In her third poetry collection The Sky Will Hold, poet Elizabeth Hazen reexamines the gap between youthful dreams and middle-aged reality, exploring what it means to belong: to a family, a community, even within her own skin.
The Sky Will Hold is a collection that emerges from a deeply personal journey that spans addiction and recovery, failed and successful relationships, and the universal experience of questioning whether we’ve ended up where we thought we would be – and wherever that may be – calling that place home…
The sky falls like a hatch
to seal us in; we define our personal spaces,
stock our bunkers, shelter in place. The sky
is an illusion, after all.
In this conversation with Vol.1 Brooklyn, Hazen discusses her writing process, making art with the memories she’s stuck with, and how becoming a parent forced her to figure out “how to be alive” in order to guide someone else through the same challenge…
Constant and Merciful, The Sky Will Hold
Do you feel like there was growth that maybe you didn’t even recognize as your collection was coming together, where you thought, “Wow, this has changed so much about me and my life and my outlook?” and vice versa?
I do feel like there was growth. Some of that is being in this middle-age period; when I started writing the poems for this book, I was in my late thirties and now I’m in my late forties. Some of the growth had to do with the challenges of publishing the poems and getting the book published. Some came from a desire to just be okay, to stop striving and struggling and fighting to hold onto good looks or fighting to have a place or to feel established as a writer and just letting go of a lot of that external stuff.
Which, you would think, is a lot – almost too much – for a concise collection. But it’s not at all overwhelming in that way; there’s closure in your book too.
I think the poems that come later [in the collection] have this active thinking about wanting to not engage some of that more superficial type of measurement. I feel like over the course of writing the book, I attempt to reach a place where I’m just letting go of some of that.
There was a poem where you mention where you thought you would be in life by now, what you thought you would have, what you don’t have, but what you do have, and it all being okay. I can’t remember what poem that was, but I really held onto that because it’s just a universal understanding that we all, especially at this age, think: “Well, I would for sure at least be here in this place in life, and I am certainly not.”
So you measure things. And then it’s like that question that I always come back to: is there a difference between settling and acceptance? Nobody wants to feel like they’re settling, but I do want to accept what I have and be grateful for it. So that’s a question that comes back a lot for me.
I love the vulnerability in your work, especially regarding your marriage in the beginning. There was this sense – I don’t want to call it second-guessing in the narrative voice – but I felt like you or the narrator was shocked to be where they were in life with their second marriage. Grateful, but also questioning so much of where they were. How does it feel looking back on that now?
Some of those poems were written really early in my second marriage. I came out of my first marriage and just had a period of going a little bit crazy; my drinking got really out of control. Then I happened to meet my husband just a few weeks after I had quit drinking, so it was a very shaky, strange time. It was always like, “Thank God I didn’t meet him any sooner when I was such a mess, because it never would’ve happened.” But there was this feeling of not deserving to be this lucky.
Your meeting seems kind of kismet and magical…
It did feel magical and beyond… I’m not really a romantic, but just so lucky… like, nobody deserves to be that lucky. And I look back on those poems, and I’m very fortunate to be able to say I still feel that way.
I was going to ask – not to fixate on the drinking – but as a sober person myself – do you find that it’s hard to write about drinking or relapsing, even after time has passed?
Some of those poems were really helpful to write. There were a couple of times when I relapsed that were really bad. But writing about it was… I don’t know… not to be dramatic, like “Oh, I need redemption” – but I feel like if there is a way to redeem choices that maybe you’re not proud of, it’s making something out of them.
Making art out of it.
That’s all you can do to stay sane. It makes sense, with the memories you’re stuck with.
And so what is your writing process like when you write a poem? Because I read in some of your work, you were like, “I haven’t written all week. I just stared out the window.” And I love that.
Staring out the window was a very integral part of my process! And that’s another question like, am I a writer? Yes, I am, but there are all of those insecurities. I don’t wake up and write for a certain amount of time every day. I’ve had periods where I do things like that, and then I get busy with other things or other work takes over. So I would say, in general, the way I write is very piecemeal.
There are also a lot of questions about family and who belongs and “who doesn’t belong” in certain contexts in your poetry…
I think I’ve walked through life feeling like I don’t belong everywhere I go anyway, and so that feeling of alienation is a theme in a lot of my work.
I love that you include other people in your poems to bring out your insecurities though. I’m looking at the poem with the “mommy drag” – I love that poem, and I love the imagery – of getting “dressed up” to pick up a kid at school, to go “play nice.”
That’s my friend who I always walk in the woods with. She just has these great stories that she’ll tell me, and she said that phrase – “mommy drag” – and also “making teeth.” I just thought, “Oh, my God.” I’d never heard that before, but I felt like I had to write about that.
Do you have a favorite poem? I know poets hate when I ask that, but do you have one that speaks to you more now, or a personal favorite?
The one that the title of the collection comes from, which is about driving my son home from getting a tattoo. We had to drive down to Bethesda because he was only sixteen. We’re driving home, and there’s this crazy, weird rainstorm. To the left, it was blue skies and this rainbow, and then to the right, it was stormy, and all these rainbows were coming up from the tires and the water. It was just this really beautiful scene. When I read that poem, it makes me really remember that moment. It was his first tattoo, and now he has tattoos everywhere. I just remember it felt like such a rite of passage.
One poem that lingered with me after reading it was “Risk Assessment.” The ending imagery in that poem is “held in the sky” as well – in a bird’s impression left on glass after having flown into it. It’s beautiful.
I feel like that poem kind of works through trauma; it lives in the body or whatever. It sounds kind of woo-woo, like “big T” or “little T” trauma. But I had, as so many of us do, experiences from when I was very young that I feel live in the body, and you don’t even realize how much you might be on edge or constantly assessing what’s around you as you’re moving through space; that mentality of everything being a potential threat. I feel like the poems in the beginning of the collection show a speaker who is very much in that state of mind: on edge, worried, anxious, and fearful. Hopefully, moving through time and toward the end of the collection, the speaker ends up in a place that’s a bit more secure.
I can definitely see that because I see the reflection in the son in the second part. Some of it is similar to the narrator’s arc in part one.
Yeah. It’s like, okay, you have to be able to explain to this younger person how to be alive. So you need to figure that out yourself. How are you going to help him with this if you don’t figure yourself out?
Which is so universal because you’re sitting there in part one drinking, and then there you are taking care of yourself just like a lot of other people.
And you get to the age that we are and think, oh my God, I thought at some point I would feel like I knew what was going on. You realize, okay, actually I’m never going to feel that way. I’m just going to be faking it.
Photo credit: E. Brady Robinson.