Poet Ellen Steinbaum finds beauty in simplicity

Recently, I caught up with poet Ellen Steinbaum to interview her about her new collection, LEAVINGS.


Steinbaum wrote me:



"Leavings is my fifth collection and I’ve also written a one-person play. My work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is included in anthologies including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places; The Widows’ Handbook; A Mighty Room: A Collection of Poems Written in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom; and CavanKerry’sWaiting Room Reader II. An award-winning journalist and former Boston Globe columnist, I write a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe” which can be found at my web site, ellensteinbaum.com."




This is the final poem in Leavings:


“The Intervening Day” we call it:

the day between his birthday and our
anniversary, between the beginning of
his days and the formal beginning of our
days together, between these two occasions
for cards and cakes, good wishes, celebrations,
this one day that has no ritual, just
an everyday day, a day we notice perhaps only
because it sits sandwiched between the two
momentous ones, a day when nothing further
is required than our simple gratitude for
one more ordinary day.

Poet Charles Coe wrote of your poetry collection that your poetry evokes "profound truths in the smallest, quite corners" Could one say you find the profound in the mundane—the minutiae?

I love that Charles said that. I hadn’t thought about that but, yes, it feels right. Though I admire poets who can wrestle with huge subjects and bring them into a scale for human observation, I think I am more comfortable with the very small thing that might almost escape notice.



Your lead poem " Commitment" deals with all things-- cockroaches. You have a knack for seeing the ugly/beauty—the romantic gloss of this roach couple?​

I think “ick—cockroach”—but I did like learning that these creatures I consider loathsome actually have this behavior I find—write it—charming!



Regarding your poem about the doomed Donner Party, I can't help but think of Donald Trump – a ham-fisted, carnival barker and snake oil salesman, who leads his hapless flock to their death.

Exactly what I hoped you’d think of, including the happy coincidence of the two names.



In your poem " What Happiness Is?," you explore the ''limp gifts"—the little things-- that are indeed consequential in a relationship. This brings us back to the profundity of minutiae.

Yes. What I was thinking of here was how, when we are lucky enough to spend our days with someone we care about, the tiniest observations become little “gifts” of noticing to offer for sharing. Noticing is something I’ve written about specifically, because noticing is what poets need to do—right?--in order to find something worth turning into metaphor, worth thinking about.



Do you feel your years as a journalist informs your poetry?

I’m sure they do. When I turned to poetry it was out of a desire to say something in a way I couldn’t do in prose, but I think it’s all of a piece, different ways of putting into words and sharing what I find interesting.


Why should we read your book?

There’s a wonderful line by Willa Cather: there are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.


I really believe that’s true—we each have our own details, but the basic outlines of our stories are easily recognizable to one another. And I think the more our individual stories are told with our specific details, the easier they are for someone else to see their own stories in. And isn’t that what we all crave, especially after a lockdown that isolated us from one another and societal divisions of all kinds—a point of connection, of commonality? My story—or the things I’ve noticed enough to bring into my poems—are mine, but I think others can find themselves in what I’ve noticed and written about, and then maybe feel connected to others through that.