by Gbenga Adesina, PhD

Writing in the Chicago Review of Books, Michael Pittard described how in Shane McCrae’s book of poems, Sometimes I Never Suffered (FSG, 2020), the poet artfully invents an “adopted Black son of Jefferson Davis (to ask) the reader cutting questions about how society and American Christianity construct notions of Heaven (to speak) with raw emotion and power.” The idea of heaven haunts the poetry of Shane McCrae, not heaven as in paradisal afterlife, but heaven as a continuum of historical time, a human fable forged through the brutal calculus of segregated grace and worthiness. But McCrae’s heaven is also about a kind of linguistic, narrative, and metaphysical freedom. He constructs an heaven or the conceit of an heaven where finally freed from a muteness imposed upon them by historians, invisible, marginal, but no less significant figures emerge and speak to us in a sparse, fragmentary, incantatory dialects of ghosts, “hastily assembled angels,” and saints. McCrae’s heaven lends them ancestral girth, gravity, and an elevated perch, and from that perch, they offer their testaments as witnesses of our ongoing history, but from outside time. He imbues the ghosts with private history, the nuance of character, and individuation. Sometimes, in his poetry, hell is not the opposite, but the extension of this heaven. His language is at once glass shard-sharp, simple but incantatory and piercing, circular, and musical with an economy that is intimate, though not confessional. No one doubts that it’s the poet speaking in these poems, but he speaks with different registers and cadences from within the inner lives of these multiple poetic personas and thus create an haunting orchestra of ghosts, a polyvocal afterlife.

Consider this excerpt from, “Jim Limber on the Gates of Heaven” from Sometimes I Never Suffered: 

In this poem, we hear a syntax that surges forward and backward through fractured phrases. Kinetic images double and circle back on each other. Meaning is arrived at through the seam and symmetry of music. “The gates aint gates……it’s dreams”. You hear wonder, a familiar awe, and revelation in the voice of the the poem’s speaker. And a desire to explicate the nature of this heaven they have encountered to the reader, to parse their memory (the sting of the bad part and the benediction of the good part), and comprehend how the passage of time works outside timelessness which is the central promise of heaven. McCrae’s poems are however not only situated in ethereal spaces, they are grounded in historical reality as well. In such poems, he excavates his family history, the contours of his childhood, his grandparents and parents, the nature of love, and the trauma of abandonment. His work demonstrates the breath, depth and marvelous range of Black poetics in 21st century United States, a poetics that embrace the historical as well as the metaphysical.  

Shane McCrae was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his latest book, a memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping. He visited Furious Flower and spoke to Gbenga Adesina, the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at James Madison University’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

It seems to me that your project is this marriage of deep spiritual yearning to a kind of faithfulness to the dignity of everyday speech, ordinary speech. I want you to talk to me about influence as it relates to your spiritual pursuits, but also as it relates to your faithfulness to ordinary speech in your poetry. 

Well, so at least with regard to religious things, the influence that goes into that is always going to be long and complicated. I think, I made my religious conversion when I was about—I guess it was about 19 years old? And it was a sort of indefinite conversion. It was a conversion from a really fierce atheism to a belief in God, but it wasn’t within any particular context, although the conversion itself happened at a Benedictine monastery. And it took another 10 years before I was baptized. I was baptized Episcopalian, and that’s still my church, so I suppose religious influences have been largely a lot of theology. Rowan Williams has been really important to me as a theological thinker, and just reading the Bible and going to church.  

With regard to language you know, I’ve never really thought about what I was doing as having a particular concern for everyday speech—although I have thought about using everyday speech and poems a lot. We’re always sort of unaware of what we’re doing, I think, to a large extent—trying to figure out the voice for the poem itself, whatever voice works best in that particular poem, and for a long time, that was a voice that was very closely tied to everyday speech. And I suppose it still is. But in the more recent stuff I’ve been trying […] to some extent complicate that somewhat, although where the complication occurs, tends to be at the level of syntax, etc. 

Yes, yes. Speaking of syntax, repetition seems almost holy to you. 

Sure [Chuckles]. And I like that you frame it that way, because that makes it sound a lot more noble than what it has to do with it has to do with [Laughs.].  I mean, I’ve always liked repetition, but never really thought about it. Influences that I hadn’t mentioned: a lot of music, particularly My Bloody Valentine. I like the use of repetition in that music. I like that figures repeat over and over and over again, beyond the boundaries at which one might think the repetition should stop or fade away. So, I’ve always been very interested in repetition, musically, and when I started writing the poems that went into my first book, in the style that I still work in, I decided to incorporate that into the work.  

And here’s where the lack of nobility comes in. It was partly to do with my love for that sort of thing, but also partly to do with I had become convinced that I was going to write formal poetry. And so, I didn’t want to write formal poetry that would require the kinds of awkward syntactical inversions, or grammatical structures that poets used to incorporate in order to make the meter or the rhyme of a poem work. And so, I thought, well, I still need some sort of technique that essentially allows me to cheat, because I’m not always going to be able to get the thing I want to say to match the meter precisely without, you know, fudging some edges. 

And so, repetition allows for that, you know, my particular syntax allows for me to make the meter and the form work in such a way that presumably, it’s not noticeable to the reader, that part of what I’m doing is trying to make the meter and the form work with repetitions, et cetera. 

Awesome. And I think that I should ask you to talk a little bit about meter, and if there’s a connection between meter and your spiritual pursuit. Can you talk a little bit about meter, and spirituality, meter and worship, meter and prayer… 

I mean, that’s really a good question. I don’t really think about it most times [Laughs.]. I am very interested in literary technique, and so that’s what I’m thinking about all the time. When I’m thinking about God and my particular religious beliefs, I’m usually not thinking about poetry.  I’m sort of haunted by TS Eliot’s remark, to the effect that to think of the Bible as literature, you do so on the grave of Christianity or whatever [Laughs.].  It’s not that I don’t recognize the close association, but I tend to keep them separate. When I’m thinking about poetry, when I’m thinking about meter, I’m thinking much more about the tradition of English poetry or a tradition of English poetry, rather than thinking about things to do with my religious practice.  

One more question along that line is about how various the kind of interior spaces that you explore are. I love the series of poems of a hastily assembled Angel, and I love that those poems were happening inside the interiority of this angel—there are flaws, there are fears inside this angel—I was deeply moved by them. And I thought I might ask you about how you use this interiority of God and of humans and angels and animals. How does that work? 

I don’t know. I mean, some interiorities, like the interiority of God, I don’t think I can really write about, but I can pretend I can do angels, because they’re described in various ways that make them both beyond human, with regard to their powers, but also beneath human with regard to the ontological, the ultimate relationship between humans, God, and angels. And there’s also a lot of texts, particularly Milton, that suggest that angels have an intuitive interiority, that’s complicated enough. Usually what I do is—it’s a little simplistic, I suppose, or there’s no way to describe it that doesn’t make it sound simplistic, but—I try to imagine what I know about whatever the being from whom I’m speaking, imagine what their circumstances would be, to the extent that I can do that, and just write as if I lived according to those circumstances. To some extent, it’s all “one is speaking from the self,” but you try to alter the self as much as you can. 

I’d like to ask you about what I might call “stamina.” I’m interested in what you might call it, but I’ll call it stamina. The preface to Sometimes I never Suffered captures that. It says: “Sometimes I Never Suffered concludes ‘A Fire in Every World,’ a poem begun with ‘Purgatory/A Son and a Father of Sons’ from In the Language of my Captor,” a previous book of yours, “and continues with ‘The Hell Poem’” from another book, The Gilded Auction Block.  “The whole of Sometimes I Never Suffered is the third part of this poem, but as is the case with the other two parts, it can be read on its own.”  So, this is a poem across three books, if I’m not mistaken. How did you keep going with this one poem? Was the poem following you and refusing to let you go? To me it just felt like incredible stamina, and long memory in a world of short memory. How do you maintain that kind of stamina—across projects, across books?  

I would have never thought about it that way.  But you just—at least I just—write a lot, and I tend not to think about extension in that way. The thing that I’ve been working on now is the extension of “The Hell Poem” itself.  Because of the three parts, it’s pretty much a straightforward narrative poem.  I’ve extended it from about 40 pages—a little bit less—to a little bit over 100 pages of the same narrative that’s just continued from the end of the whole poem to the end of the whole thing. And that was a piece where I was thinking about the whole thing sort of continuously over… I think I first wrote “The Hell Poem” maybe in 2014, and I just maybe finished the extended version of it and in 2023, and so to some extent, I was thinking about it for about nine years, but at times with more intensity.  Because I wanted to make it a sort of traditional straightforward narrative, there were things I had to keep in mind, you know, what had the characters done? I had to excise one part that I had written earlier that I cannot include, because it doesn’t make sense with regard to the narrative, the chronology. And how writing a lot comes into that is that if on a particular day I don’t write more of whatever extended thing I’m working on, there are other things I can write. And so, it’s not as if it’s haunting me all that time.  I give my attention to the other thing.  And when I want to return to the larger project, when I’m in a particular mood to write that kind of poem or whatever, then I’ll go back to it. It’s not a thing that I feel like I have to stick with doing every day to the exclusion of other things.  

This is a question I’m asking on behalf of young poets everywhere who would see this: Shane, how did you become a poet?  

Well, [chuckles] I’m still trying. But how it started, I was in high school, I was 15. I know the day it was October 25, 1990, which John Berryman’s birthday, and it was the anniversary of the death of Chaucer, and it’s one other literary thing, but I can’t remember what. But that was the day that I started writing. And I had seen this movie was Charlie Sheen’s first starring vehicle, but the name of it is escaping me at the moment. And at one point, a character in the movie starts reading Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” the “dying is an art like everything else I do it exceptionally well,” and, you know, I had been an extremely, extremely poor student—very, very, very bad [Laughs.]. I was a good student up until the sixth grade. And then I couldn’t cope with moving and I just gave up on school starting around, you know, being in the sixth grade, seventh grade, I just stopped paying any attention doing any of the work having any interest in it.  

So, when I encountered this, this was my first trip through 10th grade (I took another one subsequently) and I had no interest in anything at the time other than skateboarding, and I certainly didn’t care about books except for in a very, very abstract way. I had liked reading Shel Silverstein, and Encyclopedia Brown books when I was a kid, but I didn’t really read at all, at this point. So, I heard the lines from “Lady Lazarus” and it just sort of… there’s that famous description by Emily Dickinson about how she knew she had read a poem when she felt like a shock have gone through her … and I… yeah, it just did something to me. It lined up with my worldview. I was very goth at the time. And I had never heard poetry like that! I had tried to write one poem, maybe a couple of weeks before that, so this is evidence that it was in my mind, I guess, to some extent, but it was rather more I want to use that poem. I wanted to give it to somebody. It started, “Roses are red, violets are blue,” and the reason it started that way was not because I was being ironic. It started that way because I thought that’s how poems started. I didn’t know anything about them [Laughs.]. And so, when I heard this Sylvia Plath thing it was so far away from my sense of what poetry was. And so that day, I wrote eight poems. I kept at it. I stopped for a little while when I moved again, but returned to it. By the time I was 16, I was convinced that I wanted to be a poet. Other than skateboarding, I hadn’t been interested in anything and I was so interested in this thing. I guess that’s how it happened.  

Talk to us about the pursuit of knowledge: you begin with the epiphany, but then you go seek the knowledge, you go seek the teachers. Talk to us about your private education, some of the institutions you went to in search of teachers.  

Sure. Initially, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the school library, I grabbed a few sort of random books of poetry: Linda Pastan’s selected poems, PM/AM, I think it was called; this book by a poet named Celestine Frost called An Inhuman Rival. I read a few biographies of poets. And it wasn’t until I was going to college… I dropped out of high school when I was 18, and as I indicated earlier, I was convinced I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t know how to go about it; I knew poets had something to do with school, in a broad sense, about learning, but not how to do it, because I hadn’t done it actively since seventh grade. It wasn’t until I was 21, I think, that I decided to go to college, and because nobody in my immediate family, nobody that I really knew had gone to college, I didn’t know anything about it. By this time, I had been poor for a good time, pretty isolated in general, and didn’t have anybody to talk to about poetry. And so not knowing anything about college, my assumption was that everybody at college had read everything, they knew everything. I felt I had to prepare to go to college. And so, I started.  

I had been doing poetry long enough to have a broad sense of what a canon of English literature might be, and, you know, had a sense that it probably started with Homer and I just sort of read the major things from Homer up, and tried to read as much of particularly English poetry as I could trying to get ready for college. I read The Faerie Queene and I read The Complete Shakespeare.  I used to walk around with a big Bevington Shakespeare just reading it as I was going from place to place, and I felt like I had to know all of that because otherwise I wouldn’t. I was going to community college because I never took the SATs, but a community college would let me in. I thought I had to know all of that to go to community college, even to begin to try to learn stuff. The school that I ended up going to was Chemeketa Community College, which was in Salem, Oregon, then, briefly, I was at the University of Oregon, but I transferred from there to Linfield College, which is where I got my BA. I got a degree in creative writing. I studied most closely with a poet named Lex Runciman and he was really important to me. And from there, I went to Iowa, the Writers’ Workshop to get my MFA. And I worked with Cole Swensen and James Galvin and Robert Hass and Emily Wilson. They’re all wonderful poets.  

And from there, realizing that I wasn’t going to get a job when I graduated because I, at that point, didn’t really know anything about getting a job teaching. I’d gone straight from undergrad to Iowa, then I went to law school straight from Iowa, to Harvard, and there I was, I think, getting out of a creative writing degree plan which was really helpful for me because I had taken a lot of creative writing workshops when I was at Harvard, but having that not be everything I was doing in school, it helped me break up my focus a little bit. And that was a time where it felt like I learned a lot? You know, I wonder if it’s a little arrogant to say I learned a lot, but it felt like I learned a lot. I worked with Jorie Graham really closely.  She was and is fantastic. I think everybody should be reading her poetry all the time. She was really kind and helpful to me. That was where I started writing the poems that ended up being in my first book. After I got my JD, I didn’t go to school for a year, then I went back to the University of Iowa, and ended up getting a master’s in English literature: that was the last graduate degree I got. But yeah, those were the institutions I worked at. Those were the people I worked with.  

I want to go back a little bit to some of your artistic materials now, especially in relation to biblical narrative. I was reading those sequences where you sit with these characters from all over the country in heaven, and sometimes I’m laughing, then I’m dead serious. I was just trying to understand, how did you arrive at this marvelous thinking?  

I think that the way that poetry works is however it starts.  The beginning of a poem always feels a little miraculous; however it starts, you’ve got a little engine going, and you just follow that engine, wherever it wants to go. You let the poem reveal itself as you’re working—one of the great things about having a sequence or a series is maybe a better word for it. When I was writing, Sometimes I Never Suffered and I was dealing with thinking about heaven as, you know, a location, and location works a lot like a form. If I’ve got a location and I’ve got circumstances, I know where I’m going to be once the poem has started, and so I can work within those circumstances. Having those, having that bit of confinement, ends up generating a lot of freedom. Within those parameters, one feels as if one can say anything.   

I felt like in order to make this sequence work, because I was dealing with a character—Jim Limber, who essentially disappears from history as a child, there are a few traces after, but I kind of had to imagine his death, and I have no authority over anything to do with Jim Limber at any point. So, I thought that the only way to honestly do it, or at least the way that worked for me was to imagine having some—I think I believe in a multiverse? But this was before… I mean, it wasn’t before Marvel movies, but I wasn’t thinking about Marvel, it was before that became a thing. [laughter] But, having some belief in a multiverse.  I thought that a logical extension of that would be that there would be a multi-heaven. And so technically, every Jim Liber speaking in that book is a different one, from a different life, in a different heaven. And that gave me a lot of freedom to say a lot of different things, imagining certain base circumstances. And so having set up those parameters—the multi-heaven—knowing a bit about this person’s life, but not really knowing anything after their childhood, it’s just like, when I was talking about imagining the interiority of an angel, you have certain rules according to which you operate and you imagine, forward from those rules. 

Beautiful. Thank you, Shane. Thank you. I want you to read—speaking about angels and interiority—I wanted you to read this poem that cracks me up so much… but fills me with a kind of horror too, called “The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Lives of Dogs and of People.” 

Great, thank you. This was I think this was the second “Hastily Assembled Angel” poem I wrote [clears throat].  

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Lives of Dogs and of People.  

The hastily assembled angel wanders
And has wandered through centuries of cities
And countries and millennia of cities
And countries and of women and of men there’s

No hurry now though he was hurriedly  
Once brought to being and bears the scars of that 
Though slowly in the Earth though slowly he  
Eventually began to wonder what  
The hurry had been for and if he could  
Have been a better angel or have done  
Better the job he did if once  
They’d made him the other angels had allowed  

Him to meet God for he has been uncertain  
As people are uncertain, he has nev- 
er been as certain as dogs are who sniff  
The wind that moves the curtain and see behind the curtain

I want to ask you about your relationship to time. Because in your poems, it seems as if you’re always sidestepping time, that you refuse to treat it, and I mean I may be wrong in this, but it’s almost as if you refuse to accept that 1000 years ago is so vastly different from now, you know? You treat history as this one long room of interlinked rooms…

Well, human history isn’t all that long. Particularly with regard to recorded history and history of which we can have any real sense; that’s a pretty short stretch of time. And, you know when I first fell in love with poetry was with Sylvia Plath, etc., but when I first found a body of poetry that I really loved, it was through this book called The Silver Poets of the 16th Century, it was an Everyman Library book, and it had like, Walter Raleigh, etc. And it you know… it was these poets from, like, 400 years prior, and I just really, really love that stuff; it really electrified me, you know… as the Plath-head. And since I spent so much of my time thinking about that time period, and fell in love with medieval poetry and 17th century poetry, that was where my head was for a long time. And that’s, you know, 400-500 or so, [maybe] 600 years previously. And so, if the thing that I’m trying to make today has roots—of which I’m very conscious—its primary roots are in, you know, a time period 400-500 years ago, but then, you know, other roots are thousands of years ago, then it’s hard to think of history… it’s hard to think of something that happened in the mid-19th century as very long ago. One way to think about it is, you know, the [2024] presidential candidates, both of whom are 80 or about, if you think about it, and consider the age of America, they have been alive for a third of the time that America has existed. It’s 240 years old. They’re eighty years old. So, history is not, it’s just not that long.  

I want you to talk to us—and hopefully to the young poets who may be watching this— about… not so much just crossing genres, but finding expression in a different genre. The kind of poetry you write is crystal. Everything is distilled into one sentence; a lifetime can be contained in the sentence. But the whole point of memoir is to spell it out and dance for, like, ten chapters. So how did you manage that?  

I did end up thinking of the memoir as just a very large form. When I was putting together a proposal for the book and thinking about how long it should be, and I didn’t know anything about prose, really. I thought 250 pages made sense. And if you look at the text itself, count the pages, it is 250 pages. And the reason it is 250 pages is I calculate—I used Google to calculate how many words go into 250 pages and 60,000 words. So, when we did the proposal, I said it’s gonna be 60,000 words long. And then I figured out how many days—how many words I would have to write per day to get to 60,000 words, I wrote that many words a day, when I got to 60,000 words, that was the end of the book, you know. But the thing about that is, it wasn’t arbitrary! I could see 60,000 in the distance, and I knew how much time I had to get there, and so had to write my way to that end. And so, it helped a lot, I think, thinking of it as a very, very large form. But because I’m not using meter or rhyme, I’m not using a pre-established form, the only way that I could really make it make sense to me, was just word count.  

And what I was writing, I think the subject matter is, to some extent, I suppose, inherently dramatic. And another thing I found extremely useful was not really thinking about the subject matter—even though the subject matter would insist upon making its presence known in my life—my chief concern was the language itself. My chief concern was trying to make it sound as good as I could make it sound, trying to make it minimally acceptable to me. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I have some special prose-writing skill. But I did want to write prose that would sound like my own prose. I did want a voice that could modulate from a bunch of different registers, sometimes be very straightforward, sometimes be oblique and cover a lot of space between those two points. And so yeah, I think, just because I didn’t have again, the form to rely on having a sense of how long it could be, or should be or was going to be, and thinking about the language itself. Those were useful in helping me make a transition from the kind of poetry I write to the kind of prose that I wanted to write. 

You said something about the subject matter being a little dramatic, but I know that you don’t mean dramatic like a soap opera, you mean drama, as in containing tragedy, or comedy or a deep vault of feelings… In your poems, which I’ve read for years, the emotion of that drama is always there. But the demand of poetry, the kind of poetry you write, says that it doesn’t have to bubble up to the surface in comprehensible ways. I can read, I can just read these beautiful, crystalline, 12 lines, and the emotion of the drama will enter me, and I don’t need the details of this narrative. But in memoir, I mean, there is no way around that… So, I wanted you to talk about handling, similarly, traumatic subject matter, in poetry form and in prose form, in terms of clarity. 

Well, with poetry, I feel like a lot of what one is doing is opening up spaces for readers to fill in. You’re giving them a certain shape, I suppose. And you’re even giving them details that point in certain directions. But hopefully, you’re not closing off too many options. I think what a successful poem does is it is never finally resolvable. You can read a poem, fall in love with it, read it again—over and over again—over the course of a decade, and still find new things in it, find new ways of thinking about it. Because a poem is a machine for making thinking, but maybe more specifically, a machine for making sort of speculation, a machine for opening up space. What happens in prose, I think, and again, I’m no expert—I don’t know anything about prose—but it feels like it opens up spaces, but then the prose writer has an obligation to fill in those spaces. Whereas, as I said, the poet leaves those spaces for the reader to fill in. And so… being aware that I had… that it wasn’t going to work. I mean, I could write the same thing in poetry, but where it’s 250 pages in prose, in poetry that would be a fifth of that… less? I mean, 50 pages is really long, I don’t know that I would need that much space to do it [Laughs.]. Maybe you could do it in a couple pages. And so, your prose reader doesn’t come to a prose book for that; there’s a degree of information they want, along with, hopefully, a language-based aesthetic experience.  

And, again, I was focusing on the language, because that’s where my particular concern is, but I didn’t want the reader to ever feel like they just had utterly no idea what was going on. The sentences were often enough complicated in a way that I think a reader could get lost in them; and to some extent, I wanted to make it possible for a reader to get lost in them. But I didn’t want a reader to ever be irrevocably lost—to get lost and just say, “I cannot do this text at all.” And having that in mind, I’m sure that there are some readers who have felt that way about it, that they can’t get to wherever it is that they’re going, but I tried to make it understandable. I tried to ground it in lived details. I tried to honor what I believe, [or] how I believe memory works. You know, I tried to acknowledge the many things that I didn’t remember. One notices if they read it, you know, that there’s very, very little dialogue. And that’s because I don’t pretend to remember conversations very well. You know, the ones that are in there are ones I did remember, but you know, how many conversations from one’s childhood does one remember clearly enough to honestly represent them? So yeah. 

I thought I might ask you to read this wonderful poem, called “Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief,” where some of that magical way you do this thing comes to the fore. 

Thank you. Yeah, I wrote a series of poems about this. And this was one of the first ones. 

“Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief” 

A gift that disappears as it is given  
A gift from whom whenever they give you anything,  
You have to ask them where they got it from 
A gift that disappears and takes you with it 

A gift for which you will not be forgiven 
Whether you give it or receive it when  
My mother’s parents kidnapped me my grand-
mother said I would see my father  

Again in a few days and the big wheel he  
Had given me the gift  
She gave me then and then for thirteen years 
I didn’t you must close your eyes for the gift 
After you open it it’s stolen but it wasn’t stolen  
For you no one will give you who you are 

Thank you. Talk to me about this poem, because for the longest time, it just deeply moved me. 

Thank you. Well, I was trying to figure out, I think, when I wrote it, how am I going to write about having been kidnapped? It was… having been kidnapped, I guess, it’s something that you’re—not I guess that I was kidnapped, but the second part [Laughs.] I guess—it’s something that I guess… one is aware of one’s whole life, sort of. But I was raised by the people who kidnapped me. And it’s a kind of dual consciousness where you’re living your everyday life, and you don’t really think about it. And it wasn’t until I was in my mid-40s that I really realized or really thought about it — I didn’t even use the word before. But not until hearing my father describe it, realizing that I had been taken, did I realize what it meant. And when that happened, I thought that I really had to figure out how to write about it. And when I was writing that poem, you know, there’s some poems that you write, and they happen very quickly. And you feel satisfied with them, again, fairly quickly; some poems that you write, they take forever and forever, and that one was one that just seemed to take forever, to get it to a space where I felt okay with it.  

But I think that there are ways in which the poem structurally follows my efforts to figure out what it means to be kidnapped. That’s why it’s repetitive in a particular way. I think that it is because I’m sort of exploring what that means. And it’s not — because it’s a thing that one sort of, or at least I, sort of realized, over the course of my adult life, but then the full weight of it, I didn’t really realize until I was, again, mid-40s. It’s something that… I knew was a big thing? But also, something that I didn’t have the language for yet, or the way of thinking to access it or recognize its bigness. So, the poem is trying to figure out how to do that.  

Who are the poets who help you do what you do? I guess I’m asking about influences now. Are they always changing? 

I think they are always changing. And…that’s good and bad, maybe. Because when you’re taking in different influences, and you’re finding what you’re doing itself is changing, you can see what you had done before kind of receding, and you don’t want to let it go. So, who I am lately, I’ve been really heavily influenced by mid-century American poets—Robert Lowell, and those folks—and then poets who have taken their own work, partly out of that work, like Geoffrey Hill and so on. But also, I’ve always been thinking about Jorie Graham, I always think about Jorie. And most recently, I’ve been thinking about Susan Howe a lot. Those are poets — Howe and Graham especially — who have been with me for a really, really long time. And lately I’ve been trying, I think, to figure out how exactly to make their influence fit in with these mid-century poets and [Geoffrey] Hill, that have been on my mind a lot for some years.  

And who helps me? Music is important to me. And I think it has a big influence on what I’m trying to do. Contemporary composers like Michael Hirsch and Steve Elcock. Near-contemporary composers like Gloria Coates and George Walker, both of whom died pretty recently. Walker especially; he’s the first Black classical composer to win a Pulitzer Prize and it happened much later than one might think. I think it was the mid-90s that it happened. His work is wonderful, and it’s still not as recognized as it should be. His music is on my mind a lot, but maybe in the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about Gloria Coates a lot too. I would say that those poets and the music I listen to have been the folks and things that have gotten me trying to work in whatever way it is that I’m trying to work now.  

For a young poet who feels that they are living in a constrained world, and feel as if they have no teachers, that they don’t know how to navigate their way forward, what is your advice? 

I know that feeling and I think it can feel like it’s a bad thing. You can feel like there’s nobody to guide me through whatever it is that I’m trying to do. But I could not be more grateful that in large measure, I had to guide myself—at least at the beginning, you know. I met some teachers in high school who were really important to me, I met teachers at community college who were really important to me. But a lot of what I did was really reading from book to book, you know? I’d read one book, it would refer to some other book and I’d read the other book— and just reading my way across, again, a canon that I was discovering and constructing as one’s encounters with the cannon usually are. I guess I would say, what resulted from that is the kind of poetry — for good or ill — that I write, which is a kind of poetry where I’m trying to incorporate the English tradition that I understand, so that I’m trying to bring everything from. As I said, Raleigh and Spenser were huge for me at the beginning, relatively early on, but also I really love like Susan Howe, and I really love Jorie Graham. I’m trying to make a poetry that incorporates all of that. And one would think that they’re fairly far away, but I think it’s possible to put it all together—and I’ve always been trying to put all that stuff together. And I think that if I had found particular teachers who had pretty strident views, as people in the world of poetry and in all arts tend to do, they might have encouraged me to go in one direction and discouraged me from going in a different one. And so, I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to choose them all. So, I would say, as discouraging as that can feel, it’s also a great gift. And that means that the choice is entirely up to you. And, you know, libraries are full of books. And all you have to do is… really all you have to do this is gonna sound like I’m simplifying things. [Laughs.] Really, all you have to do is grab one. Go to the poetry section and grab a book. I know that sounds too simple, but I’ll tell you what. When I was first starting to try to figure out how to read, I got this book, and it was about the image of Native Americans in the minds of Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. The book was a remaindered book; I got it at an outlet mall. It just seemed interesting. I started reading and I thought, oh, I am not equipped for this. I need to read Spenser in Montaigne and Shakespeare. So… I read everything by Spenser and Montaigne and Shakespeare, which was huge! Those texts are so foundational in a lot of ways. But that’s, you know, for lack of a better term, that’s “providence,” I suppose. You use a book to get you to the next book, and you don’t need anybody to do that for you. I just went to an outlet mall, I just grabbed that book, it pointed to other books, I got those books, you know, and all those books point to other books. You can do this all, you can totally do it yourself. 

One more question on behalf of the young people: any connection between skating and poetry? 

Yeah, you know, there was this tweet the other day, and I think it’s by a prose writer, and he was wondering, like, “why are there no skaters who are poets?” And I’m like what are you talking about? I mean, I’m one. That doesn’t mean… like why would he have heard of me? [Laughs.] But nonetheless, because he phrased it in this way that made it seem like there was somehow some sort of necessary disconnect, I thought, well, no. But, I guess there’s a way in which it’s sort of hard for me to think about the connection, because these are both things that I started young—skateboarding when I was 12; and I started writing poetry when I was 15. And so, I was really young, when I started doing both of these things. And I did, in a weird way… think of them as almost opposite pursuits. When I was skateboarding, I was out using my body, and it’s pretty good to not think that hard if you can manage it. When I was writing poetry, I was thinking… TS Eliot said this thing that “poetry is not an expression of emotion, it’s an escape from emotion.” And people are like, oh, he’s a robot, he doesn’t have any feelings. That’s not what that means at all. It means that when you’re making the thing, you’re not caught up in those feelings. You’re allowing your mind to roam, and the feelings will express themselves, but not by a conscious effort on your part. A conscious effort on your part will disable the poem or disarm it. And so, I tended to think of those two things as separate, even though they’re actually… fairly similar insofar as you’re trying to let things happen without forcing things to happen. I think that skateboarding is a sport that’s very expressive; it’s not determined by rules so much as it’s determined by—to some extent—trends. And I still follow those trends! I’m still aware, broadly speaking, of what’s going on. Poetry kind of happens the same way, where a lot of what you see in poetry is determined by what the trend at the time is. That’s not how it should be. You [should] make your own thing. But it is very similar in that. 

I’m going to ask you to read one more poem to us. Thank you so much, Shane. This has been wonderful. This is “Jim Limber on the Peace Which Passeth all Understanding.” 

Thank you. So, you know how, when you’re writing a poem, you always — I mean, I always— worry.  This was the one that I worried sounded too much like Louise Glück. In retrospect, I don’t think it really sounds anything like Louise,  but when I was writing, I was like, oh, this is this is a Louise Glück one. She’s so important to my thinking about poetry.  

“Jim Limber on the Peace Which Passeth all Understanding.” 

First thing I saw that heartened me in Heaven  
Was a dead field first thing beyond the gates 
I might have thought if I had seen when I  
Was still alive a field in such a state 
I might have wondered whether it had ever  
Been cultivated whether Negroes had  
Worked it and if I had I might have wondered  
How many died before it got so bad 
How many Negroes did it take for the field  
To die the deaths of Negroes being the life  
And death of the Earth I might have asked the dirt 
I might have asked the limp brown grass but there was noth- 
ing human in the field I had never seen that  
Before death with no people in it 

Thank you. How wonderful—that was great!  

Thank you, thank you so much! 

Read more in this issue: Critical Essay | Poems | Writing Prompt

---

Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. His chapbook Painter of Water was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets series from Akashic Books, and his poem “Across the Sea: A Sequence” won the 2020 Narrative Prize. Adesina has received fellowships and support from Poets House, New York, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Norman Mailer Center, and he was the 2019–20 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, where he taught a poetry class called Song of the Human. He has been published in Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.