Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a full-length poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Alan! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your poetry in our forthcoming anthology, On Rules. We’d love to know a little more about your journey as a poet. How did it begin?
Alan Elyshevitz (AE): Nearly as far back as I can remember, I’ve been writing something. The beginning for me was song lyrics and tunes on a secondhand guitar during rock-n-roll’s “British Invasion” of the 1960’s. Nowadays, after a couple of decades of primarily short story writing, I write poetry almost exclusively. Since I seldom create poems that exceed a single page, I get to view the entire work all at once as though it’s a painting or a sculpture. This helps keep me focused during the revision process and provides a higher level of gratification than writing prose, at least for me…It occurs to me that I’ve digressed, but I’ll let this answer stand.
JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer?
AE: So many to choose from, but I’ll select a couple of aphorisms imparted to me by two of my fiction instructors at the Bennington Writing Seminars. The novelist Lynn Freed used to say, “Train your ear.” This advice works well for any genre. Attend to the aural shapes of lines or sentences and the rhythms created by combinations of syllables. However, I doubt that I’ve mastered this skill. Another bit of wisdom came by way of Susan Dodd: “Subtle it up.” In other words, trust the reader to comprehend your work without explication or obvious literary devices. This notion is especially useful for poetry, in which the connective tissue of ordinary logic sometimes impedes creativity.
JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.
AE: Again, so many options. I’ll choose an example from fiction: the opening paragraph of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger. “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.” What I love about this passage is the chilling emotional distance between the narrator and immediate events. However, this opening is also a signal that, in this work, readers will be granted room to breathe. No specific emotional reaction will be imposed upon us by the author. There will be no manipulation, no conventional or possibly fraudulent feelings required of us. Most of the time, I do my best to write poetry in this same spirit.
JK: Why is creative work important in 2024 and beyond?
AE: Important to the world? I have no idea. I only know that it’s important to me. I write almost every day. On those rare days when I neglect my work, I don’t feel like myself. Creativity is one of my few healthy habits, I suppose. And I gain almost as much pleasure from reading a good poem written by someone else as I do from creating my own.
JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work.
AE: Right now I’m making my way through a poem about CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, which houses the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Such a topic is not unusual for me. I very much enjoy tackling subject matter that, on the surface, may not appear to lend itself to poetry (though, frankly, everything does). I also like to include “unpoetic” vocabulary in my work, words from various unrelated fields and professions. If you would like to learn more, please feel free to visit my website: https://aelyshevitz.ink.