The Watcher

In the winter of 2012, the journalist Eliza Griswold went to Afghanistan. It was neither her first nor her last trip there, but this time, the assignment was unusual. She was trying to find the family of a teenage girl who had set herself on fire after her brothers beat her for writing and reciting poetry, which the girl had done under a pseudonym. “It seemed impossible that I would find the family of one dead girl among 50,000 people,” Griswold wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “[…] but I went anyway.” With the help of a local organization, she managed to find the parents of the girl, whose real name was Zarmina, and to visit her grave. In the process, Griswold came to see how dangerous poetry could be for Afghan women, as it implied an independence that threatened the social order. She also began to understand how important poetry was for the same reason.

On that trip and another that followed, Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy, her longtime collaborator, collected examples of a witty, sharp, two-line poetic form called a landay. Anonymously authored, like miniature folk tales, the poems are sung or recited aloud almost exclusively by and among women, especially the millions of illiterate Pashtun women living in the largely rural war zone that forms the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Seeking them out was difficult and often hazardous: Griswold visited refugee camps and was snuck into weddings; she rendezvoused in secret with those who risked retaliation for meeting her. In the essay that introduces her and Murphy’s collection of translated landays, I Am the Beggar of the World (2014), she writes, “Slogging away in the same fashion that we have together for the past ten years as journalists, Seamus and I joked that this was investigative poetry.” (In June 2013, Griswold also edited an issue of POETRY that featured some of these landays.)

Such a project was a departure for Griswold, who made her name reporting on the hard news of American military campaigns, geopolitics, and religious conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Her book The Tenth Parallel (2011), about the Christian and Muslim communities living along that eponymous fault line, won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. More recently, she won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, about the effects of fracking in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, gathering Afghan landays was a fitting task because in addition to being a journalist, Griswold is a poet. The project represented a union of her two identities as a writer—identities that, although they may seem incompatible, she has nonetheless moved between and melded in intriguing ways throughout her career.

As Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Griswold’s poetry editor there, puts it, “She writes about things as a journalist and then she writes about the meanings of them in another key in poetry.” That was an impetus for her debut collection, Wideawake Field (2007), which often reads like a series of intimate dispatches from the life of a foreign correspondent.

In her new collection, If Men, Then (FSG, 2020), Griswold continues to contend with the consequences of her journalistic work, but she casts a wider net of source material, including ancient history and myths. As in Wideawake Field, she grapples with what she’s seen abroad, but in this book also examines the difficulties of returning to life in the United States. She contemplates what being a woman and a mother means as well as the painful absurdity of human existence. The book, which follows a loose narrative arc in four parts, looks simultaneously inward and outward as Griswold attempts to reconcile herself with—and locate herself in—the world.

The poems “understand investigation,” the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips tells me. “They are self-sustained and self-sustaining engines that are looking to find a truth through lyric song.” That quest connects them to Griswold’s reporting, he suggests. In all of her work, there is “a restless and unsettled search for the truth—no matter what the truth is, and no matter what the cost.”

***

Griswold began her career as a creative writer. After getting an undergraduate degree in English (with a poetry thesis) from Princeton University, she attended the prestigious Writing Seminars at John Hopkins, where she studied with the poets Mark Strand and Susan Stewart. Life then took her to New York City, where she enrolled in an MFA program at Columbia University but dropped out after a year. She also worked as an associate editor and assistant to George Plimpton at The Paris Review, but a divorce left her needing a better way to support herself. Griswold held a short-lived job at Vanity Fair and tried writing book reviews for Vogue, but nothing stuck until, through contacts at Human Rights Watch, she learned about honor killings in Islamic communities. She saw other journalists supporting themselves by reporting on social justice issues abroad, and, as the daughter of the then-presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, perhaps she was drawn to a story that involved religion. In 2001, she saved her money and sent herself to the Middle East. She sold the resulting feature to the New Republic and another version shortly after to the London Sunday Times.

Her breakthrough happened on 9/11. She was back in New York, walking around the city with her sister, when she heard the news. “I called the London Sunday Times, for whom I had started to write, and asked if they needed a stringer,” Griswold tells me. “I was down [to the World Trade Center] in an hour, I was in Pakistan two weeks later, and that’s kind of it. And I am part of an entire generation of—I don’t know what we call ourselves, foreign correspondents and journalists, right?—whose trajectory is somewhat similar.”

Griswold and I are sitting in the Joe Coffee in Columbia’s Pulitzer Hall, home of the journalism school, where her second husband, Steve Coll, is the dean. Now based in the United States after years of reporting internationally, she still covers her usual beats—politics, religion, and the environment—but domestically, as a contributing writer at the New Yorker. She has also returned to spending more time on campuses: since 2017, she has taught as a distinguished writer in residence at the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. When we meet on this cold December day, I immediately find myself wishing I could take a class with her. Griswold is warm and open and dispenses advice enthusiastically (“Are you writing a book yet?” she asks at one point before counseling me on “the most economic but also efficient way” to do so). The practical comfort of her clothing—cowl-neck sweater, leggings, and warm winter boots—seems like a manifestation of her unpretentiousness and approachability.

Even as she launched her journalism career in the midst of the war on terror, Griswold continued to write poetry. She had the beginnings of a book from her time at Johns Hopkins, and although she was still honing her voice, going abroad helped her find confidence and the authority to write about subjects few other American poets then explored. “It allowed me to imagine that I had the right and space to capture something,” she explains. Even so, “calling myself a poet might have made me cringe—and it still might. Sometimes, when in my bio I see ‘she’s a journalist and a poet,’ I’m, like, ah!” she exclaims dramatically. “Just be the poet. Write poetry, but what is that? You need an identity marker?” she jokes. “But no, I can’t help but write the poetry. That’s how I deal with the world.”

Griswold has seen a lot of the world—not just geographically but also vast swaths of its beauty and brutality. Wideawake Field is a dark book that touches equally on the traumas of war and death and the mundane details of a roving life, including hotel bedbugs. “Water Cure,” a short directive regarding torture, is a chillingly calm address to readers: “The manual recommends a pause / to let the man confess” goes one searing line. In “Beyond the Solace of a Devastated Landscape,” Griswold rebukes the profession and the life she’s chosen:

You don’t need a war.
You don’t need to go anywhere.
It’s a myth: if you hurl
yourself at chaos
chaos will catch you.

This idea recurs in If Men, Then, in which Griswold calls out “we lovers of the liminal” who “delight / in conflagration, set up / our beach chairs at the battle side” and paints herself as an “ardent scribe, bristled with thrill” who’s “eager to share any awful story.” But whereas the narrator of Wideawake Field comes across as a sorrowful and withdrawn witness to devastation, the new collection contains a range of tones and voices that feel more active and alive. As Phillips puts it, the new poems “can seem to have pristine lyrics, but they’ve got a lot of funk and spit and grind to them.” Griswold is still dealing with the trauma of working in combat zones, but now she’s angry and funny and even hopeful. “Those poems are the most authentic way I can deal with what it means to be alive,” she says.

In lesser hands (or voice), such a pronouncement might sound grandiose. But Griswold’s frankness and honesty can be disarming. The way she speaks isn’t far removed from how she writes: with forthrightness and clarity. “That is, for me, a moral stance,” she says. “I really believe in clear, direct language. If it can be said more simply, then it should be edited to say what it says more simply.”

This style is a hallmark of both her journalism and her poetry. In the former field, lucidity is expected; in the latter, arguably less so. But for Griswold, it ensures that her poems are free from undue cleverness and remain accessible to all readers, even those without much knowledge of the genre. And what she loses at times in showy erudition, she makes up for in emotional impact.

Griswold often inserts into her poems something like a punch line that shifts the direction or undercuts readers’ expectations with a wallop. “Prayer,” which opens the new collection, begins, “What can we offer the child / at the border” and goes on to describe an innocent girl crossing a barbed-wire fence alone—a pitiable figure of the kind Griswold has reported on and whom we’ve all seen or read about it in the news. But then:

Nothing is what we can offer.
The child died years ago.

Such blunt-force honesty is followed by a thoughtful reconsideration:

Except practice a finer caliber of kindness
to the stranger rather than wield
this burden of self, this harriedess.

And finally, a lesson:

Humility involves less us.

Part of what makes “Prayer” effective is the way it moves seamlessly between different registers. Zooming in and out and shifting from description to analysis is typical of Griswold’s poetry. Galassi calls it “toggling back and forth” between “her external experience in the world” and a deep awareness of “inner turmoil.”

In person, Griswold is a master toggler. When we meet for a second time at her home in Morningside Heights, in Manhattan, our conversation about journalism and poetry is interwoven with a steady stream of baby talk to Winnie, her black-and-white bulldog. Out in the park, she picks up a stick and plays with Winnie while muttering lovingly to the puppy, then turns to me without missing a beat to consider a question about whether journalism is an art form. (Her answer: probably not, but also, who cares?)

Griswold clearly vibrates to her own frequency; at times she appears to run on a kind of wiry, almost madcap energy. It’s not that she’s scattered or can’t concentrate on any one thing; it’s that her brain is capacious, able to hold many things simultaneously. (Consider that she was reporting on fracking in Appalachia, tracking down landays in Afghanistan, and pregnant all at the same time.) On my visit, her desk looks like a metaphor for her mind—or perhaps a map of it—covered with a pleasingly messy array of books, papers, and miscellaneous items, including a single mitten (“this is typical,” she proclaims), a sage smudge, and an iPhone charger leaning against a water glass and dangling just so. As we speak, rather than sit in her office chair, she perches atop the back of it, in a position that seems to allow for the possibility of springing up at a moment’s notice.

Some of these habits may be byproducts of her years spent reporting in dangerous environments. (Griswold doesn’t share much publicly about the scarier situations she’s been in, though “Arrest,” from Wideawake Field, seems to recount one in terms both humble and poignant: “My spirit thumps in the darkness,” she writes.) But the broad range of her attention also relates to her astute powers of observation, which she’s learned to apply not only to other people and situations but also to herself. Griswold has spoken in interviews about how reporting and poetry both involve paying attention. When I ask her to unpack that, she explains that reporting requires surveying an “exterior landscape,” and poetry focuses on an interior one. She talks about being “the watcher,” which she notes is a spiritual idea; indeed, learning to observe oneself and one’s thoughts is a foundation of Buddhist meditation. “Obviously [this is] much easier in journalism ’cause it’s like, I’m at the kitchen table, I’m watching,” she says. “I guess the equivalent would be, with the poems, I’m at the kitchen table of my own selfhood.”

“Powwow,” a poem in Wideawake Field, takes up this notion explicitly:

Having made peace with the usual demons,
the characters at my mind’s powwow
sit awkward around the table.
Each archetype checks himself
before commenting on the weather—
there’s nothing else to say.
They search for shared experience,
can’t find it, break up early,
go home to kiss their wives.

This is the funniest poem in the collection, and it presages the lighter tone of If Men, Then. It foreshadows, too, the emergence of a character called I, which according to Griswold is one of the dominant archetypes sitting around that imagined kitchen table. A manifestation of part of the author’s identity, I is written as a female character in the third person, and she gets her own section in the new book, a series of 15 poems titled “First Person.” (“You can tell when you get to the I poems that this is somebody who’s really done work on herself,” Phillips says.)

Griswold describes I to me as “very noisy,” “a cartoon,” and “an angry six-year-old stomping her feet.” She is those things, but in the book, she’s also more: freewheeling, angry, mournful, and self-destructive. She’s portrayed variously as a frayed guitar string, a woman who’s been sexually harassed but hasn’t thought much of it, a Girl Scout who just won’t leave your door. One of the most striking depictions comes in “Singer Futura,” in which Griswold writes

I is instinct gone awry. Sugar,
speed, near death, she loved
to limn oblivion, thrived
off the grid, since the grid
was fraught with dead ideas
of what a life should be.

A cardinal sin of journalism, at least as it used to be practiced, is for a reporter to insert herself unnecessarily into a story. Although Griswold doesn’t claim to be objective (“there’s no such thing,” she says), she abides by this rule, so there’s something fitting, almost ironic, about her singling out a piece of herself and turning it into a third-person character called I. This construct allows her to distinguish between her personal issues and the eternal question of what being human means, particularly in the year 2020. Griswold’s we, which she uses throughout the book as well, means something different from I. “We is the universal human condition,” she explains. “I is the shit that I have to work out."

For Griswold, who has turned the religiousness of her upbringing into a core subject of her life’s work, the distinction is partly one of ego. She sees in today’s society the rise of a “market spirituality” and a lot of “shoring up and shining of selfhood, as if that’s somehow heroic,” which is at odds with the deeper, existential self she investigates in the book. The attention-seeking, oversharing culture endemic in the United States also runs counter to what might be called the mantra of her journalism career, which she repeats to her students: “Reporting requires crossing lines of difference.” Reading Griswold’s reporting, whether she’s profiling a chief in North Waziristan or hanging out with American millennial Evangelicals, makes clear just how much she excels at such crossing. It evinces her belief that journalism contains “an aspect of service . . . that I would be uncomfortable claiming for poetry.”

There’s no doubt that Griswold’s reporting has performed a vital, even life-changing, service for others. In the end, though, her poetry may have done the same for her. When I remark on her impressive ability to introspect, she says, “To be really honest, if I didn’t, I’m not sure I would be alive anymore.” The candor, self-awareness, and resilience in that comment are the same qualities that animate her poems. 

“Water Table,” which appears early in If Men, Then, is stunning in its short, lyric confession. It begins with the line “My earliest wish was not to exist—” and goes on to describe wanting not to die but to dissolve:

. . . to be unborn
into the atmosphere. To hang
in the humid air, as ponds vent upward
from the overheated earth,
rise until they freeze
and crystallize, then drop
into the aquifer.

From such a beautiful, deep-seated wish for sublimation, the book wills its way to a modest kind of hope. In the final poem, “Toward a New Year,” Griswold tells of two “dream-laden” paper boats set alight on a body of water. The implication isn’t one of destruction but of ritual. “Need I say against all odds—” she writes, “a pinch of fire, an ocean,” ending with light amid darkness, an image of fleeting, quiet persistence.