Negotiating to Keep the Poem Alive
A Conversation with Shane McCrae
Brian Brodeur | February 2023
Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered, a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize, and Cain Named the Animal, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. McCrae lives in New York City, teaches at Columbia University, and he is the poetry editor for Image.
Brian Brodeur: The first poem in your first book opens with the line: “The cardinal is the marriage bird / And flies a flash of dusk” (including the forward slash). This sounds as if it could’ve been plucked from a lost Dickinson fascicle—particularly your use of diction and meter. Yet, regarding meter, you’ve suggested, rather than composed in, common measure, by fashioning your line out of unvarying iambic tetrameter followed by unvarying iambic trimeter separated by the “caesura” of the slash. Could you talk about your career-long flirtation with meter—how your poems will often either intimate or commit to a metrical frame?
Shane McCrae: Well, I wouldn’t call it a flirtation—all my poems in all my books are metrical in a traditional sense, though they aren’t always formatted in a way that makes the meter apparent. I started writing metrical poems when I was an undergrad, in the midst of studying the New Formalists. (Story Line Press, the major New Formalist press at the time, was located in Ashland, Oregon, and I was attending Linfield College, now Linfield University, in McMinnville, Oregon, when I started writing metrical poems, and so books of criticism and theory from New Formalist perspectives were in all the bookstores.) Much New Formalist poetry seemed limited to me, even then, but I was, and still am, fascinated by it. And because I read so much New Formalist criticism, and theory, and poetry, I began to think in ways that eventually required me to write metrical poems of my own. Nowadays, I can’t write free verse poems, though I wrote a lot of them when I was getting my MFA.
Brodeur: What did you find limiting about New Formalism? Does your work attempt to provide an antidote or response to these limitations?
McCrae: Lately, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about just this question, but I haven’t arrived at a satisfying answer. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read seem to exist to make a point, and often read as if the poet had made up their mind before they started writing the poem. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read seem to take satiric poetry as a model, even if the poems themselves are not satires. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read come across as if the poet thought their work was done once they satisfied the form— i.e., as long as a poem has fourteen iambic pentameter lines rhyming according to one of the traditional patterns, that poem is a successful sonnet. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read seem to put the form above every other aspect of the poem. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read come across as if the poet thought they were entitled not only to the poem, but to poetry itself. All that said, there are quite a few poems I would call New Formalist poems that I love.
Brodeur: Could you name a few favorites—poems you wouldn’t want to see disappear—and discuss why these New Formalist poems are so successful, how they avoid the pitfalls you’ve identified?
Sonnets are love poems, even when they’re not, and are therefore haunted by the beloved, who takes many forms.
McCrae: The first poem that springs to mind is Dana Gioia’s sonnet, “Sunday Night in Santa Rosa,” in which Gioia achieves a kind of perfection. (I would also want to keep his “The Room Upstairs”; both poems appear in his first book, Daily Horoscope.) The poem benefits, I think, from Gioia’s employment of blank verse rather than rhyme—not only does Gioia give himself a bit more freedom by doing so, but he allows himself to think of the poem as something a bit freer than a rhyming poem, and he forces the reader to concentrate on the meter, which allows the cool things Gioia does with the meter to be more apparent. And he does utilize some metrical roughness, which gives the poem life and interest. (Metrical roughness isn’t always life-giving, however; I agree with Yeats: “When your technique is sloppy your matter grows second-hand; there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface. Difficulty is our plough.”) In the fourth line, for example, he drops the unstressed syllable from the final foot (the second line of the following): “A three-time loser yanks / the Wheel of Fortune off the wall. Mice / pick through the garbage by the popcorn stand.” This is the first metrical irregularity in the poem, and it’s also the first moment in which the shutting-down and disenchanting of the circus aren’t entirely being effected by human hands—the animal world briefly and suddenly begins to do its part. And just as its part is beyond the control of the people who are themselves also dismantling the circus, so the appearance of the mice is beyond the control of the meter. Furthermore, Gioia gets out of the poem’s way; he allows it to be strange, thereby making space at the end of the poem for a permanent strangeness to exist alongside, and as the representation of, a perfectly ordinary, recognizable action: “a clown stares in a dressing mirror, / takes out a box, and peels away his face.” Perhaps I’ll let the Gioia stand as my only example—as you can see, once I start talking about a poem I like, there’s no shutting me up.
Brodeur: Let’s go back a bit further in literary history to another master of blank verse. In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost writes: “The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless.” In your work, both “tune” and “tone” are indelibly linked with syntax and meter, the kind of experiments in word order your poems conduct, allowing you to push the limits of rhythm and idiomatic speech. In Cain Named the Animal (2022), for example, you write: “I’ve never anywhere I’ve / Lived before wanted to be buried where I’ve lived [.]” Would you discuss the relationship in your poems between syntax, repetition, enjambment, and meter?
McCrae: I’ll try! First off, I’m a sucker for lyricism, and I’ve come to realize over the past year or so that much of what I love about lyricism—which I know is a vague term, but hopefully I’ll clarify it in the next few sentences—much of what I love about lyricism is realized through syntax (David Constantine’s translations of Hölderlin made this apparent to me). Now, lyricism, it seems to me, is something that happens when words are organized in such a way as to prioritize their musical relationship, while emphasizing the images—be they visual, intellectual, emotional—generated by the words. Usually, lyricism seems intended to make or achieve beauty—which I know is an even vaguer term.
Brodeur: It’s interesting that your ideas about lyricism and syntax arise from German Romanticism rather than, say, the Elizabethans (who didn’t seem to share the same hesitations many contemporary poets have about syntactical flexibility, e.g., “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments,” etc.). Could you discuss sound and sense a little more in terms of the beauty-making capacity of lyrical language?
McCrae: Probably not well. Let me say first that I love the Elizabethans, but often the syntax seems impossible to utilize today because it’s native to the language, whereas the syntax from David Constantine’s translations of Hölderlin, to use the example again, seems like a vital resource because it strikes one as nonnative. Ok. I had hoped that saying something about syntax first would help me to answer your question, but nope. Well, I can say that I think sound and sense work best together to make beauty when they give just a whisper of strangeness to the language of a poem—enough strangeness that the reader becomes disoriented by, but not excluded from, the poem. To me, that’s where the beauty is, that disorientation.
I think sound and sense work best together to make beauty when they give just a whisper of strangeness to the language of a poem—enough strangeness that the reader becomes disoriented by, but not excluded from, the poem.
Brodeur: Is disorientation a kind of prerequisite for lyrical beauty? From what I know about Hölderlin’s practice, he began writing by composing literal, word-by-word translations from the Greek of Pindar. These German translations suggested the complex, extended syntactical constructions for which Hölderlin became famous. Would you say that form in general, and meter in particular, disorient language for you just enough to suggest certain possibilities for your own poems? Does writing in form become a kind of “translation” of experience?
McCrae: Yes, form in general, and meter in particular, do disorient language for me enough to suggest possibility. This is because I am, thank God, inept. Because I struggle with rhyme, which here I’m considering an aspect of form, I find myself thinking up things I wouldn’t have managed to think up if I hadn’t needed to make a rhyme work, and these things are—to my mind, at least—often the best parts of my poems. And I’ll do you one better: Not only is all writing a translation of experience, experience itself, for human beings, is a translation of experience. The perceiver affects the thing perceived and all that. But I think poetic form heightens/complicates/furthers this phenomenon and makes the attendant strangeness easier to communicate to others. By further translating experience, poetic form makes experience more experience-like.
Brodeur: Let’s shift from form to genre. A commonly held view among contemporary American poets is that the narrative/epic impulse abandoned poetry for the novel sometime toward the end of the Romantic and the beginning of the Victorian periods, only to return barely recognizable after the First World War in long sequences like Pound’s Cantos, H.D.’s Trilogy, Williams’s Paterson, and Zukofsky’s A. You’ve added to this tradition with “A Fire in Every World,” an epic or pseudo-epic that includes “Purgatory/A Son and a Father of Sons” from In the Language of My Captor (2017), “The Hell Poem” from The Gilded Auction Block (2019), and concludes with Sometimes I Never Suffered (2020). What sort of anxieties do you harbor about composing an epic within a twenty-first century, American context? What would you say, for example, to Herbert Tucker’s observation that the very idea of epic, of writing or even reading one, “savors of a dare; embarked upon, it has about it the feeling of a stunt; and the result […] cannot well avoid being regarded as a freak”?
McCrae: The more I think about “A Fire in Every World,” the more I wish I hadn’t attempted to assert its unity. Really, it’s just three groups of writings having to do with the three Dantean traditions of the afterlife—Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. I now think it’s missing too many of the things that make an epic an epic—all it has going for it is its length, and maybe the seriousness of its concerns. Tucker’s assessment of the situation seems about right to me—I don’t know that a satisfying traditional epic has been composed in the last 350 years. At least, not in English. Paradise Lost would seem to be the last good one—and maybe, hot take, it’s the best one, better even than Homer and Virgil?—but even Paradise Lost isn’t a traditional epic, not entirely. But I haven’t gotten around to Clarel yet. And a contemporary exception that perhaps proves the rule would be Marly Youmans’s Thaliad, though I don’t doubt there are others of which I haven’t heard. And does Omeros count? If so, then maybe Omeros.
Brodeur: Even Walcott seemed uncomfortable thinking of Omeros as an epic. What sort of criteria do you have in mind for the contemporary versus the traditional epic? Unity is conspicuously absent from so many of those modernist “epics” mentioned above that it either seems like the most difficult or the least important criterion to achieve. Is it just “unity” that’s missing?
McCrae: Well, an epic needs to have something to do with beginnings—it must be located at the foundation of something. But most people nowadays seem not to be comfortable considering the beginnings of a thing from a visionary perspective, which requires an assertion of mastery over the thing that, I suspect, makes folks uncomfortable. To make an epic that is not unified is to disarm one’s own mastery, to some extent, but no active mastery, no visionary perspective, and no visionary perspective, no epic—an epic is a god of the thing it is about, and all gods are visionaries.
Brodeur: Let’s transition from the visionary scope of epic to something a bit more manageable. Among the most persistent forms in Anglophone poetry is the sonnet, the movement of which Don Paterson sums up as “This; that; so: this!” In contemporary American poetry, the sonnet has been enjoying something of a revival in recent years with the publication of books like Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Diane Seuss’s Frank (2021), which won a Pulitzer. How would you explain this persistence? Why has this form been so important in your own work?
McCrae: The sonnet form does so much of the work of the writing of a sonnet—if you’re doing the whole octave, volta, sestet thing, then you already know what your mind has to do to satisfy the form. And sonnets aren’t very long, and so maybe they aren’t very intimidating? Beyond these things, sonnets are fun to write, and because writing one is so much like having a conversation—as one writes a sonnet, the form, because it suggests content by suggesting that the sestet ought to respond to the octave, speaks back to one—the sonnet is the least lonely kind of short lyric to write.
Brodeur: I love this idea of “the least lonely kind of short lyric.” Could this also have something to do with the Petrarchan and Shakespearean traditions of love lyric and devotional poetry, how Petrarch, Spencer, Shakespeare, Donne, and so many others often apostrophize an absent lover or notoriously unresponsive deity (sometimes both at once)? Of course, apostrophe isn’t unique to this form, but there does seem to be a lot of “I joy to see how in your drawen work” and “Batter my heart, three person’d God” happening in sonnets.
McCrae: Sure. Sonnets are love poems, even when they’re not, and are therefore haunted by the beloved, who takes many forms.
Brodeur: Your poems seem haunted not as much by a beloved as by history (both personal and public history). One of the biggest challenges of writing directly about specific political issues is to produce art that outlasts the people and events that occasioned the piece. Yet luminaries like Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Auden, and Lowell wrote compellingly about public subjects, even naming names. Among those named in The Gilded Auction Block (2019) alone are Jeff Sessions, Joe Arpaio, Maxine Waters and, of course, Donald Trump. Can you discuss your philosophy—if that’s the word—regarding “political poetry”?
McCrae: I don’t know that I have a philosophy regarding political poetry—I’m wary of most philosophies that directly impinge upon the writing of poems. I write political poems the same way I write most poems, except there is usually a more immediate, more responsive, and angrier energy propelling the writing of political poems. Maybe that suggests my philosophy? One must allow oneself, when one wants to write a political poem, to respond to what is happening right then without allowing oneself to reflect as much as one might in a different kind of poem.
Brodeur: Since all of your poems take advantage of meter, might form help you to temper some of this angry energy, offering you a way to achieve emotional distance—an artifice for political art?
McCrae: Yes and no. As I said above, I think there’s a way in which poetic form makes experience more like experience, and thus more like a thing being experienced in the writing down thereof. However, one can nonetheless step back a bit and contemplate this wildly living thing before one. Form isn’t a cage for the shark; form is a cage for the diver, from the inside of which the diver can contemplate the shark.
I don’t know that a satisfying traditional epic has been composed in the last 350 years. At least, not in English. Paradise Lost would seem to be the last good one.
Brodeur: From Mule (2011) through The Many Hundreds of the Scent (2023), you’ve consistently written about difficult, personal subject matter such as divorce, the death of loved ones, and the challenges of being raised in a mixed-race family: “Growing up black white trash,” as you write in a refrain line used throughout The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015). In your treatment of these autobiographical subjects, however, you manage to broaden the potentially confessional scope of this work, confronting larger historical, socioeconomic, and linguistic issues—the tragic legacy of slavery, for example. Could you discuss the unique counterpoint in your work between public and private subjects?
McCrae: I’ve always hoped to make my personal experiences legible in such a way that they might be interesting even if they weren’t about personal experiences—I’ve hoped to write poems that didn’t depend on voyeurism, or whatever relative of voyeurism makes poems that offer nothing but the personal stories they tell nonetheless interesting. Also, I’ve tried not to limit myself to telling personal stories—and, to be honest, I find autobiographical stories considerably less interesting to write than entirely fictional stories.
Brodeur: Many readers and writers seem to harbor the illusion that the “I” in lyric poetry is always, or nearly always, the poet they/her/himself—that the experiences one writes about are usually autobiographical. How do you negotiate this expectation when writing poems that are not explicitly dramatic monologues or persona poems?
McCrae: “Explicitly” seems to be the key word there. I’m going to assume the poem can still be a persona poem even if I haven’t made that explicit. Hopefully, when I’m writing such a poem, I don’t think about that expectation—I can’t imagine thinking about that expectation except to worry that the reader might confuse me with the speaker of the poem, and maybe the speaker of the poem has said things I wouldn’t want the reader to associate with me. That kind of worrying is death to a poem. So, the negotiating one must do with regard to that expectation is negotiating to keep the poem alive. And I’ve often found that the best way to keep a poem I’m trying to write alive is to not think about it.
Brodeur: This brings up the question of audience, which the poem itself seems to resist (for you). Is this always, usually, or never the case? How much do you consciously consider the reader when writing, revising, and assembling a book? Do you have an “ideal reader”?
McCrae: This will probably sound a bit self-contradictory, but I do think about the reader quite a bit, though not usually while I’m drafting, except at moments when I’m trying to smooth a difficulty. I have long asserted—and I see no reason to retract my assertion now—that I don’t believe anybody reads my poems. However, I do try to make the poems functional for my imagined reader. For the most part, I think about this when revising, and when I’m assembling a book. When drafting, I try to think about nothing but the gradual appearing of the poem. As for an ideal reader, I don’t have one—I would be happy if anybody, doesn’t matter who, were ever interested in my poems. So, I guess my ideal reader would be somebody who exists.
Brodeur: You are among the most prolific of contemporary American poets. In a little over ten years, you’ve authored nine full-length poetry collections, three poetry chapbooks, one full-length memoir, one nonfiction chapbook, and one collaborative book. These collections, I should add, are highly polished and remarkably different from one another. Would you discuss your writing practice? How do you manage not only to produce so much but to vary what you produce, to keep your work fresh not only for readers but also for yourself?
Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read seem to put the form above every other aspect of the poem. Too many New Formalist poems I’ve read come across as if the poet thought they were entitled not only to the poem, but to poetry itself.
McCrae: I don’t think I could be happy if I didn’t write, and I don’t think I could survive if I weren’t happy. So, I write because my life depends on it—at least, I’ve convinced myself it does. If it’s a matter of survival, one figures out how to do the necessary thing. I’m almost always thinking about poems and poetry. Also, I’ve yet to believe I’ve ever written well. But I would like to write well—there’s nothing I want more. The thought that I might one day write well is another great motivator.
Brodeur: What would constitute writing well? What sort of models do you have in mind? Milton? Hölderlin? Walcott? Or are you striving to sound like some Platonic future shade of Shane McCrae?
McCrae: Ha! I have no idea what would constitute writing well! Hmm. Writing a poem as good as one of Yeats’ good poems. That would be writing well. But I wouldn’t want to sound like Yeats. So, yes, I suppose I am striving toward some ideal version of myself. But I don’t think I’ll ever achieve it.
Excerpt from The World Is Wild and Sad & The Poetry Review
A Sea
We huddled in the smallest room, or two
Of us, two people might not make a huddle
We leaned together, your head on my shoulder
Sometimes, my head on yours, my hair, the new
Gray hairs that part the black hairs from the black
Exactly as if once they were a sea
Now parted by emerging land, the gray
Hairs touching your jaw, where it meets your neck
The slope between your jaw and your neck, touching
Your ear, and when you leaned your head on mine, your
Ear must have rested then on the narrow line there
Across the gray, from black to black, exactly
As if to make a bridge, as if you might hear
The secret that would hold the sea together
The Dead Negro in the Modernist Long Poem
To decorate your poems with our deaths
Bodies of rivers being black flesh in water
And bones in flesh, loosed from the threatening muscles
Unknowable as laughter
In rooms in which the laughter stops the moment
You enter, where the faces are all faces
Of who will soon be dead, although they live
Dead in a poem, and faceless
Hanging from the tree of knowledge at the source
Poet, of your childhood shame, of the branchéd river
It is a hanging tree where it begins
Of which you are the flower
Brian Brodeur is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Some Problems with Autobiography, which won the 2022 New Criterion Prize. Brian teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.
