Elana Wolff is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, editor, translator, and visual artist. Elana’s writing has most recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2024, FreeFall, Galaxy Brain, Montréal Serai, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Vallum, and Yolk. Her collection, Swoon, received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, (Guernica Editions, 2023), is now available for preorder.
You can read Spectral in the October 2023 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
“Spectral” was written in conversation with Jan Hinderson’s luminous pinhole photograph—featured for this issue of Pinhole Poetry. I needed only a glimpse to know I could write toward this image. The gauzy hanging dresses, the armchair, the window on a wider world, the inside circle of light. The mistiness of the picture and its expression, for me, of a private, anonymous, mannered kind of life. The darkness on the periphery may obliterate the viewer, shelter her from knowing, and / or provoke imagination of agitations happening beyond her field of vision. A tension is held. The image also provided me with the opportunity to use a word I’ve been waiting to bring to a poem: “fauteuil.” Poems, in my mind, benefit from selective use of uncommon words, fittingly placed. “Weimaraner” is another one. I needed three syllables for that spot on the line, and “Weimaraner” did the trick. Semantically and visually, I felt that the piece would be served by a fading out of the final lines; in terms of ekphrastic resonance too.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
There are a number of poems that have acted as touchstones over the years—so many of Louise Glück’s poems, Jack Gilbert’s poems, Anne Carson’s, Mary Szybist’s. Too many to name. Recently, I turned again to Louise Glück’s poem, “Purple Bathing Suit,” from her collection, Meadowlands, and was astounded, yet again, by the fierce beauty of her lines, how she devastates the reader with her dialectical use of tone to voice the relentlessness of love/hate, desire/contempt. Also the strength of the declarative ending that resists any blest resolution.
What are you working on now?
I’m about to launch into the world my cross-genre Kafka quest book, Faithfully Seeking Franz. The book will be in stores in November, and officially launched at the Guernica Editions group launch in Toronto on December 3. Faithfully Seeking Franz is a work that’s been in the works for long over a decade and not likely ever to be truly completed. I made the decision during Covid to rein the work in, to prepare it for publication at its present state of readiness. To be okay with a state of tentative completeness, to admit to myself that I will probably never feel complete in my seeking of K, yet not absolved from continuing the quest either. There are K locations I haven’t yet reached, pieces that I can only, for now, imagine writing. Notes I took on a recent trek to a ‘K place’, whose multisyllabic Hungarian name I’m still negotiating, have yet to percolate their way into prose. “Now”, after all, is a continuous present. I’m also still working on a collection of poems that’s been accepted for publication. I’ll be tinkering with it, no doubt, until it’s typeset.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
A poem can begin anywhere—in bed, in a dream, while eating, while reading, while driving, while being driven. Seeing that I spend much of my time at home, most of my poems begin, end, and are crafted at home. But my most recent piece was drafted while I was sitting in the passenger seat of a rented car while driving from Budapest, through Slovakia to Prague; therefore, far from home. The poem began with picking and pressing a wildflower in Želízy, Central Bohemia, and progressed from there—in aleatory mode, led by movement, the ‘continuous moment’, the joining of dissimilar things, glimpses of what might be going on in the ‘off-view’; the feeling of freeness to make sonic, semantic, and rhythmic sense of the non-obligatory flow.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Lately I’ve been reading works by Jewish-Italian French novelist Patrick Modiano, whose name I hadn’t heard until he won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. After that the English translations started rolling in: Dora Bruder, Villa Triste, Sundays in August, In the Café of Lost Youth, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Invisible Ink … Modiano’s vapoury blending of history, detective story, and autofiction are particularly compelling to me, as is his circling of the joint theme of dis- and reappearance. So resonant. And for tang with a dash of pique, my husband and I recently watched the Seth Rogen vehicle, Platonic. Rogen’s humour and appearance in the series are on the nearside of cringe, but his voice is ever so singular—baritonal rasp—and his phrasing spot on. One can learn a lot about phrasing in poetry from phrasing in comedy.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
The big questions I have are more about ethics and metaphysics than style or craft. As for style, I suppose I’m striving for a quality of timelessness. And in craft—in terms of skill with elements of image, syntax, diction, sound, and line: the very stuff of poetry—I’m also striving. Can one ever identify the big answer?