Author of more than a dozen books, Fleda Brown has been publishing col­lections of poems and essays for the past four decades. Her recent books are mortality, with friends: essays; Flying Through a Hole in the Storm, win­ner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and with Sydney Lea, Growing Old with Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. 

After teaching for twenty-nine years at the University of Delaware where Brown founded the Poets in the Schools Program, she retired in 2007, and now lives with her husband, Jerry, in Michigan. While Brown may have retired her career as a professor, her professional writing life is bustling. On her website’s front page is a blog Brown has maintained for more than thirteen years, with new entries added every couple of weeks. Under the tab on the left-hand column labeled teacher/lecturer, Brown offers herself eagerly to those seeking her attendance at their book club, poetry reading, workshop, and other literary events for little to no cost. Read any one of her blog entries and it becomes apparent that poetry and writing are inextricable from who Brown is. Whether she’s writing about an irrigation ditch, her cat, cancer, or current events—the insight, wisdom, passion, and curiosity her language per­petually exudes captivates its reader. 

Brown is also a woman who has loved Elvis all her life.

Kate Morgan: I’m interested in themed poetic collections. In particu­lar, how to construct a collection that is centered on a theme or a person or subject. How did The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives begin to take shape for you?

Fleda Brown: I can tell you really sim­ply: I was working on The Devil’s Child, which was probably the darkest and most difficult book that I have ever writ­ten and at the same time, I was tinker­ing with Elvis poems. Because that dark was just ... too dark. It was overwhelm­ing me. Sometimes I was just sobbing over those poems. They are based on a woman who had multiple personalities and she had the most horrible abuse. So, I was transcribing her story and then thinking how I would work it into poems. And I think that the Elvis poems were kind of, “Oh yes I can think about Elvis at the same time,” and I really didn’t know that I was going to have a whole book of them until I got maybe six or eight written. I started thinking, now I really want to do a book. The University of Delaware has always been very generous with grants. So, I got a lit­tle money to travel to Memphis and go to Graceland and visit Elvis sites. That’s how that got started.

Morgan: “Dark and difficult” is often how my current project feels and I know it’s a relatable feeling for many poets writing about abuse, trauma, and grief. Writing through or about these things in the end can feel empowering, life-giv­ing even. But you can also risk getting consumed along the way. Besides the Elvis poems, what helped you be brave enough to keep going back?

Brown: Well, when I was working on The Devil’s Child, I had a very good ther­apist. And then, you have to be forever aware that you’re doing art. If you start getting pulled downhill, remember your readers. Keep yourself exactly on the border where your feeling is personal and strong, and also your intellect is at work making its artistic choices. That’s a good discipline for writers if you can manage it. 

Morgan: You said you had seven or eight poems before you realized that a collection was building. In my experi­ence, sometimes it’s really hard once a concept or an idea takes hold to still find room to experiment or intuit a path. It can limit me, hedge me in. I think you can get so macro, thinking about a con­cept or a collection that the individual poem gets a little neglected, you know?

Brown: I know what you mean. I know Margaret Gibson said one time that she likes to write toward the book. She has several poems, and she figures “here’s a little gap, I need to write this for it in that form,” and I just don’t work that way at all. I understand what you mean also about hedging you in. I didn’t feel that. I was doing a lot of research, and as I found an aspect of Elvis that wasn’t exactly what I’d anticipated, I would have to work with it in a different way. Every poem was a different way of play­ing with what I was finding. I never felt that I was in any danger of trapping myself into those poems because each one was just really different. Some were more biographical, and some were more musical, more about the music. And then I felt that it was really important to have the voice of the poet, a kind of personal investment too. 

Morgan: I wonder, too, if what having worked simultaneously on The Devil’s Child felt to you as if, when you started writing these poems about Elvis, they came out of this place of play. Like, they were where you went to have fun, so maybe you weren’t thinking of them so seriously. 

Brown: Well, of course I was taking the poems seriously, but you’re absolutely right. I think Elvis was that time in my life when, well—nobody’s teenage years are happy. It wasn’t exactly happy, but there is a different kind of energy there. Really, those poems are unlike any of the other poems I’ve done in the sense that they come out of that adolescent energy. At least I hope they do, that’s kind of what I intended.

Morgan: I love music and I’m fasci­nated with musicians and fame. I was watching The Searcher last night, the two-part HBO documentary on Elvis. It’s so obvious, but I finally made the connection: Elvis was so much about the body. How he embodied the music, his dancing, and you know—that sex­ual attraction and energy he had. It makes perfect sense that teenagers who are going through all of these transi­tions with their own bodies would be drawn to somebody who is so fully in their body.

Brown: I’m glad you said that—that was exactly my impression. I think it’s the epitome of art when you find somebody whose whole expression of being is in their work. Elvis is one of those people. He was immature—there’s so many things you could say about him, all are true. He was easily pushed around by his manager. He was insecure, and so on, and so on. But he was all music. All the rest was just what you do to get by you know? There are poets that I admire so much, and you wouldn’t want to live their lives because it’s too painful. But you feel that whole life energy coming through the art, whatever it is.

Morgan: Yes, absolutely. The first poem in the collection, “The Original Sun Recordings” grapples with the desire to write with a certain trans­parent accuracy. In the poem’s own language, the speaker is “trying to not watch the poem.” Rather, she’s “trying like hell to keep track of Elvis.” Later on, the poem expresses the desire to be “like glass to make my words invisible.” Could you tell me more about that as it relates to writing this collection, writ­ing about Elvis?

Brown: That poem is kind of an invo­cation. It was, “Okay, let me do this so that I’m out of the way and Elvis is the one that we’re seeing here.” I felt some need to do that and to say it in the poem. Because I wanted my voice in there, too. It’s tricky. You might say this about any ekphrastic poem: if you’re looking at, say, a piece of art and you’re wanting to talk about it—if your sense of things/your voice doesn’t appear in some way, if there’s no attachment. I’ve read some really bad ekphrastic poems that simply describe something, sometimes very well. But you need to feel that connection. You need to sense why it hit the poet or the writer the way it did. I wanted a connection between Elvis and the speaker. There are a num­ber of places where I keep returning to that, like in the Graceland sequence, flying into Memphis, and I keep reminding the reader about my own stake in the poems. Maybe you could put it that way.

Morgan: On the flip side, a poem like “If I Can Dream” is rendered so beauti­fully because it feels like there’s a cam­era in the studio, an objective recorder of what’s going on. I really felt like I got the sense of that glass-like surface where you’re just observing a scene. 

Brown: Well, I felt very intimate about Elvis. I actually married Elvis—my sec­ond husband was the absolute epitome of Elvis in so many ways. That was not a good thing. One shouldn’t marry Elvis—I’ll tell you that. But it was easy for me to think about who Elvis was because I knew him. I was playing off what I knew about someone who was so much like Elvis. Those are things that we don’t talk about much when our own lives intersect. We can pull so much from that. Every teenager who’s fallen in love with a singer or any artist. Your hormones are raging, and you fall in love with something or someone—it’s always entangled with your real life in some way. That was another dimen­sion that pulled me into those poems.

Morgan: I read that, more than trying to see into Elvis, you were interested in exploring the “nature of art, of poetry, of music.” What surprised you in this exploration?

Brown: Well, that was a smart-ass thing I said! Sounds pretty sophisti­cated. But yes, I think the poems do eventually do that—explore the nature of art—but if a writer sets out to do that, the whole project will be a wash. What surprised me was my growing tenderness toward Elvis. I started out thinking I would look at him from a somewhat cynical adult perspective. That I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I wanted to provide a counter to the Elvis I used to adore. But that didn’t happen. He became more and more human to me. 

Morgan: How did your research shape or change the collection?

Brown: I read the two-volume biogra­phy of Elvis (Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick). That was kind of my bible. It was just enormously helpful, and then I read everything else in sight. I read a book written by a woman who swears she had Elvis’s child but never told him because she didn’t want to ruin his career. I just read trash. When I went to Memphis, I visited this little Elvis Museum run by this guy. I was alone when I went, and I was kind of nervous. He had this house all set up like an Elvis Museum, and he was the only one there except me. I thought, “Oh, this is really kind of spooky.” I visited every place I could. I drove to Tupelo to Elvis’s birthplace. And I read everything, every plaque, every brochure. I was actually really very touched by Graceland. I was touched by Elvis, as he shows up in that place, or I was touched by the fact that it matters to so many people. I was amazed that there were so many people who took the whole tour very seriously and were very deeply touched. I mean, they loved this man.

Morgan: You mentioned there’s so many interesting women in these poems and, obviously, the title is, in part, about them—the women that loved Elvis. 

Brown: I found the women really very interesting. This is just a sidelight, but it does relate. I was going to put a picture of Elvis on the cover of the book, and I knew I had to write to the Elvis Presley Estate to get permission, which they denied. They said the poems were not ... I don’t remember the phrasing, but the point was, they couldn’t endorse anything that doesn’t put Elvis in a good light. So. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who had taken a picture of a lightpost, with “Trust Jesus and Elvis, Trust Jesus and Elvis, Trust Elvis and Jesus,” carved down its side. So, it worked out fine. 

One of the reasons, of course, that the Elvis Estate was not going to be happy with the book—I don’t know how many poems they read—but it really does undermine Elvis. At the same, I mean, it feels like to me that it does double duty. One of the things it does is sort of explain or demonstrate that teen­age adoration and at the same time, it cuts it to shreds because there are these women. And these women are all, in one way or another, being subsumed, damaged in some way by this man. So, the Elvis Estate was correct. I don’t think of this book at all as being a book praising Elvis. I think of it as being a book of—maybe if I put it in my own terms, it would be a book that’s coming to terms with the Elvis of then, looking at it now, through adult eyes. How did I get so entangled in that, and what did that mean? What did it mean for me, what did it mean for these women who got so entangled in it? I don’t think it was either good or bad, it was just what happened at the time.

Morgan: By focusing on the women in the collection and showing us their wounds, you reclaim their importance. They’re crucial to Elvis’s story and legacy, and these poems give them dimension. It also gives the reader the sense that taking Elvis off his pedestal is important to you. Or at least humaniz­ing him, in some way?

Brown: I think you got it right, the first time, taking him off of the pedestal. When you write somebody’s life, and you do it in poems particularly, you’re making it yours. I mean, you’re taking the words out of his mouth. You’re mak­ing your words, and that is completely dethroning the object and making it into your own object. What I did is I took Elvis and made him my object, rather than being objectified. 

Morgan: The “bad boy” image has always come with an expiration date while entertainment has become increasingly obsessed with the pres­ervation of youth and youth culture. Simultaneously, American audiences are showing an increased interest in personal/spiritual growth stories. We’re living in a moment where the court of public opinion decides where an artist should be on their personal journey. If they’re deemed behind in their growth, the public now attempts to bring their shadow to light by sharing stories of how the artist has harmed others and they are “canceled” or, at best, disre­garded. Now it seems especially unwise to market a musician as the “bad boy” past a certain age. Better, perhaps, to push an artist toward personal evolu­tion. Do you imagine the trajectory of Elvis’s career would have been drastical­ly different if he had been encouraged to evolve authentically, or was the cli­mate at the time not conducive to that type of extreme image makeover?

Brown: He was searching for some meaning to his life greater than turn­ing out schlock songs and music. The touching thing to me was when he wanted to go off into the mountains and study with a Buddhist guru. Then, and as soon as he started reading and he started meditating, along came Colonel Tom Parker who only allowed him to make cheap movies that played on the stereotype. He could have made the switch. Elvis sneered at his own movies.

Morgan: For me, living in the current moment, it’s easy to begin equating fandom with idolization, and once you put someone who’s just as imperfect and damaged (if not more so) as the average person up on a pedestal, you start running into problems. These poems of yours convey a deep sense of the positive, at times cathartic, impact Elvis had on his fans, which is so refreshing. There’s still a desperate sense of longing for connection to Elvis that you can sense in a lot of the women in the poems, but poems like “Mrs. Louise Welling Spots Elvis at Harding’s Market” and “Mrs. Louise Welling’s Daughter Linda Never Sees But Believes” really lend their subjects a lot of humanity by showing us the grief over his death so many fans experienced was often an emotional or psychological projection stemming from something else in their own life. Like an unhealed wound that hadn’t been addressed—loved ones never returning from war. Elvis became a guiding light for so many people—as you said earlier, he was bigger-than-life. I think that often what keeps society at large interested in art and music is an interest and fascination with artists. When art strikes a chord, everybody wants to know who’s behind it. I won­der how, where, or really if a line can be made between art and artist.

Brown: I don’t think that we can, and I don’t think that we should. The new critics in the 70s/80s took the attitude toward literature in general, that we should separate them and not let the biography—not get the author—get mixed up with the work. That’s as impossible as not talking about the milieu in which the work was pro­duced. And it’s not even a good thing. Look at all the memoirs coming out right now! We want to feel that they’re real people who are committed in some kind of emotional way to the work. And if I hear a poet read in person, from then on—for the rest of my life, every time I hear a poem by that person or read one—I hear that voice and I see that person and it matters to me. Of course, I can certainly read Rilke and a million other writers, not having ever met them. 

I went to a poetry reading where the poet read a poem about the death of his brother. It was very touching. Afterward, somebody came up and said, “I’m so sorry about your broth­er,” and the poet said, “What makes you think that’s true? I just made it up.” I thought: that’s a betrayal. If it were labeled “fiction,” that would be different. But a label that says “poetry” carries the sense that what’s happening in this poem matters in some way to the speaker. Now, maybe not every aspect of it may have happened exactly the way the speaker says it did, but something about the emotional weight of it has to be true. That’s what we want, and that kind of connection. Of course, if it’s too much, if the weight of the biography becomes the whole poem, then I feel put upon. It’s not art, it’s relieving your feelings. And that’s all fine but go away and do it someplace else. 

Morgan: It’s true—if you hear a poet reading their poems, it changes the way that you hear it on the page. It makes no sense, specifically with musicians and with singers, to separate the self out of the art—how? Their voice is in it. It would be impossible to do that.

Brown: Particularly modern music, because so much of it seems written for a particular artist. You almost can’t hear it any other way. That’s not true of music from my earlier era. A lot of those songs could be covered by another sing­er, and you can hear Elvis’s covers of the Everly Brothers, you know, so many people. And they’re okay—they are not Elvis, but they’re okay. And you could do that kind of cover, but it doesn’t seem to be so true with contemporary music because the whole production of that particular piece of music has been designed around that voice. 

Morgan: I’m curious about the con­cept of emotional distance. I read some­where that you feel the more specific the focus of a poem is, the more univer­sal the resonance. I’m wondering how a poet might differentiate between speci­ficity and the weight of biography, and how that might relate to the speaker of the poem “coming close” emotionally or “pushing back.”

Brown: That is a difficult negotiation. You need detail. You need a microscope, but you need to feel your own emotions as they play on that detail. You could push back as a way to signal a painful closeness; you know what I mean? You’re saying to the reader, I’m backing off now because it’s too painful to go on. 

Morgan: On the back cover of your book, the late Stephen Dunn comments that you’ve “turned an obsession into a series of finely wrought evocations.” As we discussed, this collection captures the hormones and emotions of adoles­cence, but it also navigates the darker, heavier experiences Elvis himself had: the isolation and loneliness he felt, his substance abuse, the loss of his mother, etc. You really explore the paradoxes of fame, where you must juggle being one person in public and another in private. Would you say that kind of polarity felt particularly impactful to Elvis’s life? He was constantly the center of attention and had all this affection but felt so alone. He seemed unable to process his emotions and the grief he experienced, having to constantly perform.

Brown: I guess that’s always true; don’t you think? Like Simone Biles. What a huge struggle for her. I think what hap­pens is when somebody gets to be a star in whatever way, people project all sorts of stuff on them. They don’t see the person anymore. It’s all projection. All those teenage girls who were screaming and crying over Elvis on the stage—they weren’t seeing him at all. They had a projection. He was their ideal lover, or whatever. And the weight of that must be almost unbearable. You know inside who you are, and even if you’re Elvis, you haven’t had a chance to develop very much as an adult. Still, you know that you’re not that. You know you’re not all that screaming and carrying on. And the pain of that, the difficulty of that, must just be lonely for one thing. Incredibly lonely, seeing that the whole world sees you one way, and you know that’s not the real you. 

Morgan: We’ve had this culture in America around being famous, and it feels like it’s only been in the past ten years or so that people have started thinking about and unpacking that just because a person loves singing or loves acting, whatever your creative practice is—it doesn’t necessarily mean that you want all of that handed to you as well. We obligate people in the spotlight to hold power and to be morally upright, infallible. And it’s like, of all the people, you want musicians and creative people to be that for you?!

Brown: Right. Exactly. If you took all the great people, all the great poets, the great writers and whatever and you look at their personal lives, and you almost always see the huge disparity. I mean it’s painful. It’s painful to be unlike other people in that you have a talent that is driving you—and that you recognize is driving you and you need it to drive you which means that a lot of other aspects of your life are going to fall away because that’s just what happens. Really, I mean, it happens in minor ways to all of us who are committed to an art. You recognize what you give up and you recognize the pain of not being average, I want to say, not being like other peo­ple exactly—whatever other people are, I don’t know. But your way of living in the world is different, and if it weren’t different, you wouldn’t be able to do your art. And so, you just kind of have to learn to live with that.

Morgan: You worked on this collection in the late ’90s when there was this rise of digital media and paparazzi and celebrity culture and reality TV. There seems to have been a continuum of the influence of celebrity ever since Elvis’s time that’s now resulting in some neg­ative consequences. There was Donald Trump’s presidency. And the #metoo movement. At the time you were writ­ing the collection, do you think anyone was kind of attuned to the very real dan­ger Americans in particular put them­selves in by granting famous people so much power?

Brown: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, there was Joseph McCarthy, and there was J Edgar Hoover and these others and then Nixon—I mentioned him in the poems. So, there’s always been danger­ous, important people. But I understand I think what you’re saying is the dan­ger in projecting so much onto these people and, clearly, it’s been done in history. I mean, look what happened with Hitler—people project. A whole lot of people thought Hitler would save Germany. So, it’s happened in that way but, honestly, Elvis was the beginning of media culture, the superstar. Before Elvis, music was radically different. There were people like Frank Sinatra and their songs were just kind of gentle, sweet songs. My mother was absolutely insane about Nelson Eddy. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, but Elvis was the beginning of the real hype. You also have to realize that there wasn’t much music to choose from. And then all of a sudden, there’s lots of music to choose from. Everybody’s listening to different music because there’s so much of it available. I think that kind of pas­sionate devotion to one artist may not be as powerful as it used to be. 

Morgan: Another thing I think that’s also drastically changed since that time period is the accessibility that fans have to their idols. Today, a fan’s longing is more easily quelled because of social media. So many contemporary artists, writers, musicians, celebrities, etc. have been known to strike up personal and sometimes romantic connections with their fans through Instagram and dat­ing apps like Raya. Then, of course, you know—those connections are often ones that don’t end well. I live in LA. It’s hard to tune out what’s happening in Hollywood. Many of my friends work in the business. So, I hear these stories as soon as they come out, of fans who you know felt lured or were promised a bunch of things, and then wound up feeling emotionally abused or like there was this immense power the other person was waging against them. It’s women that tend to be on the receiving end of that dynamic. What kind of con­nection do you make between fan cul­ture and celebrity and patriarchy, what is that dynamic about?

Brown: I don’t think there’s any doubt that our whole patriarchal history led right into that kind of male superstar thing. Now there are a lot of female superstars these days and maybe that’s changing just a little bit. But it still seems, certainly in the Elvis era, there were women singers, and they were well liked, and they made money, and they did well. But the male singers were the ones who got the adulation. I think it’s just a direct outcropping. Even Elvis, the bad boy—you think about that: there was a real . . . maybe still is . . . I don’t know. All these women who get abused, there’s a draw toward what’s not okay, what’s not acceptable socially. The delinquent boy—I’m thinking of even West Side Story—it’s always the story of a girl who falls for somebody she shouldn’t fall for. 

Morgan: Around the beginning of last year Marilyn Manson was in the news because several women, including his collaborators and ex-partners, came forward to talk about how abusive and controlling he is and has been. I think that that’s the perfect example of some­one whose entire image is just shrouded in darkness and—

Brown: And that draws certain women—

Morgan: But you know, nobody wants to be mistreated like that. Nobody wants those things. Perhaps an inter­esting point to be had about separating an art and artists from their art is when you do, there’s a risk. For example, in assuming that somebody who creates such dark work and a dark image isn’t themselves a really dark person.

Brown: It’s hard to know, isn’t it? I don’t know how you know those things. I think that the women who get pulled into these abusive situations need the power to ride on, you know? To cling to. Because they are not yet aware of their own power. 

Morgan: It is upsetting, however, that this kind of psychology is often weaponized and gets used as an excuse much more often than it’s examined as a symptom of something larger, more systemic. Not all of us have the privilege and encouragement to dream, be vali­dated, and given power along the way. It’s much easier to take things out on an individual or even an industry than it is to see the larger constructs that keep us confined. Anyhow, I think the most valuable thing a woman can walk away from these types of situations with is the ability to examine and understand the way in which their own projections get in the way of their ability to think and act in their own best interest. 

Brown: Yes, we can’t always control our personal situation. There are many ways to mitigate the powerlessness when we see it, and certainly one way is, as I said, writing the story of it, making it mine rather than my oppressor’s (if there is an oppressor). But really, to talk too much in this way makes art look like a weapon. It can be that, but that would be only secondary. What I want in a poem is to see into the heart of the moment. To find words that break open the surface, words that may sometimes seem crazy, ungraspable on a surface level. The way dreams are. That’s enough. That deep awareness is enough.

Excerpt from The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives