The Lightning Room with Ali Shapiro
[Simon Jacobs / October 15th, 2012 / Interviews / Tags: Ali Shapiro]In our July issue, six scintillating poems by Ali Shapiro. Read on, for bursts.
1. When I read “If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have To Miss You So Much,†I think of it being read to an audience who cheers at every burn. What’s your process like? How did you put all of these pieces together?
I wrote that poem start to finish during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I’d spent most of the residency writing quiet, cozy nature poems in my quiet, cozy writing studio, which felt good, at first; it was certainly a welcome respite from what I’d been doing before the residency, which was boomeranging around New England in my station wagon, blasting country radio and burning bridges with various exes and accumulating speeding tickets.
But after a few weeks of quiet coziness, I started to get restless, impatient. I wanted to blast country radio, but that would’ve disturbed the other residents. I wanted to leave, but that would’ve been a waste of a residency. So being stuck in that quiet, cozy studio forced me to focus that restless, impatient energy into a poem instead of another angsty road trip. And I allowed myself to just jam those pieces together more recklessly than I usually do, because what I wanted to capture wasn’t a crafted, calculated feeling—it was that restless stuck-ness, the engine revving in neutral, the exhilarated-exhausted assertive-uncertain top-volume feeling of wanting very badly to simultaneously leave and stay.
2. Those bottles you emptied—had one contained a genie, what would you have wished for?
To remember nothing. Then to have everything back. Duh. And/or to have a very large sea creature as a pet.
3. If your body was a road, which road would you be?
I-90 West. But without all those Wall Drug billboards in South Dakota.
4. Your first three poems are all pulling away, while the second three are close as they come. How do these two relate?
In terms of content, you’re absolutely right—the porn sonnets are very intimate, while the “leaving” poems are about, well, leaving. For me, though, the “leaving” poems are actually much more up-close and vulnerable, because they’re so unfiltered, both formally and emotionally speaking. The porn sonnets, on the other hand, are filtered through the demands of the sonnet form and the varied voices of their speakers.
Speaking of speakers, I think we’re overly concerned with maintaining the alleged separation between “speaker” and “poet” when we talk about poetry. It’s like this huge insult to assume or suggest that the “I†in a first-person poem—especially a first-person lovepoem—might have anything to do with the actual person who wrote it. And while I understand the urge to discourage artless, embarrassing hyperconfessionalism, my favorite love poems are honest and wry and dirty and brave, and feel as though they’ve come from an “I†who is not just a sterile “speaker†but an actual person with a real, raw heart. For me as a reader, conflating the poet with the “I†is a great compliment. It means I believe the poem.
I hope my “leaving†poems are believable in this way—real, raw, etc, without being embarrassing.** And I hope the porn sonnets are unbelievable, too intellectualized and distant and formally contrived to approximate the supposed “closeness†of their sexy subject matter. Because that’s what porn is, in a way—closeness filtered through technology and anonymity, experience controlled by camera angles, desire broken down into super-specific categories and fetishes.
Not that I’m anti-porn. Porn is awesome! But it’s also weird and intense and fascinating enough to merit questioning, rather than blind acceptance and consumption.
**Though I’ll admit I’m also interested in toeing that line, in writing a poem that highlights the helpless universality of human emotion by asymptotically approaching cliché—i.e., a poem that works like a good country song…
5. When do you miss mystery the most?
When I’m watching porn. I totally overthink it now. And I can’t stop hearing iambic pentameter in all that thrusting and moaning.
6. What was the last camera you looked in the eye?
That little beady camera-eye at the top of my laptop screen. But my dog kept looking away. So our PhotoBooth self-portraits came out kinda uneven.
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