| Home | Issues | Contributors | Submissions | Contact | Links | Take Action | PoetryDepot |
Abalone Moon
Michael Shorb: an interview
What events in your life or the society around you have had a major influence on the themes and content of your poetry?
It is hard to cite a particular event or experience that shapes one’s poetry. The current climate is the worst -- politically, economically, environmentally -- in my memory. Thinking about what is going on now gives me the same sense of alienation and despair that I and so many others felt during the ‘60s’ era. A further frustration is the ongoing degradation of our culture, with its reality TV, slasher mysteries and pornography. It’s too easy to think that the Philistines have won or to despair that poetry is no longer possible or doesn’t matter even if it is possible.
In my work, I try to effect some sort of balance between being lyrical, relating something meaningful, and keeping in mind the post-modern exigencies of poetry as verbal play and innovation. Still, I don’t know from one poem to the next what I will say or how I will say it. It’s hard to even know who one’s audience is.
The ‘what to say’ part is crucial, since there is no agreement about what the current standards and rules are. Is poetry the clever little neo-academic experimentation of a James Tate or Billy Collins? Do you write only about your personal experiences? When I studied writing at UC Irvine the official dictum seemed to be that if your poem was easily understood it was bad and if it was basically incomprehensible it was good. Reading such modern ‘masters’ as John Ashberry seem to affirm this absurd posture. This also factors into why poetry has lost so much of its non-academic audience. And still the questions remain. Is the point the creation of something beautiful or lyrical? Is it as obsolete as representational art to ‘have something to say’ in one’s poems?
And then, of course, there is the steady stream of rejection slips to remind you that whatever brilliant answers one may come up with are doomed to be wrong in the view of the majority of editorial gatekeepers keeping track of what gets published.
Anyway, I try to plug away with a mixture of poems that take a satirical view of the present absurdities, poems that reflect on the human experience in history, poems that capture, at least momentarily, the elusive qualities of lyrical beauty. Several of the poems in this selection deal with personal experiences. I suppose one frustration I have is the feeling that I should do more with the mining of my personal history for poetic material. Another huge frustration is that it seems that there are -- given the multitude of poetry publications -- so few publications that are interested in poems that address political and environmental issues.
Poets speak more intimately, wildly, and provocatively than the manners or ordinary conversation allow. The rules of rhyme, meter, and stanza, though often respected by contemporary poets, are just a small part of the repertory. How true is this of your writing?
I used to pay more attention to various experiments in technique and execution -- how you broke the lines up as they flowed down the page and so forth -- but find them increasingly tedious. I don’t know if there really are any ‘rules’ left about anything. The point is to write something worth saying and finding an audience.
Copyright (c) Abalone Moon, 2005. All rights reserved.
Web page design by Velene Campbell
Web page editing and site optimization by Peter Bunce - e-mail: techsolutions@netscape.net