After receiving All We Are Given: Robert Fanning on his most recent work

On December 9th, Robert Fanning, beloved creative writing professor at Central Michigan University, bestowed upon the world a new poetry collection: All We Are Given We Cannot Hold. Expansive in its subject matter, yet sharply exact in its language, All We Are Given is unshy in itself. This body of work knows what it is. 

Central Review editors, Liv O’Toole and Brenna Dean, had the privilege of discussing All We Are Given with Robert Fanning. You can find their conversation below.

On the back cover of this collection, Melissa Crowe calls upon fans of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke to engage with your work. How did it feel reading this ringing endorsement that invokes two iconic contemporaries? You’ve mentioned that this book was a six-year project. Whose, if anyone’s, work did you call upon for inspiration or precedent while composing?

RF: Thanks for these great questions! Well, to be compared to two of my all-time favorite poets is totally breathtaking, completely hard to believe, but also beautiful. It proves what I’ve always hoped–that the poets and poems we love become woven into the fabric of our own making, as we write. I can hear and feel their influence in my poems–but I’m especially glad that others can, too.

As we write, we make our music from a wide spool of thread that consists of our own imagination and experiences, yes, but also the deep inner hum of all the poems we’ve loved and read, and all that we’ve learned about the art from mentors and other poets.  In this collection, I was inspired by some of my favorites whose names you’ll find in this book: Melissa Crowe, Aimee Nezhukumathatil, Dennis Hinrichsen, Peter Markus, Diane Seuss, and many others. We are never a single melody, as poets and human beings. We are a chorus, a harmony of all the voices who’ve become part of us. 

Many poems in this collection seem to deal with contrast. Seeing kids grow up and grieving lost loved ones, parenting young children and parenting mature ones, the past and the present/future, absence and presence. Did building contrast in poems like “Deadheading” or “Driver’s Education” shape or extend the scope of the poems’ reach in any way? 

RF: Absolutely. But the wide spectrum of that contrast exists in every moment of our lives, if we are open-hearted to our full experience. The “ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows,” to borrow a phrase from Buddhism, are inseparable.  We live as we’re dying. That’s the sugar and salt, the bittersweet. And it’s especially palpable in the middle of our journey, as we witness our parents descending the mountain, and as we simultaneously guide our own children, if we are parents, in their ascent.

When I write poems of experience, poems that draw from my life, as these do–I hope to capture that duality, what Robert Frost called “the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.” This is the case in “Deadheading,” as I walk through the garden with my wife in the same summer my niece will die of suicide and my mother will die of natural causes, only days apart. In “Driver’s Education,” I relish (and gasp!) seeing my oldest child learning to drive, even as this lesson becomes a vehicle (literally, figuratively) with which they’ll travel far from me—as I know they should.  

Some of the poems in this collection seem to be engaging with poetic forms, such as “Strange Music.” Are there any forms you tried or adapted for the first time in this collection? When drafting poems that worked with form, did you set out with the form in mind or come to it more organically as the poems were written?

RF: Typically, I’ll be somewhere in the early process of a poem’s composition when I start to consider if it will be enhanced or amplified by a form. “Strange Music” is one of those firsts with form; it is a carol. I’d never written a carol before—and to partially address your second question, I knew that poem needed a refrain, and when I came across the carol, I knew it was the perfect form for that piece. “Shell and Wing” is a double triolet. Similarly, I knew that poem needed a tight vessel for its lyrical leaps and repetition.

The majority of the poems in this collection are in free verse, as it mostly consists of realism and narrative. However, and this is the first time I’ve ever done this, I did experiment with poems that pay homage to others by borrowing or mirroring aspects of their forms. For example, “Because You Never Asked About the Line Between” is a poem concerned with identity, and, among other things, in-betweeness, liminality. As I was writing that piece, I remembered Howard Nemerov’s fabulous poem about the sometimes blurry line between poetry and prose, in which he uses a metaphor of the line between rain and snow. For that poem, then, I mirrored the shape of his poem, a quatrain followed by a couplet, but then doubled it–with a second couplet and quatrain.

“At Home Once More,” borrows not only the actual shape of James Wright’s “A Blessing,” but also much of that poem’s language, repurposed and extended. “The Lockless World” borrows the meter and imagery and structure of Robert Frost’s “The Lockless Room” and rewrites that poem from the bottom up. And there are other examples of this formal play in the collection. I found these ‘repurposings’ both challenging and extremely fun. I also like how they pay homage to other poets and poems. 

You’ve alluded a few times to a sort of poetic canon that students of the craft continually strive to draw from and contribute to. What is it that you hope readers, whether they be writers or not, take away from what you have woven into the aforementioned poetic canon? Is that something even worth speculating about? What might you encourage them to try after reading “All We Are Given We Cannot Hold”?

RF: I hope any readers–poets and non-poets alike—find my poems worth their time, and would be thrilled if any of my poems were remembered in any way, period! Just as wonderful would be to be paid homage by a poet emulating a poem of mine and crediting my authorship, as I’ve done in this book. To me, this is one way we, as poets, converse with each other across the art, and these conversations then bring attention to the poets who’ve inspired us. I think of the famous example of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” being modeled after Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” and how we, as readers, benefit even more by there being not just one, but two fabulous poems in the world, due to their correspondence.

It doesn’t have to be a whole poem, either. In All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, I’ve often used the spark of one of another poet’s lines to start the fire of one of my poems (Keetje Kuipers, Dennis Hinrichsen, Aimee Nezhukumathatil, as a few examples in this book…) I would not presume to specifically prompt a poet—but if anyone wished to weave a line or formal inspiration of mine into their own work–that makes for a fantastic patchwork quilt. It’s crucial to credit the original source, though–that’s how we inspire readers to look beyond our own work, to the constellation of writers we’ve drawn from–whom they might also enjoy reading. 

It’s especially thrilling when such mutual inspirations occur across genres or arts, too. For example, my friend David Biedenbender, an amazing contemporary composer, has now drawn inspiration from several of my poems, and from my titles as well; in fact, he even asked if he could share my book title–which I happily granted–and he recently released his CD by the same name, which includes several pieces inspired by my poems, from this book, and others. Because of our collaborative spirit—my poems have reached a musical audience, and his music has reached a poetry audience, in ways that may not have happened otherwise. I love that if you search online for All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, my friend’s CD appears in search results along with my book. That’s super cool. 

What has surprised you in the construction of this collection? Were there any surprisingly challenging or rewarding moments? 

RF: I write very different types of books—some that are more uniform or cohesive or singular in focus, and others, like this book, that are a collection of many themes and subjects. Books like this one are much more challenging for me, especially in structuring the poems into a whole—trying to decide which poems seem to want to be near each other, which poems want to be beside each other. I hit a wall several times—as the manuscript wouldn’t cohere in any meaningful way in the structuring process. (This is to say nothing of  the many rejections one receives from editors—that can spark severe doubt if one isn’t careful.)

Ultimately, I’m very happy with the collection as whole, and especially with my publisher, Dzanc Books, who believes strongly in the work. I am pleased with almost every poem in this book, and deeply disappointed as well—because a poem is only ever a piece of what you dreamed it would be. My biggest challenge with this book was a sense of painful vulnerability at times, as it is, in places, the most candid book I’ve ever written. This collection felt more dangerous in its transition from privacy to being public. Whether or not to include certain poems in the final manuscript woke me up in a panic some nights. Ultimately, I decided I needed to move out of the way of poems that were trying to move through me, beyond me. At some point, one must let go—as the title of this book makes clear. 

In the end, as with the making of individual poems, writing and publishing a book is no different: the process of making and shaping is incredibly (and joyfully) challenging, and finishing the work is rewarding, to say the least. Beyond that, after December 9, 2025, the official publication date for this book, it is now in readers’ hands. To me, it is now a testament of who I was, of the best I could do at the time. Every book is a time capsule, a shadow, shed skin. Aside from the joy of re-inhabiting the poems temporarily at poetry readings, my work is done, and I am so hopeful, and grateful, that others can now live in the poems themselves.

And hopefully the poems can also live in them, these silences wearing the music of language.

ROBERT FANNING is the author of five full-length collections of poetry: All We Are Given We Cannot Hold (Dzanc Books, 2025), Severance (Salmon Poetry, 2019), Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Poetry, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006), as well as four chapbooks: The Good Sea, (Red Flag Poetry, 2026), Prince of the Air (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press, 2002). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Atlanta Review, The Common, and many other journals. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he is an awardee of the CMU Faculty Distinguished Service Award, as well as a two-time winner of the CMU Excellence in Teaching Award. He is also the founder, facilitator and host of the Wellspring Literary Series, a vibrant community event featuring Michigan poets in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.