Introduction
I was first introduced to Bobby Elliott’s debut collection, “The Same Man” (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), in an editorial meeting earlier this year. I read the opening poem to the collection, “Mondegreen”, and felt myself gasp in both bafflement and excitement by the poem’s end, impressed by how much the piece could evoke in me given the poem’s brevity. I knew the collection would be an important one for me, as I was already moved by its barely two-page intro.
“The Same Man” is full of family: fear, panic, and suicidal ideation, joy, humor and unconditional love, all pulse through the brave collection grounded in the speaker’s dual experience of fatherhood as both a son and new parent. The book balances the clarity of plain language with the depth, and terror, of imagination, and it invites readers into the very real anxiety that comes with being responsible for keeping someone alive.
I initially reached out to Bobby to thank him for making the leap: his words had found me and moved me, and I was grateful to have been stopped in my tracks amongst the (often beautiful) oversaturation of a creative writing MFA program. He responded with warmness and gratitude, and as I read more of his work, I realized that the impressive choices in “Mondegreen” flood the rest of his work as well. Specifically interested in what helped him write about, and finetune for sharing, such personal experiences, I asked if he would be open to an interview. A few weeks later, on May 21st, we hopped on zoom so I could learn more about how the collection came to be and has resonated.
Michaela Godding: So first off, and I’m sure you’ve heard this hundreds of times by now, but congratulations on winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize! I think that truly that must be such a big way to release your first collection into the world. In learning more about you as an artist and writer, I came across the fact that your prize winning collection, The Same Man, was in some way decades in the making for you. Could you share with us what your process of writing the book looked like from start to finish?
Bobby Elliott: Toward the end of my time at the University of Virginia, I had written what felt like a book. But after a series of conversations with one of my teachers there, Mark Doty, I started to wonder if that was the case. And that question sat with me for a solid year after my MFA—I kept going back to the manuscript and trying to figure out whether it held up, and whether it was what I wanted to step forward with. Ultimately, my answer to that question—and this was sobering and humbling—was that I needed to go back to the drawing board.
So, I started over and began writing new poems. This was at the same time that I became a father, so, as you can imagine, it meant that my time was very limited, but I knew I wanted to see the poems through and just started waking up before anyone else in the house to write. In the end, I drafted and revised the poems over the course of those first few years of parenthood. I wasn’t sending them out —I wasn’t even sharing the poems I was writing with my closest friends or former teachers. I was just trying to get the poems done and, in large part, hear myself again.
I’m sure you’re experiencing this a little bit in your own MFA program: you receive a lot of feedback, including (hopefully) great feedback, but it can be easy to forget the sound of your own voice, and I wanted to rediscover that as I was writing these new poems. Once I felt satisfied with the poems, and the book as a whole, I shared it with my closest friend, the poet, Michael Dhyne. We went back and forth for a bit on edits, and then in March of 2024, I started sending the book out. It got picked up in the fall of that same year.
MG: Awesome. This may be a hard question, but when you returned to the poems and were going through that editing process, and I love what you said about hearing your own voice, was there a moment or a feeling you had when you finally were like, okay, yes, this is done—I have reached where I want this to be?
BE: For me, it was important to get to that moment myself—I didn’t want to be reliant on someone else saying so (or saying that I hadn’t), and I knew that if I didn’t believe in what I’d made, the inevitable rejections to come would be a lot harder to endure. Maybe even impossible.
So, it was probably the winter of 2023 when I felt like the book was in place. Part of that was finding the title, The Same Man, and finishing the title poem, which felt like it suddenly radiated through the book in an essential way. And part of that was getting the sequencing down, which was complex and needed to move between the past and the present fluidly, seamlessly.
That said, there’s no question that Michael’s support and feedback was critical. If Michael, trusting him as much as I do, had said to me, “You know, I don’t know if this is ready,” I think it would have made a big impact on me—regardless of how hard I worked to get to a place of belief. His feedback was really helpful, but was largely a recognition that I had made a whole, that the poems were more than the sum of their parts. He was so excited by the book that I became more excited about it, too, which gave me enough wind in the sails—and hope—to begin sending it out.
MG: I love getting to hear about these moments of collaboration in building poetry and a collection. It really does take a village. And I think sometimes, you know, it can feel or become singular in conversations, so I appreciate you bringing in the world of the book coming to life.
BE: Absolutely—even though I didn’t seek out much feedback on the book as I was writing it, my friends and teachers were still, of course, vital in my life and in the life of these poems.
Gregory Orr, a mentor of mine, immediately comes to mind. He always pushed me to write about what I was most afraid of on the page—and he also encouraged me to embrace my obsessions. I carried both of those things into the writing of the book in almost daily ways. They helped me see the book through.
MG: That’s such a great prompt. I’ll be keeping that! That kind of fits into the next question as well. So, as we established, your first collection won a prestigious award, and I’m sure that that has come with life-changing attention and exposure, but I’m wondering, have there been any hard things that have come from that exposure? Or were/are there any difficulties or pressures that maybe you didn’t expect would come with that big introduction of your collection to the world?
BE: That’s a great question, Michaela. The experience has been life changing and affirming—and I’m so happy and grateful to have the University of Pittsburgh in my corner but there are aspects of this journey that have been hard.
There’s the whole reception piece, which has helped me reflect on external validation (and its traps), but, more importantly, writing this book, and then publishing it, has had real stakes in my life.
The book is autobiographical—I’m not afraid to say so—and centers around my relationship with my father, who is alive and an active part of my life. And I knew that this book would be, at the very least, significant for us—and I feared that it would be catastrophic. Ultimately, it hasn’t been catastrophic, but there’s also no question that the book has had consequences and impacts for us that are still unfolding and resounding. And that’s been both meaningful and painful.
MG: I would love to know a bit more about that because, as you said, your father is a huge part of your book topically, so I’m curious about how both of your parents reacted to this collection being out in the world, given that they are both deeply within it?
BE: It’s a little easier to talk about when it comes to my mother, who has been incredibly supportive from the minute the book was picked up. That isn’t to say that the book hasn’t been hard for her, but I think that she has been able to celebrate and recognize its meaning in my own life, in ways that I feel really lucky for. She’s come to a couple of my readings over the course of this year, and has been right there beside me along the way, which I think I will always look back on with a real fondness and gratitude.
When it comes to my father, I’m always careful about characterizing how he has met the work, because I’m hesitant to speak for him. What I can say, though, is that the book was important for him to encounter and initiated the kind of conversations we’ve never had (and may never have again).
As you can tell from the poems, there is so much that is unsaid between us, and there is so much work to be done between us, that it’s hard to characterize where things are now. And I don’t mean to be vague or opaque—it’s been big and it’s helped us talk about a lot, and yet we have a lot more to talk about, and work through.
MG: Which, honestly, I think is really beautiful. There’s this line is the first poem of the book, “Mondegreen”, that says:
I’d been thinking of how lost
you’d have to be
to believe you knew everything
there was to know
about yourself.
I found that so powerful because isn’t that what we do as artists? Choosing art as a career is committing to forever learning and relearning. So I totally hear all that you’re saying, and I don’t find it opaque. I think what you said is straightforward and clear, and I also totally respect that you don’t want to speak for another person, and that’s just another thing that’s so complicated, I think, as another poet that also writes about family and trauma. There are different levels of permission, both from the self and from the people we love as we write about them.
BE: Natasha Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, and just this morning I was re-reading her poem, “Illumination,” which begins with the line, “Always there is something more to know.” And I think that that line—in both direct and indirect ways—really fed, nourished, and made possible so many of the poems in The Same Man, including that line you just referenced from the opening poem, “Mondegreen.”
MG: Wow, that’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing. And yes, that line I referenced is one of the reasons why I’m so drawn to the poem, “Mondegreen.” The enjambment in the poem does so much so quickly. It made me gasp in what it captured, so I was so excited to read the rest because it was inviting me to not assume I know everything there is to know, too.
That perfectly connects to my next thought and question, which is about fatherhood. Now you’re a father yourself, and I’m wondering if becoming a parent changed how you write, or how you read, poetry?
BE: It did, and I don’t think this book would exist without having become a father. There is an aspect of that that stems from the reality that until I became a father, I wasn’t truly able to write about my own father in the ways that I needed to, but it’s also true that I suddenly had these luminous sons to write about! I feel the current of their lives in my own life—and on the page—every single day in ways that feel incredibly empowering and hopeful.
Poetry and parenthood both make us face the intensities, and emotions, at the core of our lives. Even as I’m sometimes afraid of what they evoke or prompt, I always come back to a belief that they both require me to access a level of feeling that I sometimes find myself guarding against or avoiding. And more and more in my life as an adult—as a husband, as a father, as a poet and a teacher—I find myself striving toward that space. It feels as vital as anything else to me right now.
MG: Your joy for and from your sons is contagious. I love that you called them your luminous sons. That’s a poem right there!
Something that fascinates me throughout these poems is that amongst such clear language, there is still room for the imagined amongst every context it offers, and I’m interested in how those two things juxtapose each other sometimes. This is one of the, if not the, first collections that I’ve read that almost unravels its own logic later on, which I think is a really brave choice.
Throughout the book we are given, or alluded to, multiple methods of suicide attempts throughout different moments of time. I’m wondering why you chose that specific moment to begin with?
BE: The threat and possibility of suicide dominated my childhood and adolescence. My father struggled mightily with suicidal ideation and, unfortunately, I was highly aware of that as a young person. For a very long time—and still to this day—I took it upon myself to try to save my father. And, of course, that’s not possible—we all make the choice to live, or not to live—but, especially as a child, I just couldn’t possibly understand that. I thought my job as a son was to keep him alive and with “Mondegreen” as the opening poem, I wanted to authentically situate the book in a state of panic, uncertainty and fear that was deeply familiar to me.
Over the course of the book, the poems navigate and negotiate the very real possibility of my father ending his life and, ultimately, that feels true to my experience of being his son. As crushing and difficult as that reading experience may be, it reflects what it’s meant for me to be alive in some ways—and what it’s meant for me to become a father. Does that make sense?
MG: Yes, totally. And I think it completely sets that tone. And that’s part of what unsettled me and baffled me, right? AND at the same time, you gave me that reaction in so few words, which honestly just really impressed me.
BE: Thanks, Michaela. That’s something other readers have talked about as well—and while I wasn’t necessarily aiming to baffle a reader with the opening poem, I absolutely wanted to create a sense of profound uncertainty and fear, which persists, I hope, throughout the collection.
MG: So with that in mind, and with me thinking about the fact that we’re going to publish “Mondegreen” by itself next to this interview, I’m curious if you’ve ever had an interaction where someone maybe hasn’t read the whole book and reads this poem, or any singular poem from the collection, and takes away from it that the father mentioned did in fact kill himself, and whether or not it matters to you if someone leaves the poem, or even the book as a whole, with that belief, given what you’ve said?
BE: It’s happened, and that’s been hard. But when it comes down to it, I’m not in control of how anyone encounters my work. And I think that’s how it should be, right?
When I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, I read Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” where he makes the argument that the maker should have no say in how their work is understood or met. Now, I think the very act of taking part in an interview is, in some way, a rejection of that principle, but at the same time, I agree with him—the life of any poem or book is settled by the reader, not the writer.
As a teacher, I’m always trying to encourage my students to recognize that there are very few wrong answers when it comes to reading. My hope is that The Same Man eventually makes clear that the father figure is still alive, but it is possible for a reader to have a different interpretation than I do, or that you do. And I think there’s power in accepting that. Even embracing it and celebrating it.
MG: One of the things I am most drawn to in this collection is that it uses images and words that we all know, that invite us into your world seemingly with ease, that are then reintroduced later in a new context. “Mondegreen” is a great example of this—you introduce the idea of a father shooting himself in the poem, but then, for instance in the poem way later, “Prayed For”, you again reference the dad, and it says, to quote:
he says that with a look
he used to shoot
my mother when he wanted her
to stop breathing.
I think that your brilliant enjambment, with that moment in mind, and honestly throughout the entire collection, sets up this environment of panic through associations, which rings really true to me as a person who’s survived and revisited multiple traumas. So my question is, as someone who thinks that you captured that so well, and as a poet who, and I quote a blurb on the back of your book, “..believes in plain language’s power,” what would you say to writers and readers of poetry that believe that a contemporary poem has to be dense to be successful, or to not to be clichéd?
BE: The truth is that I’ve never had any interest—whatsoever—in density.
When I first started reading and writing poems in high school, my English teacher at the time had me read the Modernists: Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Pound. And while I loved the poetry itself, it wasn’t until I read Langston Hughes on my own that I discovered actual poems I could call my own—poems that were fashioned with language that felt almost transparent and out in the open and yet still complex and worth returning to. To this day, that enterprise, that orientation of the poem, is what I’m after on the page.
I want to make the most of the language we use every day, and I understand that it’s a risky effort. It can be quite easy, I think, to write off poems where the diction is relatively simple and where, especially in many of these poems, restraint is also functioning. But, in my view, the rewards are unparalleled—I’m thinking here of a poem like “the lost baby poem” by Lucille Clifton—and I’m willing to aim for them.
MG: And amongst all the risks, there’s also so much joy in the collection too, and even, I think, humor. Despite the heaviness throughout the collection, there were moments where sometimes I would find myself chuckle or even laugh a little. For instance, in the poem “Harmless” where you refer to your father and it says, “…there was no daddy store to return him to.” I loved that I could at first read that in the context of disappointment and anger, but then I would read it again and it would come across as a joke. And to kind of open that up a bit, a lot of people, we, because I include myself, laugh to get through trauma. I’m curious of your take on that thought and how you think humor and trauma collide?
BE: That’s a great question. I actually come from a long line of comedians—my grandfather was Bob Elliott, who had a longtime radio show called Bob and Ray, and my father’s brother, Chris Elliott, is a comedian, as is his daughter, the actress Abby Elliott. So, in some ways, humor has always been an important part of my familial life. Even my father can be a very funny person.
But I didn’t recognize the moments of levity in the book itself until I started giving readings, and now I really enjoy those moments, because I see them as a form of relief. There are, of course, many wonderful books that are bleak—Colby Cotton’s forthcoming, and exceptional, Steelhead comes to mind—but I’m grateful that The Same Man offers up some moments of relief along the way.
And certainly, in a larger sense, joy is a strong current in this book, particularly when it comes to writing about my own family. Beyond the figure of the father, the speaker’s partner and children animate, and illuminate, and give meaning to, the whole. They balance it, as they do in my life.
MG: Yes, the humor offers a nice breath between everything, but its inclusion is also a mirror to the allness of life.
You can’t just kind of pick and choose, and I think you did a really great job of balancing the many limbs and bridges of self and family—the layers of family, because there’s multiple families within one family too, and it all just felt alive and relatable to me in a way that I really enjoyed.
So now looking back on this experience—you’ve been through years of writing and editing this book, you’ve shared it with the world, and I’m wondering if you could say one thing to the you that wrote the first version of the book during your MFA that fell short for you, what would it be? Is there something that you know now that that version of you didn’t know, that you would share at the end of all of this?
BE: I recognize now that throughout graduate school I was always in search of external validation—I wanted to be told that what I was doing had value and meaning, that my thesis was, in fact, a book, and a good one, too.
This was both natural and dangerous. It was natural because I was working with some of my heroes—Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, Lisa Russ Spaar, Mark Doty, Paul Guest—and I wanted to prove myself as a poet. But it was also dangerous because I was so in search of that validation that I lost sense of what I actually wanted. I didn’t know then that my self esteem was the issue, that my sense of shame was powerful and damaging.
From where I sit now, I can see it all a little more clearly and probably would’ve benefited from a deeper awareness of those forces. But, at the same time, I feel very grateful for the journey I’ve been on—I feel lucky, and excited for what’s to come, too.
Interview by Michaela Godding
Michaela Godding is a loud and proud queer Poetry MFA candidate at George Mason University with a deep interest in writing about and through trauma. She has released a chapbook, dwelling (Bottlecap Press), and a full collection, The Year Our Grandmothers Died (AOS Publishing). More of her words can be found in or are forthcoming from Fruitslice, Rabble Review, Azarão Lit Journal, Chill Mag, Echo Review, Ritual Dagger Zine, Same Faces Collective, The Nutmeg Anthology (Grayson Books), and on Poetry Daily, where she currently works as an editorial assistant. You can follow her current projects, music, interviews, podcast appearances and upcoming publications on her instagram, @michaelagodding.
