On Poetry with O’Shaughnessy

by David Brennan

Keith O'Shaughnessy teaches English at Camden County College in southern New Jersey. His poems have recently appeared, or will soon be appearing, in Columbia Magazine, Measure, Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies, and Able Muse. He has published two chapbooks, Carnaval and The Devil's Party, both with Pudding House Publications. Another, Snegurochka, is forthcoming this spring. He lives in Princeton.

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When does prose, or even a less syntactical arrangement of words, become poetry?

That is tantamount to asking what poetry is, and, to adapt a line of Eliot's, the best we can ever hope to do is to come up with less unsatisfactory answers to this question. That said, it is as natural to try to answer it as it is to ask it in the first place. Even then, I can only define poetry according to my own idiosyncratic conception of it, though I am perfectly willing to do so—and in fairly definitive terms.

For me, poetry should not look or sound like ordinary speech any more than dance should look like ordinary movement or music should sound like ordinary noise. In fact, I like it to have the strange diction and incantatory rhythm of a rune or spell. This is because I want it to create imaginatively—then and there, as through the transporting power of intoxication—an "elsewhere" or "otherwise" that is radically original and fundamentally alien. Correspondingly, I like every word, like an onomatopoeia, to summon forth the thing it names, every shape to enact what it describes—for every sound to echo its sense, every form to reflect its content. But these are ideals, and pretty fanciful ones at that. In the main I'll settle for any arrangement of words whose line length is determined by the aesthetics of a pattern rather than the physics of a margin.

In this age of wireless interconnectedness, of Facebook, Twitter, and the Blogosphere, what is the purpose of the poem?

Poetry, by manipulating the sound and shape of words along with their meanings and arranging them into artful patterns, can communicate what is otherwise inexpressible. What other modes of communication do may well be equally valuable; they simply communicate different material. Poetry, then, bears the same complementary relation to them that sight, for example, does to hearing, taste, etc. It is no better and no worse than any other medium, merely different.

Can a genre seemingly as tenuous as poetry survive changing media or will the media change poetry?

I've never given this matter much thought, as I'm not particularly inclined to think along such lines. I will say, however, that I find the common hysteria about poetry's corruption by more visual, technological media absurd, and the underlying assumption that verbal expression is somehow superior to, and should be privileged above, visual representation spurious (after all, Shakespeare's plays were visual in the same way movies are). Just as language itself, by nature, is constantly in flux, media are inherently unstable and mutable. In fact, that instability is often part of what poetry expresses, using itself as a metaphor.

The identity of the poet seems multifarious and, at times, often conflicted: the poet as king, the poet as philosopher, the poet as historian, and even the poet as warrior, outcast, and monster. Who is the poet of today? Where can he or she be found?

All of the above strike me as a bit grandiose (à la Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world" or—worse yet—Emerson's "liberating gods"). That said, I guess I'm no less a self-mythologizer myself, because I recall being at a reading a couple of summers ago and getting characteristically fidgety and ill-tempered about what I considered the objectionable blandness of the performance (more like a flat recitation). When asked later to account for my behavior, I found myself replying, with unintended intensity, "I want shaman." Granted, I know next to nothing about actual shamans, but I think what I meant was that I wanted the reader at least to attempt some kind of transcendence, to inspire ecstasy, like the wild-eyed singer in "Kubla Khan."

As a poet, how would you categorize yourself?

For me, every work of art is an act of defiance against Nature. It wrings beauty out of ugliness, or mere blandness. Dance, for example, represents a refusal to accept not only the laws of physics, but the ungainliness of the human body, an optical illusion that turns matter into form—even an angelic one. Correspondingly, music takes all the chaotic din in the air and refines it into ordered sound. Poetry, then, organizes all of our disintegrating incoherence into patterns that, if they fail to convey definite meaning, at least erect artful monuments to its failure to do so. I also think of the poet as a graffiti artist who is forever spray-painting "I was here" on the all-too-blank face of things. Isn't everybody's favorite doodle their own signature? One's name is the first and last word on oneself.

What draws you to poetry?

Ever since childhood I have been almost maniacally obsessed with language, and less with the meanings of words than with their sounds, textures, and even shapes, including the sensation of uttering them, often in conjunction with other sounds. If I were disciplined and gifted enough to adhere to my own theories, I would be a painter or sculptor—that is, a genuine creator, as distinct from mere representer, of unmediated images—but I dream about words the way chess players dream about chess moves, so it looks like I'm stuck with them. Artists generally make art out of whatever raw materials they have lying around, and use whatever vocabulary is native to them. Also, I can't sing or dance, so I guess this is pretty much it.

What importance do the conventions of meter, line, rhyme, rhythm, and image have to your poetry?

I believe that, as Aristotle once claimed, the soul thinks in images (as evidenced by the symbolic language of our dreams), so if poetry wants to talk to the soul, it has to speak its language. To adapt another line of Eliot's, poetry is one person's unconscious speaking directly to another. The imagination, as the word itself suggests, is that faculty which both recognizes and selects images. If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the way to a person's soul is through their senses. Rhythm is equally vital to poetry insofar as it communicates elementally with the blood and nervous system, which are at the heart (if you will) of poetic experience.

Does form affect your subjects?

For me the distinction between formal poetry and free verse is a false one. All poetry is formal. It is formal because all language is formal, if only because it is arranged structurally. The only truly "free" poem would be a wordless cry of some kind, like birdsong or a primal scream—in effect, inarticulate eloquence, expression without language at all. A poem's content should almost literally "dictate" its form just as its sense should "call for" its sound. That is, its form should be the one that is the best visual and aural equivalent of its substance. I think that writing a sonnet, say, because one fancies oneself the kind of poet—and perhaps even the kind of person—who writes sonnets will most likely result in a decidedly unpoetic and inartistic sonnet—in short, one that is more formulaic than formalist.

When beginning a new poem, what is your process? How do you start?

Depends. I have no system. I just take what I can get, call 'em as I hear 'em, as it were. My process ranges from elaborating upon a single line that's sprung to mind unbidden to needing a poem on a given subject or in a particular form as part of a structural pattern and grinding one out methodically. I compose pretty much everywhere and under just about all conditions.

Are you willing to share unfinished poems with others?

Though certainly willing to do so, I rarely do, simply because I'm not in the practice of it. For better or for worse (mostly the latter), I've always worked essentially in a vacuum, and stubbornly continued to do so long after the dangers of doing so have been made manifest. For exhibits A, B, and C, I refer you to the three poems that accompany this very interview.

With regard to your poetry, what is the importance of performance and public reading?

Merely reading poetry in silence and never hearing it recited aloud is tantamount to reading sheet music and never hearing it performed. Because I was raised on television, however, I often require some prior familiarity with the written text to catch enough of it out of the air when it's recited for me—in other words, I am a pretty bad listener and so, need a cheat sheet. I would like to think, though, that I am a pretty good reader, primarily because the act of performing my work aloud forces me into precisely the kind of sensual relation with language as utterance that first excited my interest in the medium.

Your first chapbook, Carnaval, was a collection lyrical poems while your second chapbook, The Devil's Party, featured dramatic monologues. Is there a form in which you feel most comfortable or in which you prefer to work?

I would like to think that I do not have a "form" —or style, or voice—in which I prefer to work, but that I am always trying to create new ones, in part because I never feel "comfortable" with the old.

The dramatic monologues, for example, were actually written first and in a style I have long since abandoned, but not because I "outgrew" it. More like I no longer had anything to say that way. That is, the first poems invented a style and aesthetic specifically to say what they wanted to. When I had something different to say, in Carnaval, I set about creating a new language, or way of talking, to communicate it.

The poems in Carnaval are actually taken from a full-length manuscript, which—perhaps unsurprisingly—has yet to find a publisher. It represents, for me, the total realization of a complete vision stylistically (or delusion, depending on your perspective). Its overall structure is meant to be symphonic in that the individual poems function less as separate songs than as related movements in a larger musical unit, which develops multiple formal as well as symbolic patterns. It was the first time I put my money where my mouth was—turned my poetics into poetry.

Incidentally, out of vanity or sheer boredom, at one point I undertook a full poem-by-poem analysis of the entire volume, describing and explaining every choice in exhaustive—not to say exhaust-ing—detail. Weird as it may sound, I found it incredibly useful—and enjoyable—as an exercise in increasing my awareness of exactly what decisions I was making and precisely what effects they were having. There are no accidents in great literature, and for the most part, even the merely passable stuff tries its best to limit them. Everything should be where it is, doing what it's doing, for a reason—and a damn good one at that.

What's next for you?

I have completed a draft of another full-length manuscript, this one set in Russia rather than Mexico, though it operates on many of the same compositional principles as its predecessor. In fact, I have just had a chapbook version of it, entitled Snegurochka, accepted by my publisher (Pudding House Publications, for those of you waiting on pins and needles . . .). After that, I suppose, it's the Yale Prize, followed by a National Book Award and full tour of duty as poet laureate, capped off by a Nobel. You know, the usual . . .

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On Poetry with O’Shaughnessy

by David Brennan

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