Elizabeth Arnold

About Me

Here's my standard short bio:

Elizabeth Arnold is the author of three books of poetry—The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006), and Effacement (Flood Editions, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Poetry, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Antioch Review, Tikkun, and Oxford University Press’s Literary Imagination. While researching her Ph.D. dissertation on Mina Loy, Arnold discovered Loy's novel, Insel, which she edited for Black Sparrow Press in 1991. She has received various awards, including a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, and a Whiting Writers Award. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland and Warren Wilson College’s low residency MFA. She lives outside Washington, D.C.

Why do you write?

That's a hard one. I'll have to think more about this but I can say now that I do it because it feeds some need in me. When I go for a while without writing (as I have lately having recently finished writing a book), I get agitated. It's physical, this need. I love it when I've got something going in a poem or series of poems. It's what I live for. Besides gardening. Seeing the leaves emerge, vegetables, flowers, is a little like witnessing a poem emerging syllable by syllable, sound by sound on the paper.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Too many to name, so this is an incomplete list: McMichael, Bidart (shorter poems mostly), Lowell, Bishop, Oppen, Bunting, Loy, Pound, Niedecker, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Wyatt, Archilochos, Homer.