Ask The Author: Danielle Shutt
[J. Bradley / November 18th, 2011 / Interviews ]Danielle Shutt’s “Narcotic Winter” is an addition to our September Issue. Danielle speaks with us here about cocaine, dead bodies, and angels.
1. If someone offered you cocaine on the blade of a knife, would you accept?
Nah. I have a thing about sharp objects being near my face. Truth is, cocaine scares me. “Narcotic Winter” is a sort of worst-case scenario poem about two people close to me who are in recovery from addiction. When they were using, there came a point where I started to expect The Phone Call. So, I think the poem came from preemptive grief—needing to spell out the dread and fear I felt at the time.
2. Why are poets so obsessed with dead bodies?
Because we’ll each become one. I just pulled up some recent drafts to see if I could argue against this obsession, but sure enough: there’s death, dying, and bodies in nearly all of them. Part of that impulse may come from my fascination with how things work—in which case I think bodies would be a natural first place for poets to go … And not necessarily because so many of us tend toward hypochondriasis. However, I’ve started to notice that many of the poems I write also reanimate dead things and people. It’s not exactly zombie poetry, but I think I’m driven to insist upon possibility against the odds, especially with something non-negotiable like death. I have fun moving from how things work to how things could work if my cat intervened/that banana hadn’t been overripe/we’d already figured out time travel/a goldfish was swimming around inside my head.
3. What would you do with the body?
Try to reason with it.
4. Who would star in the movie adaptation of “Narcotic Winter”?
My friend and fellow poet, Tim Greenup of Omaha, NE. He has the right build for wings, and I think he’d be more agreeable than most if asked to flail around in snow for several hours. I don’t think he’d be the guy who eventually snaps and overturns the craft services table.
5. What would happen if you stepped on an angel?
I grew up in Lynchburg, VA (home to the late Jerry Falwell and Liberty University). When I try to answer this question, all I can hear is the teacher from my short stint in Vacation Bible School, who pulled me aside one day and asked, “Do you know what a smartass is?”
6. What would you cut the cocaine with so an angel could do it?
Glitter.
Her answers to numbers 3 and 6 are low-key hilarious as shit.
There’s a lot of that low-key humor in her poetry, too. Nice to see it translated to the interview.
[...] “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was [...]