never fully grasp the underlying meaning of a poem through images that, to use another comparison, are like strokes painting light in Impressionist paintings, they fleet by leaving trails on the page, all pointing to something that can’t be said, an ineffable. Even as I say this, I know full well that every word, phrase, stanza is deftly carved by you and not a single word or comma can be changed once you’ve finished a poem. Perhaps it’s that underneath your work there isn’t a surety, a belief system that explains the behaviour of the world, an underlying bedrock where an essentially single metaphor is hammered together and where all the ends are neatly tied. Your metaphors rove, appear, unfold, gather, slip in and out, come to us, to use a line from your poem, Canterbury Bells, “in the language of flowers.”

How seemingly disparate images cohere? But they do.

The poems have a feel of collage— a bit from here, there, placed exactly so, elements from the garden, a trip, an experience, like the rain that only fell on the poet and her husband in a group tour, or the difficult early life of a grandson —and these elements, precisely carved, syncopated together in the rhythm of a poem’s syntax, sing.

If you pulled one stanza out, I almost feel, the poem would shudder, shiver and immediately reconfigure like pulling a weave of a branch from cascading ivy…

3. Do you agree with what I have gleaned from your poems? Can you talk about craft, in your own words from an email: “about structure, language, rhythm and sound, narrative, voice, argumentation, rhetorical devices.” In this collection, did you wrangle with any elements of style in particular?

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In this book there are two family members who waver between life and death and who form the emotional heart of the collection. Your grandson, referred to as Manu, the first human, in this book, born too early, incubated, on 24hr watch by the family in the hospital, who survives and is thriving. And your beloved husband who, while he did not have a heart attack, thankfully, had a quadruple bypass. On his stretcher, as they wheeled him away, he tells you,“Be strong, you said/ before the prep, before they took you in,// before the wait—“ Such love, a moment where I wept. Neither slipped away to become ghosts, but the ghostly spectre was there.

4. For me, these two on-the-edge-of-life crises, your grandson’s early fight for life and your husband’s operation, are the emotional heart of the collection. Does a poem, a group of poems, have to have an emotional centre? I believe it does. Can you elaborate.

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I have pages of notes and so much more to say about this collection, but enough from me. An interview launch offers portals into a book that increase one’s awareness of the richness of a collection of poems. A few more straight questions.


5. Can you talk about the doubling in the collection? Poems throughout the collection that echo, seem linked. The Manu poems, grandmother poems, Kafka poems. And the lines in These Snippets, Lustrous & Doubled, say exactly this, don’t they.

“This box of Siamese/cherries I bought for lunch at Market Square./Every one of them lustrous & doubled://two-conjoined-in-one –/continuous shiny/crimson skin.”

6. Finally, your closing poem, Larkspurs, is a stunner. Can you read it… and comment on anything you feel would help people to understand your vision and this collection?

Questions from the floor