A Conversation with Poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Contributor to our Fall Poetry Collection

Photo credit: Jon Trend

This fall, we wanted to celebrate the seasonal shift with a moment of reflection. We see coffee as a ritual, a daily meditation, and a few minutes of bliss—what better complements this than poetry? Slowing down to sit with a poem mirrors the reflection we hope you find in every cup of coffee. That’s why we partnered with the Poetry Society of America to find some of the brightest voices in the literary world to bring our coffees to life and inspire a moment of calm. 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, a poet, visual artist, and writer, wrote the poem featured alongside our seasonal Recollection Blend. We recently spoke with Rachel about her poem “Our Wonderful Hours” and what reflection looks like for her.

The Poem

In the title, “Our Wonderful Hours,” the word “hours” feels very intimate, but also fleeting. How did you decide on “hours” as opposed to days, years, or any other measurement of time?

I like the idea that “hours” feels like sharing time with others. To each of us, our hours are so personal and intimate, and yet there’s a bigger story of time in our lives. We’re all within the shape of what we agree is time or what we think of as time, and that includes seasons. So there’s a collective energy in seasons that feels like time is changing or shifting. I wanted to remind myself this is such a challenging world right now and the way we spend our time has been so dramatically altered and impacted, whether it is through the seasons, land, environment, climate, and also our bodies and politics—this reminder that we all have hours. 

And there’s a sonic play on ours and hours. It’s not just my wonderful hour. Walking down the street, having a cup of coffee—we all do these things, and recently, these are the sort of ordinary rituals that feel really necessary to me. These are the things I wake up to and know that my loved ones or people on the other side of the planet are also waking up to as I fall asleep. 

There is so much wrapped up in your last line, “I survive.” We feel an idea of surviving your mother’s memory, of strength, but also of hollowness and feeling like you’re just getting by. Can you speak to what it means to survive? 

When you think of how death is documented, it’s always, “This person is survived by . . . survived by this person and this person,” and there’s this circle or tribe of who is going to carry your name, your story, your memory forward. I get to bring my mothers story with me, and it is essentially endlessly linked to my life and my story, and there’s something beautiful about that. My friendship with my mother goes beyond her death and hopefully mine too. 

But I'm also speaking about this very challenging world we live in and this vulnerable question—how do we survive and go beyond surviving? How do we find joy and thrive? How do we believe in our right to have joy and have a full life? I wanted to share a sense of resilience that happens in the little hours, not just the big moments. Getting back up when you get knocked down by grief. 

It’s kind of wonderful in some ways; even when life is awful, it's wonderful because you’re alive. That’s the miracle—even your suffering is kind of wonderful. The trick is trying to zoom out and feel connected when you are suffering. There’s grief in this poem but there’s also this repetition, this victory chant of the world “alive.” There’s a power behind it. It’s Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and my little disco spin in my living room. In spite of death, wildfires, floods, and war, we also can have love . . . which seems obvious, but I don’t think it feels obvious in this world right now. 

The Writer

I know that we see this motif of birds, feathers, and wings play out in some of your other works. Is there a personal connection for you to these aspects? 

I think poets like to think from an omniscient bird’s eye perspective—a wingspan gliding over the planet into different spaces. I’m a nerdy poet who loves birds. Before I knew I was a poet, I was a child who just loved things with wings. Not just birds, comics and superheroes. Any costume I could have with wings, I was happy—including Wonder Woman’s cufflinks and lasso. I have this idea of flight happening in the most dorky way possible.

There’s also that connection to a very elemental, primal wonder with flight and birds—something that simple. They have this thing that I can’t ever really have, except in a poem. I can only fly in a poem really. So, there’s this striving or hope or desire or something . . . a longing to really experience it throughout my body, and poetry gets me pretty close. 

How does working across different mediums as a poet and visual artist affect your approach to this project? How do the senses of smell and taste figure into your own work? 

When I was younger I really kept everything separate—here is my visual art, here is my poetry. They were oil and vinegar. But as I’ve aged, quite youthfully, I love bringing them together and the messiness of it. It’s like giving a child finger paints or watercolors and letting them just be wild, and then later coming back and asking what's the story. 

Working with different mediums is about curiosity. It’s finding the best life or body for different questions that come to me, but never trying to answer the question, just explore it. I like to live in these different kinds of rooms in the same house because it helps me not to fixate on my project being my little, precious thing, my little page. It just keeps flowing and stays liquid for me. And part of the art is also knowing when to constrain it, but it all starts with imagination before you ever touch a medium. 

I went to school for literature, but I’m a self-taught photographer. Something about being self-made freed me from working with the constraints of photography critiques and how things should be. I’m a queer black woman—I can’t wait for someone to see me, I have to go forward. 

As far as writing about coffee goes, I think as poets our awareness and mindfulness of sensation and our senses is how we come to the world and make a space on the page. We have to make you understand what Saturday morning cinnamon really smells like, or the orange you ate when the moon was full. What does the moon smell like? How can I make you smell the dirt on the basil before I wash it? But also what is the taste of loneliness, how does a fire feel when you're in love versus when you're grieving? We ask ourselves these things, we want to taste the world. We want to feed our imagination and feed others. In poetry, there’s endless resonance and repetition of our sensations. 

And working with textures in cooking and poetry is being connected to my mother. She loved cooking and making a table. My mother was an extraordinary cook and she taught me how to cook. She brought the senses alive and describing her tables connects us all. We all can relate to coming together at a table of our own. 

How much or little do you think the pandemic played a role in inspiring or influencing this poem, and how has it affected your work as a whole?

The shape of how time is happening and how I fill my time, or use it, or inhabit my time has really changed for me. A lot of my hours involve a lot more rest and being mindful of how my hours were structured prior to the pandemic. Go go go, make this, do this, and in New York you can certainly fall victim to this wheel of time go, go, going across your throat. 

But the pandemic made me slow down in a really powerful way, and in many sad ways too. This isn't the way I want to realize I need to rest or devote more time to friendship and family, and to reevaluate what I really need, what I want, what I don’t want anymore, and it feels very collective. We’re all examining our capacity to accommodate what is most meaningful and valuable—not transactional, but really valuable. 

During the pandemic, time became a sort of vigil here in New York of really traumatic and overwhelming grief. We felt haunted in the city as it was emptied out in apocalyptic ways. The sense of hours themselves being apocalyptic with the Black Lives Matter protests and helicopters flying overhead. It felt like a hellscape. But we have to think of who is coming next and protest the past. Maybe there’s still time not to fail them. 

Our Wonderful Hours

Alive in the fall, the orchards remember you.

Alive in me, the music remembers you. Alive.

My mother, alive, loved how fall looked 

With its amber eyes & mouths of smoke. Alive

In this season we sense that change can dance

As the mind. Like the memory of how a life

Can love you back. Bring you to your knees, your wings

Open above lonely fires. Alive, years fly off & birds

Go somewhere warm. Our wings are gold leaves 

Tattooing the sky. Alive, without my mother’s song, I survive.