Elisa Gonzalez | "Failed Essay on Privilege"

In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Elisa M. Gonzalez. Her work appears in the New Yorker and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University M.F.A. program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Source

This episode includes a reading of her poem, "Failed Essay on Privilege"  featured in our 2022 and 2023 Get Lit Anthology.

"Failed Essay on Privilege"

I came from something popularly known as “nothing”

and in the coming I got a lot.

My parents didn’t speak money, didn’t speak college.

Still—I went to Yale.

For a while I tried to condemn.

I wrote Let me introduce you to evil.

Still, I was a guest there, I made myself at home.

And I know a fine shoe when I see one.

And I know to be sincerely sorry for those people’s problems.

I know to want nothing more

than it would be so nice to have

and I confess I’ll never hate what I’ve been given

as much as I wish I could.

Still I thought I of all people understood Aristotle: what is and isn’t the good life . . .

because, I wrote, privilege is an aggressive form of amnesia . . .

I left a house with no heat. I left the habit of hunger. I left a room

I shared with seven brothers and sisters I also left.

Even the good is regrettable, or at least sometimes

should be regretted

yet to hate myself is not to absolve her.

I paid so much

for wisdom, and look at all of this, look at all I have—