Latest Shane McCrae Quotes from Interviews

• I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Poet, Interest

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think that the moment we're living in offers the best opportunity we've had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. The only problem there is that a lot of the time these are being talked about in confessional modes.

  Shane McCrae

  Opportunity, Thinking, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

• I definitely notice the absence of character in most poetry, which is not so say that I'm an innovator in that regard. Character-based poems are not weird or new by any stretch but they feel strange and new because the atmosphere is one in which no one does that. People always talk about, and with good reason, poetry's unpopularity. When people say that they forget or they brush aside the fact that in the middle part of the last century poetry was immensely popular. Dylan Thomas was basically a rock star; so was Anne Sexton.

  Shane McCrae

  Character, People, Atmosphere

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

  Shane McCrae

  Mean, Kids, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.

  Shane McCrae

  Fall, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them.

  Shane McCrae

  Thinking, People, Political

  Source: therumpus.net

• I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

  Shane McCrae

  Real, Book, Struggle

  Source: therumpus.net

• Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.

  Shane McCrae

  Memories, Struggle, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• That's a fairly Wordsworthian way to look at things! But yeah, actually - part of the poet's work, I think, is to maintain or reintroduce the imaginative capacity of their earlier self while nonetheless maturing. And I do think the more successful the poet is at this particular thing, the greater their achievement as a poet.

  Shane McCrae

  Successful, Thinking, Achievement

  Source: therumpus.net

• I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language.

  Shane McCrae

  Thinking, Trying, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

• If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse."

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Thinking, Musical

  Source: therumpus.net

• I believe rhythmic sensibility is always a product and extension of language, defined broadly, among other things. But it is an immediate product and extension - no time elapses between the exposure to language and the creation of rhythmic sensibility.

  Shane McCrae

  Believe, Language, Creation

  Source: therumpus.net

• A white noise app wouldn't work for me - I would be too distracted by the non-white noise noises I could still hear, even more distracted than i would otherwise be. So I have to just accept the regular noises.

  Shane McCrae

  White, Would Be, Noise

  Source: therumpus.net

• I was just thinking about how my grandparents, who raised me, would be considered "white trash," whatever that means - mostly for being racists, I'd say. And how, as a child, I wanted to be like them, and identified with them culturally.

  Shane McCrae

  Children, Mean, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I like having a phrase lying around to get poems started. It's like having a key.

  Shane McCrae

  Lying, Keys, Phrases

  Source: therumpus.net

• I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Brain, Easier

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think about the body kind of all the time, being as how I'm really uncomfortable in mine.

  Shane McCrae

  Thinking, Body, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

• I just can't write and listen to music at the same time.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Listening To Music

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think I cause a lot of headaches for editors - it's impossible to keep up with the ridiculous amount of changes I make.

  Shane McCrae

  Thinking, Editors, Causes

  Source: therumpus.net

• I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Trying, Able

  Source: therumpus.net

• I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.

  Shane McCrae

  Book, Years, Done

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm always glad that other people are way smarter about my poems than I am.

  Shane McCrae

  People, Way, Glad

  Source: therumpus.net

• I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Thinking, Listening

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't know that I find either aspect of Jesus more interesting than the other, although maybe I think about the God one more.

  Shane McCrae

  Jesus, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: therumpus.net

• I do believe in Jesus as wholly God and wholly human, and I believe the human part was human.

  Shane McCrae

  Jesus, Believe, I Believe

  Source: therumpus.net

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