{an interview with poet shane mccrae, whose newest collection, FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS, will be published by factory hollow press next month. pre-order it here}
when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?
I don’t know that I have an ideal reader—which, I know, isn’t an answer to the question, but is maybe parallel to an answer, maybe a way into answering. I’ve always felt a little disingenuous saying that I write for myself, although I do—the problem, I think, is in the word for. It suggests the giving of a gift. I write because I can’t not write, because I wouldn’t know how to be if I didn’t write, and in that sense I write for myself—but I write for myself in the same way that I breathe for myself.
That said, I do want people to read what I write; I hope they will. And I especially hope people might find what I have written useful. But I’ve discovered there is no way to know, really, that anyone has ever read a word one has written. And I still have doubts that anyone has ever read anything of mine. I’m fairly confident people have heard things I’ve written, since I’ve done readings, but even then it’s hard to be sure.
how do you use poetry as a practice for spiritual exploration, discipline, or growth? can you offer any practical advice or surefire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their spiritual discipline?
I have long since deluded myself into believing that I think best when I’m writing. Writing, the act itself, does, I think, help the mind to be both more receptive and more generative, and I think that is an ideal way for the mind to be—it is ideal for the mind to be more—when thinking about God. So, as far as advice goes, I would say: It helps one to write well if one can get oneself out of the way; and getting oneself out of the way helps one to think about God (I’m God-centric; I don’t mean to exclude any other sort of spiritual practice by talking in that way, however—that’s just the only way I know how to honestly talk about such things). In other words, writing is itself a spiritual practice. Write.
But, you know, that’s my particular prejudice and flaw: I am often in a more prayerful state of mind when writing than I’m in when praying.
when you approach your desk, journal, computer—wherever it is you tend to create—what are some of the processes you use? what’s going through your mind? tell us about your habits of writing, no matter how quirky, mundane, strange, or small.
Ah! But I have no habits, or try to have none. I have consciously attempted to erase whatever writing habits I had. Habits, in my own experience, have been consistently dangerous—the fulfillment of a writing ritual can begin to seem like writing itself, and take writing’s place.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
The best advice I can give, which I suspect is advice too painful to follow, is this: Never stop revising. Never abandon a poem/never let a poem abandon you (if you can help it). Find a space somewhere in your mind or heart or fingertips or hair in which to store your poems, keeping them open there, suspended—finished, perhaps, but not closed. Henry James once said something like, “A writer is someone upon whom nothing should be lost.” I’m sure that’s a terrible paraphrase. But I’ve for years taken that to mean one should always keep one’s mind open to the possibility of writing, one should always be available—and a corollary to actually doing this is that one always keeps one’s poems open.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
Reading others is more important than you have been led to believe, even if you have been led to believe it is the most important thing a writer can possibly do.
would you like to share a poem you’re working on or have recently finished and comment on how it was written in light of the comments above? if so, please do so below…
This poem is the final poem in my fourth book, The Animal Too Big to Kill (forthcoming from Persea Books), and is, in some ways, a revision of a longer poem near the beginning of the book. In that other poem, I talk about how I’m going to try to become a vegan; in this poem, I talk about how I don’t yet have the money to be a vegan—it’s hard to be particular at the food bank. This poem reuses and re-frames language from the beginning of that longer poem as its own beginning, but it moves in a different direction. And that language was still available in my mind, in part, because I kept that longer poem open to revision.
WHO PAYS
Lord I have eaten and I don’t
Want to and have to
anyway / Sometimes because I can’t afford to eat
According to my conscience animals
Lord many times my weight
in animals in the past / But since I started
eating animals again it hasn’t been that much
I’m sure it hasn’t been that much
Maybe if all the meat I’ve eaten since I started
eating animals again were piled and weighed
It would weigh as much as maybe if my leg were cut off
Below the knee the calf the shin the foot
Were laid in a scale opposite the meat
Maybe the scales would balance
+++++
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule, Blood, Forgiveness Forgiveness (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press), The Animal Too Big to Kill (forthcoming from Persea Books), and three chapbooks. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Fence, Pleiades, LIT, and elsewhere, and he has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Oberlin College and in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University.