“Even the Smallest Flood Ends”: Remembering Elizabeth Arnold

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

Before we ever met, Liz and I were correspondents. I first wrote to her in the fall of 1994, having launched on a doctoral dissertation on Mina Loy—something Liz had finished several years earlier, at the University of Chicago. She was happy to hear from a fellow “Loy-alist” also toiling as a scribbler in the larger poetry field, and she was candid about having to leave her full-time academic position due to illness, which prompted her reluctant return to her native stomping grounds of Jacksonville, Florida. In between her words of encouragement and our shared excitement about Loy, I could hear a frown of frustration behind the laughter that I would later see firsthand in her always animated face. A couple of years later we were both in Provincetown for the winter—she as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, I as the writing coordinator there following a fellowship year. With so many shared enthusiasms—Loy, Bunting, Niedecker—we quickly became friends. I had the privilege that winter of seeing writing that would become her first book, The Reef (1999).

The poems of The Reef are formally stunning as well as arresting for a bildungsroman and künstlerroman narrative that moves from childhood into adolescence and illness (Hodgkin’s lymphoma), and out, to the evolving vocation of poetry. Liz’s syntax and prosody, her feeling for the sentence/line relationship and sensitive ear for cadence—how a poem moves and unfolds with the phenomenal action of a kinetic form—brought her to the art as much as any experience in her life. For her, the adventure of the body, in health and in sickness, was also the adventure of the poem. You can hear its dramatic propulsion in The Reef’s overture.

Tremendous blocks of ice-
smooth turquoise-tinted slabs
—not quite ice yet, not even
slabs but only seeming
to be, through the slightly
convex surface of the rushing
(not breaking) roiling
water of the stream—go past
as blurred or sharp, depending
on how fast whatever guides
the eye can follow then
flip back, catching the next
unbounded segment of the stream
that’s hurtling down the giant
runnel it has tunneled at
god knows how long, the finger-
numbing force not rumbling
as you might expect, but
whispering at a pitch so high
it’s almost out of range—
a sound as if of exhalation,
breathing over my whole sense
the air the stream has cooled, 
a stream nearing its hectic end
where it will spill
everything it has into
the waiting, open-ended
once-lake arm of ocean,
the forest-green fjord—
as earlier, uncountable
millennia ago, it broke
the barrier of dirt and rock,
crashed through or slowly rubbed
until the land dissolved
and flooded through itself
beyond beyond.

The liveliness of this writing—the technical skill on display as line rushes into line without undermining sense—comes from Liz’s adept handling of the twinned elements of poetry, energy and rule, power and control.

The poems of The Reef established the physical and psychic geography that Liz would chart over the next 24 years and across five subsequent volumes of verse from Flood Editions—Civilization (2006), Effacement (2010), Life (2014), Skeleton Coast (2017), and Wave House (2023)—even if that geography shifted as she wrote herself into it. Born in Jacksonville in 1958, Liz grew up near the St. Johns River, immersed in a riverworld of eels and catfish, palmetto, and ginko, that were joined, in her imagination, with the birds that visited her in dreams. This rich world of the Florida north coast, where Liz lived happily as a carefree, curious riverchild, became eventually a place of first illness, hospitals, tests, the chill of metal beds, treatments, radiation, surgeries. Having to confront her own mortality early on gave Liz an exigent clarity of mind, allowing her to perceive with an imaginative buoyancy the network of connections between the body’s distress and the operations of the world—in art, politics, natural disasters, cities and their architecture, war, religion, the whole history of human consciousness—lit by an awareness of life lived at the cellular level. Here, for example, she finds in the face of her ailing father an entire world ridden with the paradox of time moving backward: 

My Father’s Face 

a civilization
falling out of its accustomed

stand amidst the world.

He is happening in the air around him
happening less

even as his face regains its youth
though he is dying.

Why not grimace?

The obdurate stubbornness of facts—their volume, weight, and material resistance—gain a wonderful plasticity in Liz’s handling; from near and far, they came into her mind and snagged there. She relished their textures, felt their vibrations, and transferred their energy into a body of poetry that brought an epic scale into the tight domain of lyric actions, enlivened by an elliptical compression she’d perfected through her long study of the poets she loved, from Archilochus to George Oppen, Heraclitus to Pound, Virgil to Bunting, Niedecker, and Loy. Writers such as Ungaretti, Celan, Melville, and the anonymous singers of Anglo-Saxon make their way into Liz’s own poems, showing up as exemplary figures of cosmic imagination who populate a room of mirrors in which Liz caught her reflection and redirected it out into the world, along Egyptian rivers and distant deserts where she discovered new intimacies.

Liz was obsessed with moving water—how it figures consciousness and imagination, spirit, time, history, and runs through the morphing rise and fall of civilizations. The St. Johns River became one with the Nile, the Niger, the Bahr el Zeraf, the Mississippi, the Hoanib, the Tiber and Isonzo, the waterways of Maya, even Etna’s river of lava, even the Great Sand Sea near Libya. 

Great circulatory movements of Earth,
the ocean’s rivers and

streams of air

jerked from their beds,
those hollows we imagine, runnels

that aren’t there!

(from “Hell,” Skeleton Coast)

Mindstreams, there and nowhere, running inside us. An interest that we shared, and also, in the way of poet friends, kept from each other. We were joined through our fascination with water, and were often working along parallel tracks, even, uncannily, giving our poems—without knowing it—the same titles. When I was working on “Rock Creek (II),” she was drafting “Like Water Flowing” and “Flow Dynamics”; somehow, we both wrote a poem called “Net.” Discovering this, we also happily stumbled on our separate obsession with Alice Oswald’s long river poem, Dart. Liz remarked on how Oswald figures moving water as if it carried with it the whole social history of life on the riverbank, something that called back to her own origins. It’s inCREDible, she said, her voice rising to a peak in the short middle vowel of that modifier. The way she said it with a rising push, I felt I was hearing that word as if for the first time. For Liz, what was most convincing in a poem was always most incredible, what stretched one’s belief in what it is possible to do with language.

In 2001, Liz and I were both hired by the University of Maryland. We shared an office in a rundown temporary building that had once been called Surge Overlow (more rivers!). While we were both mostly silent at department meetings and around new colleagues on the scholarly side of the corridor maze, Liz and I seemed never to stop talking to each other behind the closed office door. Students who dropped in for conferences invariably got a stereophonic experience, with two unceasing voices agreeing and disagreeing as we opined at high speed about poets, poems, and poetry. We’d slow down to a micro-crawl when discussing students’ drafts, and thought out loud with each other about the life and labor of doing what we were doing with the aim of helping writers in the MFA program do it too, and better. Liz would fasten on a moment of rhythmic collapse in a student’s draft, for example, and repeat the line in a manner that made them hear it. She’d then jump on an image that was exactly right, and repeat it with an intensity of appreciation that you could see lifted the student’s spirits. She’d point out where the verse movement came together with impressive verbal energy, and where it crumbled. 

It was exhilarating and exhausting, and a lot of fun to be with Liz on the roller coaster of poetrygab—talking craft and digging into the substrate of poems we loved. You didn’t want to be in a car with me and Liz if one of us was driving and you needed to get somewhere promptly. With the two of us talking to each other at the same time as we were listening to each other, we would invariably drive 20 minutes past our arrival point, and would have to double back (we missed a number of AWP panels in Baltimore that way, but we had a better time together in the car, yakking). 

Liz was legendary for how she listened to students’ drafts at the level of the syllable, often hearing in them elements—an improvised meter coming into audible apprehension, or an acoustic correspondence of consonants and vowels that suggested a larger concatenation of experiences—that the poet had not yet heard themselves. Liz read poetry as she wrote it, with her whole body; students caught the vibe of that excitement, which inspired them to carry on and carry forward into writing they might not have otherwise imagined. The intensity of her attention was not limited to the intellect, but involved the aggregate physical senses so actively a part of her poetic intelligence. This embodied poetic attention is what allowed her to make the leap from The Reef to her second book, Civilization. 

In part through her long study of Oppen, Liz came to feel the limitation of the modality of her earlier work. She wanted something tougher, quicker, more compressed, and heavy with facticity that ignited perception and took off. Thus, in Civilization, we get poems like “Eclipse”: 

Nothing can throw me off my footing
the way god’s blotting out of the sun has,

as if he’d pasted wet clay over it,
darkening the noontide.

No way to hide the fact that
though we’re standing in one place

we’re travelers to whom anything can happen:
fish grazing in the slant-hilled meadows,

cows of the kelp-beds—such are ours now,
pastures wavering under water . . .

Facts are never hidden in Liz’s poems, even as they cross and become transposed in poetic vision, like those fish and cows. Instead, for Liz, facts of the truly real—that is, poetic facts, facts as they are experienced in phenomenal life—defy reason and conventional perception while revealing everything that the mind would play on, like this section of “Like Water Flowing,” from her fourth book, Life: 

The mango trees were blooming
and the animals slept. We walked

closer to the river.

There was a little bit of light making shadows.
You were

turning away

but I saw something other as your
voice moved like the river when it

swerves past rocks it swirled,

slammed giant thumbprint-like impressions into
nobody knows how long ago,

carving a new channel.

Liz worked intuitively and with formal rigor to create that sense of swing from the end of one line to the opening of the next. Notice how the action of the line cascades down the poemcourse, how the force of her verbs—turning, swerving, slamming, carving—intensifies verse movement at the line openings. Here, the action of the poem is starker and sparer than in her earlier work, the phenomenal movement of water caught with a brighter verse-speed, more indelibly, as if she were somehow sketching and etching the action simultaneously. Rather than the streaming, extending, pushing-pulling forward and recursive effect of her earlier poems, Liz’s later work places greater pressure on line endings—where the invisible yet audible channel of verse movement is carved—to create the “surprise mind,” as Ginsberg calls it, of the sudden leaping insight that hits us in a poem. (As we walk at the end of one line, we get closer to the river; as our being is turning away we leap to a line of apprehension—the river is a voice, unique, working its way through temporal space.) 

I think Liz’s greatest poem is her translation of “The Wanderer,” the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem in the 10th-century Exeter Book. Liz wrote it early in the pandemic, and it appears in her final book, Wave House, published before cancer would sweep her away. It’s the most personal poem she ever wrote, even as it only gestures to the suffering brought on her by the treachery of her body, which underwent surgery for lung cancer twice during lockdown. Liz’s poem throws into sharp relief the terrible contradiction of a spiritual homelessness rooted in the condition of being literally homebound.

Often for this one,
alone, lost,

suffering lasts
god help me

—yet my mind,
harried, heavy,

finds its scared way
across seawater,

icy—exiled,
no one else here.

So spoke the wanderer,
land-stomper,

dragged down
by calamity,

bitter slaughter,
kinsmen’s ruin.

Liz shot the rapids, in her life and in her art. She brought the force of that fluency to the surface of her poems, which pull the reader into the depths, where we find even more at the riverbed. For those who never knew her, the poems are waiting; and for those who did, they might find her, as well, at any delta, where the river runs into the sea.

                            —Joshua Weiner
                            Washington, D.C.
                            October 1, 2024