KARAN

Shane, thank you for these sonnets — they’re at once timely and timeless. Your work often grapples with historical and contemporary political issues, as clearly evident in “Pseudo-Petrarchan Sonnet on a President Is a Wish Away from Being a King:” “Now     killing bad guys isn’t an exact / Science believe me     folks I wish it were.” I’m deeply interested in the intersection of the personal and the political. Everything is political, of course, by way of us being part of certain socio-cultural geo-political contexts. But there’s a risk political poetry runs — the recent Amanda Gorman discourse comes to mind. How do you approach writing about political subjects while maintaining the emotional core of poetry? Do you see your poetry as a form of activism?

SHANE

Probably this answer will be as too-simple as it sounds in my head, but I write what I feel compelled to write, and I think that’s how, if I actually do maintain the emotional core of poetry, I do it. So, strictly speaking, I don’t approach writing about political subjects, but instead approach writing poems, and political subjects sometimes happen to occur. That said, I wouldn’t go so far as to say my poetry is a form of activism, though I do think writing poetry can be activism. Most of the time, I’m just trying to fail as little as possible at making a poem work.

KARAN

Would you try to delineate for us your writing process? Do you have a writing routine? How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Do you begin from a specific element — image, idea, memory, or thought, for example — or do these elements form in tandem with each other? Which is also to ask, where do your poems come from? And finally, most importantly, why do you write? 

SHANE

Honestly, I worry about laying the process bare, though I doubt much about how I do it is particularly special. I don’t have a writing routine — I fear writing routines, as I suspect they can take the place of actually writing. Most often, a poem will start with a phrase that I find interesting, and usually the phrase appears out of nowhere. As for why I write, I do it because I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t, and that becomes more the case every day. 

KARAN

Your sonnets play with the traditional form in fascinating ways. We have a wide range here — Elizabethan, Petrarchan, Blank Verse, and Shakespearean sonnets. Would you please speak about your relationship with form, particularly the sonnet, and how you've evolved it to suit your voice and themes? Of course, I ask this because the sonnet, out of all the forms, has probably seen the most evolution, and its revival is exciting. And also because I love form and believe that the restrictive nature of forms actually opens up possibilities that you’ll not see otherwise.

SHANE

I agree with what I take you to be saying — that formal restrictions are only restrictive in an illusory way. A few months ago, I gave a lecture about this. With the lecture, I tried to convince my audience that form grants a degree of autonomy and even will — even something like rights — to poems; the more restrictive the form, the more power the poem has to enact its will, and to make its thinking apparent. Poems, that is, think through form. And I don’t know whether I could think in poems without formal restrictions — I certainly couldn’t think very well without them. I like that forms require me to negotiate with the emerging poem — I learn a good deal from the poem as it comes into being. As for the sonnet, years ago a professor off-handedly mentioned to a class I was in that sonnets are an apprentice form. And so, since I’m an apprentice poet, I write a lot of sonnets.

KARAN

You’ve spoken about your love for meter elsewhere. You’re really one of the very few poets working in meter today. Do you ever get eye-rolls?

SHANE

If I do, I don’t notice them. Meter is the best technology I know of for making a poem. It does sometimes seem that folks don’t know I write in meter, and as a consequence I sometimes feel a bit insecure about it — would people realize I’m writing in meter if I were better at it? — and so I feel I have to be loud about it. But there are plenty of wonderful metrical poets writing today — most of the books I most look forward to are books by living poets writing in meter — I’m just stumbling along behind them, trying to learn what I can. 

KARAN

I really like how you’ve created a unique rhythm, especially with spacing. Would you also briefly discuss how you’re using caesura to control pacing and emphasis in these sonnets?

SHANE

There’s not much to it — I’m just trying to have a bit more control over the rhythms of my lines. Usually, I’m trying to stop them from becoming sing-songy. But also caesurae can create ambiguities and clusters of meaning that can briefly point the reader down a path the rest of the line doesn’t intend to follow, and that can be, I hope, worthwhile. 

KARAN

I love how your use of language is often raw and direct, as in “Elizabethan Sonnet on from 2004 to 2023 Clarence Thomas Received $4 Million in Gifts.” Lines like “Why should I save a rich man’s life for free / I mean it’s that’s     it isn’t it the game” seem to cut right to the heart of the matter. I think you’ve achieved a most marvelous feat by combining meter with accessibility. “How much are we supposed to take the guy in / His yard he had     a sign it said Fuck Trump.” I sometimes feel the reason poetry is such a niche is its elitist and inaccessible nature. I admire that your poems are so accessible despite the rich prosody. There’s not a single word in most of your poems a child wouldn’t get, and yet the emotion and experience behind the language churns up currents that are so relevant and resonant with anyone who reflects on the human condition. Is it a conscious decision for you to write in an everyday colloquial way?

SHANE

No. I think the reasons one might want a poem to be accessible are usually good reasons, but I worry they inadvertently result in the underestimation of readers and feed an aversion to, even a repugnance at, learning that poisons American culture and reinforces existing power structures. Difficulty is a good thing insofar as it can be a goal. When I first started reading poems as a teenager, and for years thereafter, I found poems more difficult to read than anybody I have ever met. Every poem — actually every poem — was incomprehensible to me. And if I hadn’t found poems incomprehensible, and as a result read as many poems as I possibly could, I wouldn’t have the life I have now. And I’m happy in my life. I’m better for the difficult poems I’ve struggled with. When I use simple language, often enough it’s because I’m imitating simple speech. But, especially lately, I am way into difficult syntax. 

KARAN

In poems “The Hero of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” and “The Hero of The Outer Worlds,” you engage with video game narratives (I guess), which is so fascinating. I love this: “Most of my health I get from locked containers / The yellow ones…Barrels I found on corpses sometimes”!!! Are you a gamer? What drew you to explore these narratives in poetry? How do you see the intersection of pop culture and poetry in your work? 

SHANE

I am a gamer, yes. Before I started replying to these questions, I was playing Fallout: London. But I don’t know what drew me to explore those narratives — or, I do, but it’s not very interesting: video games and the stories they tell are a big part of my life, and so sometimes when I write poems, I try to tell those stories. Otherwise, I’m not huge on pop culture in my work — but I would be if I were more engaged with pop culture. I’m aging out of that, alas. 

KARAN

There's a school of poetry that believes a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? Where do you anticipate going next?

SHANE

Ideally, my poetry is all four kinds at once. But I don’t have sufficient distance to know. Hopefully, next I’ll continue to work on a long narrative poem I’ve been trying to write for some time. A robot bird and a dead guy go to the moon… 

KARAN

You recently published your first books of prose, a memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun. How does your approach to prose writing differ from your poetry? How do you find the two forms informing each other? 

SHANE

Writing the memoir was in a way a wonderful experience, and I hope never to do anything like it again. Writing prose is indescribably different from writing poetry for me. If I want to write any prose at all, I have to write as quickly as possible. If I stop to think about what I’m doing, I grind to a halt. 

KARAN

Are there more prose projects inside you? Do you plan to write a novel?

SHANE

No and never.

KARAN

As someone who has published many books, received numerous awards and fellowships, and also as a long-time poetry editor of Image, what advice would you give to young poets?

SHANE

Read as much as you can and more than that. Spend a few years reading only people who are dead. Write when you can’t do anything else.