Shane Book Interview
Michele Lesko: The pantoum, “Stark Room,” was the first poem of yours I read. It struck me with its ethereal images of the negative space left by a lover. Cigarette smoke wished into being and remembered laughter conflated to become that wished for contrail of the other's presence. The longing is stunning. This whole poem rests in emptiness. The form works well for that turning over of detail in one's mind after the other has left. Tell me about weaving emptiness through such a structured form. How did that airy imagery become settled into the form?
Shane Book: I’m glad you liked the poem. I’m struggling with how to describe the process of “weaving emptiness through such a structured form.” Perhaps the best way to say it is I chose the form because I wanted a vessel that would allow a kind of repetition that would become haunting, obsessive, the way one’s mind can become obsessed with a person who is no longer there, who has left. It seemed to me that the pantoum’s repeated phrases would give space for such an endeavor and that this repetition in itself would create an atmosphere of loss, longing, and ultimately, grieving. Another way to think of it is that if you are writing about a void, it makes sense to scaffold that “nothingness” with a rigid poetic form—in this way you get a dialectical relationship between the unyielding and the vacant, being and non-being, as it were.
ML: I read something you said about negative space and am fascinated with how this poem speaks to so many aspects of negative space. Its dynamic asks readers to consider what is not there. I've always been drawn to negative space in art & design, and, of course, to what lies beneath or behind the lines in a poem or a conversation. It's a tricky area. You've pulled it forward beautifully.
SB: Thank you for saying that. Yes, subtext comes to mind, too: the floating ice cube’s hidden underside, and so on.
ML: Many of your poems have the feel of a photojournalist's point-of-view. There is an incredible simplicity in the portrait drawn in the first six lines of “Uganda, 1997.” It allows readers to visualize any little girl, perhaps their own, simply standing, waiting.The shock occurs precisely when you break line six with “stump ends.” What did those first lines represent to you? The children appear as children. While we empathize with their suffering, they do not show up in this poem as asking the world for anything.
SB: I wanted to do justice to the girl in this image, who is first of all, a real person. Sebastao Salgado took that picture. I did not want to sensationalize what had happened to her. It seemed to me the best way to do it was to employ a reporter’s or as you say photojournalist’s point of view: just try to give the reader the image in as unadorned a manner as possible. The first lines were supposed to lead the reader into the poem as a viewer’s eyes might traverse the photograph. I wanted to let the reader see her as a human being first, and then show what had been done to her. It seems more emotional that way. And hopefully, more true.
ML: Let me back up a bit and ask about your beginning as a poet. Poetic forms, your voice, all of the underlying craft is apparent in your poetry, yet it shows through only as a sure-footed confidence. Never does the poet appear crafting the poem. There is a conversational tone even in the most heartbreaking images. The reader is transported to the place of witness, and is never mired in a maudlin perspective.
SB: This book took a long time. Or rather, I took a long time with it before sending it anywhere to be published. A teacher of mine at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the poet Brenda Hillman, told us to wait 8 years after graduation to send our manuscripts out. That seems about right to me. I deliberately waited because I did not want to feel pressured, rushed to just publish something. So many first books feel pushed out too soon. I did not want to be like the Canadian poet Al Purdy who told me that whenever he arrived in a new town to do a reading he’d hit the bookstores and look for copies of his first book and buy them all with the intent to destroy them. Also, slowing things down on the composition side, when I wrote Ceiling of Sticks I was writing three other manuscripts as well—all written out of different aesthetics. When I would get stuck on one I would jump around to another manuscript to give myself a break. So the poems had a long gestation process and an even longer revision process.
ML: When you create a poem in a specific form, does the anchoring image change from its original impetus?
SB: I look at form as a generative tool. An early teacher of mine, Philip Levine, told me that if the form is hurting the poem, abandon the form and save the poem. For me, this attitude extends to holding onto a fixed idea of what an image might be or do. I try to write line to line, letting go of any controlling ideas. If I’m not surprised by own poem line to line then I’m sure no one else will be. Plus working that way makes writing more interesting, as a process. I think writers need to stay open to possibility. You have to stay flexible.
ML: Ceiling of Sticks won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Had you sent the manuscript out at all before the prize? And did this prize help you evolve as a poet in any way?
SB: In the Fall of 2008 I sent the manuscript out to some contests – I forget how many, maybe ten, just the ones that I thought might be open to the book – and six months later I got a call from Prairie Schooner. In a way it took no time at all to get published. But if you think of how long I took to write and revise it, the whole thing took years. That said, I think the reason the book was accepted relatively quickly is precisely because I took a long time to work on it. The prize gave me enough money to pay for a cross-continent move and it did get some good exposure for the book so that maybe a few more people saw it than would otherwise have seen it. As for my evolution as a poet, I can’t say the prize had any effect.
ML: What rituals do you have or preparations are necessary to taking your experience ofthe political, cultural and emotional worlds and placing them on the page?
SB: I try not to have too many rituals around writing because I think rituals lead writers to not write, in that one can get hung up on say, having a certain chair, a certain coffee mug, a certain room to write in, and so on. If I have a ritual it is to try to sit in the chair as long as I can—especially when I am in the solving problems stage of a draft. I just get into it and camp out there. When I wrote many of the poems in this book I was so intense about it that I took it a bit too far: I would sit for twelve, fourteen hours at a time. Some evenings the girl I was living with would be downstairs and hear a thud and run upstairs to find I’d fallen out of my chair onto the floor and was passed out cold. She’d have to roust me, and help me get to my feet and lead me downstairs to bed. I’d have no recollection of even hitting the ground. It was scary. Eventually she put a soft matt down on the ground so I wouldn’t hit my head. I don’t recommend that sort of ritual.
ML: Will you tell our readers about your travels and how they shape your perception?
SB: Traveling has been my primary education. Unlike schools’ rigid socializing rubrics, travel has a varying rhythm, unpredictably changing depending on what part of the world you find yourself in. I think traveling so much has made me a nomad in my thinking, tastes, interests—it has made me a flexible watcher, or at least I like to think it has made me somewhat more open to seeing whatever is in front of me and in so doing, allowed me an ability to inhabit various points of view. Like an actor, it is important for a writer to be able to occupy a variety of positions, vantage points, to empathize both on a grand scale and in a thumbnail dimension. Seeing new places, meeting people of different cultures, and living in those cultures sets one up to remain universalist in one’s proclivities.
ML: How does poetry inform your identity and, specifically, your identity as a poet juxtaposed with your concept of yourself in the larger community of joy and suffering?
SB: Poetry writing and reading require a certain kind of thinking. You could call it more associative or lateral, but whatever you want to call it, the poet has to remain open to the world of experience and thought and emotion. Certainly then, being a poet and reading poetry has amplified my intellectual interests and probably changed the way my brain works. Writing is also often a solitary activity and so one has to be sure to make time to be in community with others—when one is not writing. I think of myself as a person who likes people and likes to work collaboratively also, which is one reason I like to make films. For me, it is not enough to just write poems and then venture out occasionally to read them. I need a collaborative creative practice as well; I’m healthier that way. I suppose one could say that poetry allows for individuated reflection and also an opportunity to speak of and to a grouping. A way to think of poetry is that the art is itself a community: we are not writing individual poems; instead we are writing one gigantic poem stretching out from the very first poem to the present. Maybe it is like a quilt of poetries, this writing poetry.
ML: Let's close with you shedding light on crafting a specific poem of your choice. Would you tell us about the draft process, your editing methods and what gives you the sense that a poem is exactly what it needs to be to move into the world without
qualification?
SB: At fourteen pages, my book’s final poem, “To A Curl of Water,” is the longest I’ve ever written. I spent about a month writing the first draft. Beforehand I read a lot of longish poems by other writers. I studied them as models to see how they worked, how they were put together. I read them until I’d internalized their structures. Of particular interest to me were the ways in which the writers used transitions. I knew I wanted to write a poem that made extensive use of transitions and worked itself out from a central line of thought/image like a jazz solo spinning away and coming back in. Eventually, after much reading, I got down to the actual writing. I just wrote chunks, memories, story-scraps unconnected to each other except by my intuition. Then as I amassed a lot of these little chunks I noticed “dog” figures appearing again and again. I did some research into dogs as symbols, both literary and mythological. I came up with some ways to “glue” some of the disparate stories together that way. I put the poem aside for a few days and read a lot more long poems before resuming the drafting process.
After a couple weeks, I saw I had a long poem evolving. I kept writing, without a sense of where it would go or end up. When the month was up I had a pretty rangy, wild thing on my hands. At this point I set it aside for a couple days. When I came back to it I started pruning, chopping, reducing the fat. Then I had the rough shape and measure. I tend to be pretty particular about sentences, phrases and word choice even during the first draft so by the time it is at the end of first draft stage it is like it is at thirty-fifth draft stage. When I first started writing I used to physically start new drafts from beginning to end each time. Now I will go at a draft endlessly, tinkering with it and also making major changes, but when I make a major change I save the old version just in case. So it becomes hard to say what how many drafts I actually do—I guess I would say many many drafts went into this poem’s “first draft.” The other thing I did was I read it out loud a lot, to hear the rhythm and to know where it faltered and sped up and so on. Then when I couldn’t see it from any new angles anymore I put the poem away for months and then took it out again and spent another three weeks cutting and trimming. I showed it to some people I trust. They gave good feedback. I tried to incorporate some of their feedback into the rewrite. Then I put it away for about eight more months. When I took it out again I made some more cuts and asked other eyes to look at it. I used the helpful comments and discarded the not-so-useful contributions. The last thing I did to the poem was I went through and tried to hear where the lines were too smooth or the rhythm was repeating itself, i.e. where I was relying too heavily on my own usual tricks and some moves I know I tend to replicate because they are somewhat easy for me. Of course their ease is also their trouble: I tend to rely on them instead of trying new things. My greatest fear is to end up writing the same sounding poem over and over again. For example, I went through and tried to remove as many prepositional phrases as possible in order to roughen up the music.
Finally, my girlfriend at the time told me to leave the thing alone. So I did. As the old saying goes, poems are never finished, they’re abandoned. Once you write for a while though, you do get an intuitive sense for how much you can tinker with a poem before it gets worse, i.e. how much revision is enough revision. And so the poem needs to meet this inalienable, unseeable but very much sense-able state before it is ready to be sent out into the world.
Shane Book: I’m glad you liked the poem. I’m struggling with how to describe the process of “weaving emptiness through such a structured form.” Perhaps the best way to say it is I chose the form because I wanted a vessel that would allow a kind of repetition that would become haunting, obsessive, the way one’s mind can become obsessed with a person who is no longer there, who has left. It seemed to me that the pantoum’s repeated phrases would give space for such an endeavor and that this repetition in itself would create an atmosphere of loss, longing, and ultimately, grieving. Another way to think of it is that if you are writing about a void, it makes sense to scaffold that “nothingness” with a rigid poetic form—in this way you get a dialectical relationship between the unyielding and the vacant, being and non-being, as it were.
ML: I read something you said about negative space and am fascinated with how this poem speaks to so many aspects of negative space. Its dynamic asks readers to consider what is not there. I've always been drawn to negative space in art & design, and, of course, to what lies beneath or behind the lines in a poem or a conversation. It's a tricky area. You've pulled it forward beautifully.
SB: Thank you for saying that. Yes, subtext comes to mind, too: the floating ice cube’s hidden underside, and so on.
ML: Many of your poems have the feel of a photojournalist's point-of-view. There is an incredible simplicity in the portrait drawn in the first six lines of “Uganda, 1997.” It allows readers to visualize any little girl, perhaps their own, simply standing, waiting.The shock occurs precisely when you break line six with “stump ends.” What did those first lines represent to you? The children appear as children. While we empathize with their suffering, they do not show up in this poem as asking the world for anything.
SB: I wanted to do justice to the girl in this image, who is first of all, a real person. Sebastao Salgado took that picture. I did not want to sensationalize what had happened to her. It seemed to me the best way to do it was to employ a reporter’s or as you say photojournalist’s point of view: just try to give the reader the image in as unadorned a manner as possible. The first lines were supposed to lead the reader into the poem as a viewer’s eyes might traverse the photograph. I wanted to let the reader see her as a human being first, and then show what had been done to her. It seems more emotional that way. And hopefully, more true.
ML: Let me back up a bit and ask about your beginning as a poet. Poetic forms, your voice, all of the underlying craft is apparent in your poetry, yet it shows through only as a sure-footed confidence. Never does the poet appear crafting the poem. There is a conversational tone even in the most heartbreaking images. The reader is transported to the place of witness, and is never mired in a maudlin perspective.
SB: This book took a long time. Or rather, I took a long time with it before sending it anywhere to be published. A teacher of mine at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the poet Brenda Hillman, told us to wait 8 years after graduation to send our manuscripts out. That seems about right to me. I deliberately waited because I did not want to feel pressured, rushed to just publish something. So many first books feel pushed out too soon. I did not want to be like the Canadian poet Al Purdy who told me that whenever he arrived in a new town to do a reading he’d hit the bookstores and look for copies of his first book and buy them all with the intent to destroy them. Also, slowing things down on the composition side, when I wrote Ceiling of Sticks I was writing three other manuscripts as well—all written out of different aesthetics. When I would get stuck on one I would jump around to another manuscript to give myself a break. So the poems had a long gestation process and an even longer revision process.
ML: When you create a poem in a specific form, does the anchoring image change from its original impetus?
SB: I look at form as a generative tool. An early teacher of mine, Philip Levine, told me that if the form is hurting the poem, abandon the form and save the poem. For me, this attitude extends to holding onto a fixed idea of what an image might be or do. I try to write line to line, letting go of any controlling ideas. If I’m not surprised by own poem line to line then I’m sure no one else will be. Plus working that way makes writing more interesting, as a process. I think writers need to stay open to possibility. You have to stay flexible.
ML: Ceiling of Sticks won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Had you sent the manuscript out at all before the prize? And did this prize help you evolve as a poet in any way?
SB: In the Fall of 2008 I sent the manuscript out to some contests – I forget how many, maybe ten, just the ones that I thought might be open to the book – and six months later I got a call from Prairie Schooner. In a way it took no time at all to get published. But if you think of how long I took to write and revise it, the whole thing took years. That said, I think the reason the book was accepted relatively quickly is precisely because I took a long time to work on it. The prize gave me enough money to pay for a cross-continent move and it did get some good exposure for the book so that maybe a few more people saw it than would otherwise have seen it. As for my evolution as a poet, I can’t say the prize had any effect.
ML: What rituals do you have or preparations are necessary to taking your experience ofthe political, cultural and emotional worlds and placing them on the page?
SB: I try not to have too many rituals around writing because I think rituals lead writers to not write, in that one can get hung up on say, having a certain chair, a certain coffee mug, a certain room to write in, and so on. If I have a ritual it is to try to sit in the chair as long as I can—especially when I am in the solving problems stage of a draft. I just get into it and camp out there. When I wrote many of the poems in this book I was so intense about it that I took it a bit too far: I would sit for twelve, fourteen hours at a time. Some evenings the girl I was living with would be downstairs and hear a thud and run upstairs to find I’d fallen out of my chair onto the floor and was passed out cold. She’d have to roust me, and help me get to my feet and lead me downstairs to bed. I’d have no recollection of even hitting the ground. It was scary. Eventually she put a soft matt down on the ground so I wouldn’t hit my head. I don’t recommend that sort of ritual.
ML: Will you tell our readers about your travels and how they shape your perception?
SB: Traveling has been my primary education. Unlike schools’ rigid socializing rubrics, travel has a varying rhythm, unpredictably changing depending on what part of the world you find yourself in. I think traveling so much has made me a nomad in my thinking, tastes, interests—it has made me a flexible watcher, or at least I like to think it has made me somewhat more open to seeing whatever is in front of me and in so doing, allowed me an ability to inhabit various points of view. Like an actor, it is important for a writer to be able to occupy a variety of positions, vantage points, to empathize both on a grand scale and in a thumbnail dimension. Seeing new places, meeting people of different cultures, and living in those cultures sets one up to remain universalist in one’s proclivities.
ML: How does poetry inform your identity and, specifically, your identity as a poet juxtaposed with your concept of yourself in the larger community of joy and suffering?
SB: Poetry writing and reading require a certain kind of thinking. You could call it more associative or lateral, but whatever you want to call it, the poet has to remain open to the world of experience and thought and emotion. Certainly then, being a poet and reading poetry has amplified my intellectual interests and probably changed the way my brain works. Writing is also often a solitary activity and so one has to be sure to make time to be in community with others—when one is not writing. I think of myself as a person who likes people and likes to work collaboratively also, which is one reason I like to make films. For me, it is not enough to just write poems and then venture out occasionally to read them. I need a collaborative creative practice as well; I’m healthier that way. I suppose one could say that poetry allows for individuated reflection and also an opportunity to speak of and to a grouping. A way to think of poetry is that the art is itself a community: we are not writing individual poems; instead we are writing one gigantic poem stretching out from the very first poem to the present. Maybe it is like a quilt of poetries, this writing poetry.
ML: Let's close with you shedding light on crafting a specific poem of your choice. Would you tell us about the draft process, your editing methods and what gives you the sense that a poem is exactly what it needs to be to move into the world without
qualification?
SB: At fourteen pages, my book’s final poem, “To A Curl of Water,” is the longest I’ve ever written. I spent about a month writing the first draft. Beforehand I read a lot of longish poems by other writers. I studied them as models to see how they worked, how they were put together. I read them until I’d internalized their structures. Of particular interest to me were the ways in which the writers used transitions. I knew I wanted to write a poem that made extensive use of transitions and worked itself out from a central line of thought/image like a jazz solo spinning away and coming back in. Eventually, after much reading, I got down to the actual writing. I just wrote chunks, memories, story-scraps unconnected to each other except by my intuition. Then as I amassed a lot of these little chunks I noticed “dog” figures appearing again and again. I did some research into dogs as symbols, both literary and mythological. I came up with some ways to “glue” some of the disparate stories together that way. I put the poem aside for a few days and read a lot more long poems before resuming the drafting process.
After a couple weeks, I saw I had a long poem evolving. I kept writing, without a sense of where it would go or end up. When the month was up I had a pretty rangy, wild thing on my hands. At this point I set it aside for a couple days. When I came back to it I started pruning, chopping, reducing the fat. Then I had the rough shape and measure. I tend to be pretty particular about sentences, phrases and word choice even during the first draft so by the time it is at the end of first draft stage it is like it is at thirty-fifth draft stage. When I first started writing I used to physically start new drafts from beginning to end each time. Now I will go at a draft endlessly, tinkering with it and also making major changes, but when I make a major change I save the old version just in case. So it becomes hard to say what how many drafts I actually do—I guess I would say many many drafts went into this poem’s “first draft.” The other thing I did was I read it out loud a lot, to hear the rhythm and to know where it faltered and sped up and so on. Then when I couldn’t see it from any new angles anymore I put the poem away for months and then took it out again and spent another three weeks cutting and trimming. I showed it to some people I trust. They gave good feedback. I tried to incorporate some of their feedback into the rewrite. Then I put it away for about eight more months. When I took it out again I made some more cuts and asked other eyes to look at it. I used the helpful comments and discarded the not-so-useful contributions. The last thing I did to the poem was I went through and tried to hear where the lines were too smooth or the rhythm was repeating itself, i.e. where I was relying too heavily on my own usual tricks and some moves I know I tend to replicate because they are somewhat easy for me. Of course their ease is also their trouble: I tend to rely on them instead of trying new things. My greatest fear is to end up writing the same sounding poem over and over again. For example, I went through and tried to remove as many prepositional phrases as possible in order to roughen up the music.
Finally, my girlfriend at the time told me to leave the thing alone. So I did. As the old saying goes, poems are never finished, they’re abandoned. Once you write for a while though, you do get an intuitive sense for how much you can tinker with a poem before it gets worse, i.e. how much revision is enough revision. And so the poem needs to meet this inalienable, unseeable but very much sense-able state before it is ready to be sent out into the world.