I’ll revise a poem if I’m not happy with it, just to get it to a point where I’m like, “Well, I guess this will do.” But I always feel like the best poems come out almost exactly right the first time. The kinds of poems that I do more slowly and revise more, they never feel completely finished. I actually feel the same about essays. I really like to write essays all at once. Then I’m only really making small edits from there. I’ll just think about them for so long that I feel like, “Okay, now I know exactly how to write this”.
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EG
Elisa Gabbert
writer
b. 1979
Arts and letters
About
Elisa Gabbert (born 1979) is an American poet, essayist, and critic. She is the author of seven collections, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and writes the “On Poetry” column for The New York Times.
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