Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets

Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd Reginald Shepherd writes poems that are thick, often opaque—a lexical swamp where fractured syntax, myth, and history form a hypermusical lyric. And somewhere below the surface is “meaning.” But more than anything else, perhaps, Shepherd wants the reader to dive deep, to encounter resistance, and to ‹nd sheer engagement in words. Isn’t that the point of poetry? he suggests here. Shepherd, who recently published Otherhood (2003), hopes his verse will be an antidote to what he sees as a prevailing “aesthetic of transparency” in contemporary poetry. For Shepherd, raised in tenements and housing projects in the Bronx, literature offers “a combination of otherness and brotherhood, the opportunity to ‹nd the otherness in the familiar, to ‹nd the familiar in the other.” A practitioner of a lyric, in›uenced by T. S. Eliot’s challenge against personality and echoing Hart Crane’s most musical moments, Shepherd maps out in this interview how and why a poet moves from the “I” to the “eye” and explains his desire to “make lyric of fact.” One of the most challenging poets writing today, Shepherd doesn’t buy into “the consensus that people don’t read poetry because it’s 159 %© Robert Giard too hard and too elitist.” Quite the opposite, he believes poetry must “give pleasure before it’s understood; that’s why you want to understand it.” Praised for his poems on eros, poems in which desire complicates rather than facilitates meaning, Shepherd also speaks insightfully about his love-hate relationship with the god of love and lust and turns to Plato, Shakespeare, and Sappho as he looks back to “the long tradition in poetry of desire as something that raises you up but also smashes you into pieces.” Shepherd also faces his attraction to Greek mythology’s “beautiful boys” but notes, “Whom the gods will destroy, they ‹rst love.” In Shepherd’s verse, desire and myth dismantle self and language—and produce poetry in the process. As Apollo chases Daphne (“a girl / -shaped slip of driftwood, mandrake / root that makes a fatal sound”), he tracks a desire that is “the scent of lack”: (she’s moving further into verblessness, the roots of meaning: true aloe, not these bracts of sassafras and cassia: bees swathe her in hum, leave the honey behind, beetles pollinate her) (“Apollo Steps in Daphne’s Footprints,” Otherhood) “Everywhere one turns / a god, someone turning into one,” writes Shepherd. His poems are, in fact, full of gods, myth, and the ruins of story—and Shepherd here explores the possibilities that remain. His books include Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 AWP Award Series in Poetry; Angel, Interrupted (1996), a ‹nalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Wrong (1999). He is the recipient of a 1993 “Discovery”/The Nation Award; the 1994 George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine; an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship; and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, among other awards and honors. His poems have appeared in the country’s most prestigious publications, as well as in four editions of The Best American Poetry. He holds MFA degrees from Brown University and the outside the lines 160 % University of Iowa and currently teaches at the University of West Florida. We spoke via telephone from his home in Pensacola, Florida, in August 2003. %5 Christopher Hennessy: Many of the poems in Otherhood keep me pleasantly stunned, even off balance, after multiple readings. In so doing, they remind me of one of your beliefs—that poetry is about more than a search for “meaning,” that it’s about ‹nding pleasure through language. I think many poets and critics, including myself, from time to time forget about “pleasure.” Reginald Shepherd: When I started writing poetry as a teenager, what attracted me was the richness of the language, the foregrounding of what language can do and the worlds that language can create—as opposed to language re›ecting the world. Though there’s been a de‹nite revival of interest in the poem as an aesthetic artifact, as we’ve seen in different ways with both avant-garde poetry and neoformalism, the poetry world is still dominated by what’s been called the aesthetic of transparency, writers purveying little vignettes or moving anecdotes about some public image of themselves, often with an epiphany at the end. There’s still a real neglect of the idea that a poem can be something, rather than...