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? 

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.

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.

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.