Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

An Interview with Aaron Shurin

103 An Interview with Aaron Shurin© Orpheus 104 Aaron Shuri n Love and language, sexuality and textuality, have been central themes and central modes in Aaron Shurin’s poetry since the beginning of his career, and for him these two things have been keys to liberation both personal and social,” writes poet and critic Reginald Shepherd. “His has never been a poetry of uncomplicated self-expression, but a poetry that seeks both to embody and to incite transformation; the linguistic transformations of the poetry are the model (and hopefully the catalyst) for the larger transformations it proposes and points toward,” Shepherd adds. It is these transformative powers that make Shurin one of the most exciting poets writing today; indeed, he is one of the foremost poets exploring the possibilities of experimentation and incantation that come with writing prose poetry, crafting via collage, and using “derived language.” Shurin’s latest collection is Citizen, published in 2012 by City Lights Books. In Shurin’s hands, this rich palette of compositional strategies has allowed him to enjoy a distinguished career as a poet who defies categorization. In fact, Shurin once described himself as “the bastard son of Robert Duncan and Frank O’Hara, an heir to seemingly irreconcilable poetic territories: diction high and low, mythopoeic drama and breezy urban rhythm.” It’s an apt description for the author of eleven books of poetry and prose. From composition to influence to poetic territories, these and many other issues are eloquently and passionately explored in Shurin’s own words in this far-ranging, far-reaching interview. The topics covered also include an intimate discussion of Shurin’s mentors Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, his complex “duet” with Whitman and how Shurin’s groundbreaking poem “City of Men” is his “gift of openness” to the Good Gray Poet, and a look into Shurin’s “poetics of struggle” and other elements of his writing on AIDS. Shurin weaves into the greater conversation his complex insights on form, craft, and the special properties of the sentence in prose poetry. 105 Aaron Shuri n Shurin has forged a singular poetics richly informed by his personal experience of sexuality and identity formation. In this interview, he sheds light on poetry’s capability to explore self and sexuality through the poet’s deep understanding of multiplicitous identity, the gay body and psyche, and what he calls here the “florid” sensibility of a “proud voluptuary.” In one of the highlights of the conversation, Shurin describes the writer-reader dynamics of narrative versus lyric (poetry) by using the metaphor of eros. In another moment, he illuminates how “coming out” profoundly affects a poet’s development. At the same time, his experimentation with semantic density, disjunction, and fragmentation allows him to transform these themes and sensibilities into a verse that shimmers in its strangeness and tantalizes the reader with a kind of alchemical spell—in pursuit of “irreducible meaning.” Recalling Duncan’s wisdom, Shurin says, “You don’t give meaning to the world; you derive meaning from it.” One of his recent books of poetry is Involuntary Lyrics, in which Shurin composed poems using the derived language of the end words of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Of that book, poet Ron Silliman says, “Shurin seems to have no limit as to what he can do with a form more closed—in the constructivist sense—than anything a so-called New Formalist might e’er imagine. The sweep [of the book] is startling.” Silliman cites the book’s first sonnet, below, with the declaration that the poem “is so strong it nearly took my head off ”: If the judgment’s cruel that’s a wake-up call: increase energy, attention. These little pumpkins ornament themselves with swells, die pushing live volume packed springform hard as a knock: Decease 106 Aaron Shuri n and resist. Content surges exactly as memory closes its rear-guarding eyes —the world rushes in not by! just be steady, receptors, measure is fuel: whatever moves move with the drift which moving never lies. Shurin’s selected poems, The Paradise of Forms, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1999. He is also the author of Unbound: A Book of AIDS and a collection of autobiographical essays, King of Shadows. Shurin is a recipient of two California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in poetry and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He...