By A. H. Jerriod Avant, PhD

It was near my final semester or so of my first MFA in Louisville, Kentucky maybe twelve or so years ago when I encountered the work of Shane McCrae in the form of Shane McCrae himself. He was the visiting faculty during Spalding University’s Low-Res MFA program. While hearing him read I thought, What is he sayin’ and why does it feel good to hear him say it how he sayin’ it?  This was in 2012 and Mule had not been out a year or not for long. Each of us who sat in his workshop was there to try and find a path to carve our own voices and here McCrae was, his modes in hand and light-years ahead, carving distinct voices, weaving personal history and family through a metricist’s lens. To read and hear a voice who’s been denied truth in the ways McCrae names and remembers is soul -stirring and makes an impeccable argument for a life disturbed by family, being torn from his Black father and, in a way, Blackness, and the complications of identity and belonging that come along with that. McCrae’s lean toward metrics isn’t solely responsible for how hefty the work is, but it does give McCrae a kind of grid from which his poems come etched.   

The poems in Mule carry with them an innovative use of meter. Convention is over in McCrae’s metrical constellation. Breaking away from traditional means of writing in metrical forms, and instead, the poet works to reflect the fragmented and rather multifaceted nature of the African American experience. What Black tongue hasn’t been broken? What Black path to anything has been linear? What Black family hasn’t been torn apart variously and relentlessly? McCrae’s been generous with details of his interior life including the story of his kidnapping, the huge part race plays into that, and finding a way back to his Blackness and his father after being ripped away from them at an age the mind can be so easily molded.   

As the mind can be molded, so can language, and is able to be configured endlessly, especially when we think of language as matter, as a physical thing that can be pushed around and arranged to our aesthetic bends. This feels like the modus operandi of the poet, Shane McCrae, whose belief in the “infinite possibilities” of writing in meter, keep him interested and dialed into the practice. Meter, or the marks, rules and limits that govern it, can become an indispensable tenet of a craftsperson’s practice, a kind of toolshed for shaping and carving out a voice, a feeling, a mood, a space, or a poem built less to communicate a thing and more so, to imagine, explore and maybe arrive somewhere new, necessary, or interesting. McCrae’s work lands me in new places often, given my penchant for sound, rhythm and the vast number of cadences available to those who live in the metrics of poetry. 

A unique feature of McCrae’s metrical deployment is the way two lines can sometimes form one or one and a half (if we read McCrae’s forward slashes within the line as indication of a metrical line break). This can be useful if the poet has identified the meter the poem wants to be written in. It can keep you on track with your foot count and give you a sense of how long your lines are. It doesn’t feel as if the breaks are a disturbance to the rhythm or the metrics of the line have on the poem or on what we hear, if anything it reinforces a set pattern the poet can use to build, break, riff or otherwise work from as the poem carries on.  Here, in the first stanza of “The Cardinal is the Marriage Bird” McCrae has given us all of this and more. It reads (with the metrics as I sounded it out. I generally don’t pronounce the “i” in cardinal): 

The poem is written in nearly all iambs. The first line of this stanza reads as iambic tetrameter (4 pairs of iambs) but is followed by an additional 3 pair of iambs after the metrical line break, bird /.  This sets the tone for McCrae to construct complementary rhythms next. The iambs clear the way for the meter to vary from phrase to phrase or line to line and provide a stable base for the poet to come back to and re-establish it, if need be. Writing in iambs is sing-songy enough to carry itself but with some well-planned timing and a musical enough ear, iambs can be enhanced by our natural speaking cadences and their linguistic features. The decision to break the second line with an enjambed dusk makes the second marginal line (from margin to margin, not metrical line) sway back and forth in a different way given the pauses at the caesura (space) and the metrical line break, then ending on an unstressed syllable, -dy, which feels like a kind of softening offered by the falling meter that line ends with. This puts the 3^rd marginal line, with its anapestic feet, in the position to offer up a series of sonic treats, of the card-, in the sun-, in the day. Anapestic and dactylic feet often remind me of triplets in music, where 3 musical notes are played within the timeframe of 1 beat in a measure where each measure consists of 4 beats. Generally, three anapestic feet in a row would sound intense, especially if the poem continues that rhythmic path, but given the metrical terrain of the poem, the anapestic song is wondrous and balanced amongst the many iambs that account for the bulk of the stanza.  

In another poem in the series of marriage poems in Mule, “We Married in The Front Yard,”, McCrae digs into this repetitive, emotionally charged passage, that seems to mimic the uneasiness and heartbreak baked into the subject matter. These are highly rhythmic portions of the poem and seem to feed the poem’s emotional and glitchy core. Centered in the poem is a marriage, a son,  and the developmental disorder taking hold. McCrae points directly to this when he says: “… we watched him disappear / gesture by gesture    word by word his au- / tism slowly    erasing him he couldn’t catch /.” It’s heartbreaking to watch a loved one’s faculties fall away, especially (I imagine) before those faculties are even fully developed in a child. These three lines do much work to mimic that falling away occurring in the child. The breakage that happens from phrase to phrase signals a kind of disappearing/coming apart. The way “gesture by gesture” and “word by word” are both balanced and rhythmic in their palindromic construction, feels analogous to the back-and-forth nature of a parent and child playing catch. The exchanges in an activity as such are undeniably rhythmic and functions on a pattern that seeps through McCrae’s lines. The severing and enjambment of “au- / tism” is part symbolic and part metric as McCrae decides to end the line with this rising meter, so that the next line begins with“tism slowly”, a pair of trochees that swing so easily you don’t even realize they’ve swung.  

But trochees, guilty of their falling meter, have this effect and in this case, act as a foreshadowing metric for what feels dizzying a few lines later in the poem. It’s stunning how much McCrae’s arrangement sounds like and seems to mimic the actions referenced, and the unsuccess of them. This portion reads:  

Again, with iambs percolating through, McCrae weaves music and cuts into an emotive sway that can be felt as it is read or heard if spoken aloud. A difficult passage that points to the steady trying, over and over, again and again, instructing the young child earnestly, to “catch”. This passage begins with a trochee and a spondee “Part to let go” which I read as, Dum-da Dum-Dum. Counting on a consistent number of beats per line and each line ending in a stressed beat, the poet knows what space and time he has to make the music he wants. He has a map that guides his decisions into fruition. The irregular trochee and spondee at the beginning of the passage, work in tandem with the caesura after “The ball again we said …” and the caesura before “catch.”  There are cracks and empty spaces here. It seems the rhythm of the action being referenced, its back-and-forth, swaying operation, are baked into the meter and then broken up so that there’s a sense of instability, but the rhythm is benefitting from the pause and thus we get this music that seems to bury us emotionally in what McCrae has been so generous in offering.  

McCrae’s use of meter is not rigid, mechanical or exacting. The metrical variations in his work reflect the poem’s emotional nuances. Sometimes there’s a trochee at the beginning of a line, meant to create a sense of urgency or disruption. These variations prevent the meter from becoming monotonous and add a layer of complexity to the poem’s sound and meaning. Additionally, McCrae’s syntax and enjambment play crucial roles in the poem’s metrics. By breaking lines in unexpected places, he creates a sense of movement and fluidity, mirroring perhaps, the flight of the cardinal. He’s manipulating the poem’s pacing, drawing attention to certain moments and enhancing the overall impact of the poem. 

***** 

Much of what I love about McCrae’s work lies in the tone and desires in the underpinned captives speaking in his poems. It feels like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation where someone has had an upper hand for far too long and the jig is finally up. The level of surety, and observation brought to these voices is piercing and resonates deeply given how democratizing language can be in a field like poetry. Imagine listening to an enslaved African American speaking to their enslaver in the meter and diction McCrae provides for Jim Limber.  

It is a rousing treat to experience In the Language of My Captor and all the racial, historical balancing, setting straight and probing into the minds and interior spaces of the captor and the captive, it does. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be listening, like I’ve tapped a private, unequal phoneline between the two. I want to think about how concise and penetrable Jim Limber’s voice is. For certain readers, I imagine it may be unnerving or even frightening to read. I believe if I came from a long line of captors, hearing Jim Limber’s voice according to McCrae, might unsettle me. The book opens with a series of themed scenarios that move from the captor’s God and the captive’s God not being the same God, to the savagery of the panopticon and its ideas, to what privacy might truly mean or not in hostile quarters like these, to shame and a captor crying in his hands to his captive who justly expresses no pity for him and the lack of shame inside him. Given McCrae’s own kidnapping and captivity, he unfortunately has insider knowledge of the emotional landscape one must face in a circumstance as racially charged and motivated as both his and Limber’s. In a poem much later in the book, titled “[hope][lessness],” Jim ponders the ways the relationship between he and his captor affects him, specifically the hopelessness of the relationship which feels more parasitic than it does symbiotic; not one person goes unharmed, even the captor who might believe himself to be unharmed. A portion of the poem reads:

This reads like the dialogue of a period film set in the antebellum south, except the captive’s language is giving the captor’s language a run for its blood and cotton money. McCrae deviates from the regular iambic metric of the map and has enjambed lines so that we get truths inside each single line and truths from the accumulation of them. In the first stanza, we learn about four different truths about the captor, and this forged relationship. The effect of adding a portion of a metrical line to another metrical line not only changes the rhythm of that line but the following line as well. McCrae is assigning parameters for his lines. Like redistricting, which can change the area of the map a politician may cover, certain metrical lines in McCrae’s have their own line, while other metrical lines must share the line, the way a district line within a county or state might split a town or city where candidates share voters in one town but may have all the voters to themselves in other towns. It’s an important distinction given either scenario. This offers McCrae the opportunity to break up the monotony of the iambs and thus, the monotony of white supremacist thinking and activity. The fourth line, “Expression    of his hopelessness // /My kind” reinforces the mirror held up to the captor. That what he thinks and feels about his captive, is more so a reflection of what he lacks and feels about himself. It points not only to his captive but those like Jim Limber. The poem continues: 

The retributive tone and language are palpable and feel tremendously achievable inside the world of the poem and almost outside of it. There’s this feeling created by enjambment and stacked lines (what I’m calling two or more metrical lines sharing a marginal line) that feels slippery—the captor and the captive seem to speak simultaneously through the poem. Limber knows his captor intimately enough that they share the same language and sometimes have the same thoughts except one is cloaked in a kind of paranoia and the other a kind of fuel for it. The , “How could he    / Free me / And not fear I / Would seek revenge    / He says”  we see the anxiety of the captor and I think, a truth and wish for Jim Limber. The way the years of captivity have bred this attitude in Limber is fiery. McCrae get us as close to the heat as he can. The calm, quiet, mostly monosyllabic words also give Jim a concise, eerie, and focused tone, unwavering in its pursuit of revenge. Lastly, it is not beyond the captor’s knowledge that what he has caused is as evil as Jim tells us it is. That it is as selfish and disruptive as the consequences and longevity of it all.  In the lines, “/ He says / he keeps me here / because he would if he were / Me seek revenge” we find glaring evidence in this confession, which is not a characteristic I would typically associate with white supremacist activity, this confessing out loud of the damage and violence at their hands. Sure, they know it and think it, and say privately to each other perhaps, how fucked up what they do is, but in this way, I think it rare. Feels incomplete here. But in the poem… or but McCrae forces the confession in perfect unforced clarity… or something to close out the thought.

***** 

Ain’t no sidewalls or guardrails in McCrae’s sonnets. He’s taken them off and thus, gotten rid of what felt like hard walls on both sides of the sonnet; the strict rhyme schemes and hard and strict syllable counts have felt more mechanic than human, more programmed than fluid and freely moving. Reading various sonnet brands has taught me that quirks and idiosyncrasies often mark the differences in received forms of any kind. We don’t get the Miltonic sonnet without the two structural tweaks and the switch in subject matter Milton makes to the Spenserian sonnet. So how McCraen to include more than one metrical line in a marginal line of a poem and mark it. What a McCraen move to lean into ending and beginning lines with irregular stresses, contrary to what the type of feet the metrical map is dominated by. McCrae’s knowledge of and instincts for meter enhance the emotional depth of his poems while weaving personal, familial, and sweeping details of a Black interior life, in the face of so much that still feeds off it.  

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Works Cited 

McCrae, Shane. Mule. CSU Poetry Center Books, 2010.

McCrae, Shane. In the Language of My Captor. Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine (2023), received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts and Letters Poetry Award. A graduate of Jackson State University, Avant has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. A graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, he’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. Avant has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, The Yale Review, among other journals, and has been produced in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Highline NYC, and the Kitchen Lab. Avant is the 2024-2025 John and Renee Grisham Writer-In-Residence at the University of Mississippi.