Aaron Shurin’s Elixir: New and Selected Poems, out now from Nightboat—and which follows his Unbound and The Blue Absolute—collects his work at the forefront of publishing, politics, and poetics. From the Gay Poets collective and the Gay Liberation movement, through the San Francisco circles Shurin has belonged to throughout his life (and in which he’s been referred to, by Kevin Killian, as a “gay shaman”), here is “a combination of distilled essences found nowhere else in American poetry” (Brian Teare).
The themes are the same throughout: the pulse of a historical lineage, from Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, his beloved mentors, to Language Writing and New Narrative; the appearance of the prose poem, that amalgam of lyricism, atmosphere, and aphorism; and an insistence on the local.
We discuss those themes, and others, in our conversation below.
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: Elixir is such a comprehensive collection—it includes over five decades of work. What was the process of putting it together?
Aaron Shurin: It was a lengthy process for sure, I spent about two years reading through all my work and learning HOW to read it. Going back fifty years I had to adopt a different kind of critical intelligence: I had to love myself! What I mean by that is I had to meet the work on its own terms, in an appropriate historical frame. I tried to see how the poems reverberated in their immediate historical context, how they met the linguistic or thematic needs of their time. I was nervous about how the early poems might be read by a contemporary reader, and dived into the first books swinging a machete. Then I was talking to my friend Micah about this process and he said, “You’re including ‘Woman on Fire’ aren’t you?” But I had already decapitated that poem. I went home and read through the whole poem again and was completely charmed. Now there was no way I was going to leave it out!!! I huddled with myself and gave it a thumbs up. It would now be the first of the “Selected” section of Elixir, from which the rest of my work would grow.
After that I just gobbled up my own work, looking for poems that broke through chronology. I tried to find a balance between short and long poems and also follow the rule, championed by Brian Teare [author of the introduction], that there wouldn’t be excerpts from long poems, just the poem complete. Hence, “Woman on Fire,” “Multiple Heart,” “City of Men,” “Elsewhere,” “Into Distances,” “Human Immune,” and “Shiver” appear unedited.
I looked for poems that had the integrity and strength to form their own forms, and push me out of the way, poems that were interesting and/or bold even if the prosody was less informed than in later poems. The book covered a lot of years and I had to be flexible and kind to myself. It was a grace to give myself permission to be myself. You can see me trying various things as I find my way through the work, through the years. Finally, if there is a style there, it’s exactly where I have most deliberately stepped aside and followed my star. In the end I came to understand that the book, with its long and shorts, its circling pigeons, its twirling drag queens and streaking fog was not about me but was really and simply an expression of my love for poetry.
Dante Silva: In the poem “Memorial Day,” one of several new poems, there’s an “impassioned speech to the pigeons.” It’s an image of desperate conversation, intimate and absurd (and delightful). How did you write that poem?
Aaron Shurin: That little poem came rather quickly, but the interesting part, in compositional terms, is the ending. I see a lot of birds from my apartment and I’m always amazed how pigeons fly, turning together simultaneously, wheeling in fluttery arcs and waves across the sky in absolute unison. They do this rapidly and with great showmanship. It doesn’t always look like they’re going somewhere. With their nervous swooshes, and jittery turns, they may be the best dancers in the sky! I watch them all the time and they are dancing all the time. They never fly a straight line. I guess you could say I was already in conversation with the pigeons, so it wasn’t so odd to be in conversation with them in this poem. I just picked up the thread. But it was the last line that really posed an interesting problem. As I wrote it—”you are written and erased”—I thought to myself, wait, that’s not how I feel, I don’t want to say that, I’m not that glum. Don’t write that! But I couldn’t fight it off, that’s how it wanted to be written. Period. (well, no period) and what I discovered was this: as personal expression the phrase was rather unhappy, but the poem was drawing on meaning larger than my personal expression. When you read it it has philosophical integrity, an incontrovertible truth beyond me (especially augmented by its missing period). I’m glad I had the sense to follow the poem; the dark silence of its disappearing subject (its period) supercedes my own ups and downs. I am the first erased.
Dante Silva: There’s a poem from The Night Sun (1976), “The Twenty-Ninth Bather,” which references Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” You write—
each morning
real casual
I folded my clothes into a gym locker
and before dressing, with studied
aimlessness brushed — by knee, or arm, or back — Joe Zalinsky’s
neighborly pink cock
Your work has, since The Night Sun, insisted on the conflation of language and embodiment. Is there a politics to that conflation?
Aaron Shurin: My 29th bather is an exact mirror of Whitman’s except in one important aspect: in his, Whitman switches gender and poses as a woman. The woman watches the men bathe and frolic in the water, until, at the final frame, we are told “they do not think whom they souse with spray.” That’s the worst gender impersonation in all of Whitman, and it is one among many. H. Rider Haggard’s drag queen fantasies, Collette’s tomboy traversals, Proust’s Albertine transposition are all inheritors of Whitman’s quickchange artistry. I’m happy to say I break that mold, and deliberately, as early as in “Woman on Fire”—which is at the very beginning—I’m writing about drag and gender impersonation.
And there is certainly politics behind it. In all the poems from The Night Sun on, which is all the poems, gender is loosened, and soon it is set free from the male/female dichotomy. It is mutable. Subsequent to gender my work flips person, tense, agreement, a lot of grammatical straight jackets. I might say there is a revolution inside of grammar.What else is awakened under the spray of that 29th bather?
Dante Silva: Whitman is one of your “ancestors.” Who are the others?
Aaron Shurin: So many ancestors: Homer, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Coleridge, John Keats, Gustave Flaubert, Chopin, Proust, Colette, Puccini, Edith Sitwell, H.D., H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Edward Field, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Aretha Franklin, Montserrat Caballé.