Well, the dog needs bossing, also the baseball practice (batting balls) and the plumber on the copper pipes (he looks like a man who enjoys a good banging) and the general lack of cheese, shredded. Suddenly there is a rash of either lost cell phones beneath couch cushions or fleeing blackbirds on wing and car doors slamming all around our block and I think to myself this is it, they are coming to take me away. I hold my breath waiting for my garage door to rattle open, loose teeth of nuts and bolts falling, wondering how I am going to get at my toothbrush now that my illicit lover has locked herself into the bathroom (they do this, eventually). But then the government truck farts and rumbles off, there must have been another opportunity at the Walmart across the road. I want to be arrested so that I can read books of poetry, right through from the beginning to the end.

Example, Predatory, by Glenn Shaheen. (It had another more melodramatic title, Shaheen told me, but I forget the exact. It was a beery evening. [I think])

This book is paranoid. Or maybe just ill that way with perception:

All night, a howl

outside the window. All night an animal

is sick.

("Feral Cats")

Look, I have to drive off to the cafe to buy some cat food, or fetch my grandfather from judo, or this very book of poetry lands on the lawn covered in blood. I unfold it, and out fall foaming KILLING MACHINE and THE PAGE ON WHICH THE SPINE IS BROKEN, MONSTROUS, SUDDENLY, A BOTTOMLESS PIT, black widow spiders, PREDATORY, and ACCIDENTAL INJURY AND THOSE WHO ARE LIABLE.

By the middle of the night the grass is still red because these are all titles from the book, Predatory, except for the black widows, I just added that for effect. But look at all the paranoia and the violence and the blood, I mentioned the blood. I like a book to know itself and be a thing. This book is a violent machine mirror thing and you can see CNN inside it, but also the way CNN is your spleen, you know? Like everything that revolts your brain only works because your brain has to go, yes, there's a little bit of me-cell there, a little CNN inside all our acronyms, no matter the AKAs we wear most every day. We asked for this, Shaheen is saying:

I've forgotten who I am a few times.

From surgery, from drugs.

("Dementia Unit")

We've been sucked

into the latest story in the great saga of fire.

("Introducing Love into the Fragile Texas Ecosystem")

One time Shaheen said he sent this book out either 200 or 1,000 times. Wait, it had to be 200. Yeh, I bet it was 200 but costs like $1,000 to do so. There's a reality there, you know. The way these things get done, have to get done, will be done, something. It's a path a book of poetry takes, a meandering sometimes, a fit and starts. The origin story of a book interests me. There should probably be an interview series, or a blog, or whatnot ONLY about origin stories of books. How it got there, to that artifact. I bet there already is such a blog, right? Well, I apologize. Though not really. No.

In "The Longest Day of the Year" Shaheen writes, "From here things only get worse. Your friends divorce. Your family dies./Disease. Crumbling ground over a deep chasm. You aren't able to run/anymore."

Ah, that one hurt me. To not be able to run anymore. To sink, that way.

There's a lot of burning, but there's a lot to burn out there. We've built a lot of things. And to keep from burning. And to never...still, it will burn. So paranoia-that word again-becomes awareness. There's an argument here, not didactic, not even wanting to be, just this way a thing builds. Repetition is a brick, you know. They wall a thing. They rise. Some forces are so large they bleed into a poet's consciousness. They inform every poem.

Then THINGS FALL APART.

A book of poems is a book, not a collection of poems. It accumulates, gathers into a FORCE or PUSHING or like if you threw the book at a wall, it would scratch there, but then imagine the INSIDES of the book, propelling, the concepts, the words, the forms and functions, like they would go through the drywall, or the fake rock, or out the other...expand like the copper mushroom around the lead, a bullet (compression forms) I mean, metaphorically, but if it HITS you as you read, moves synapses, rattles acetylcholine, is it metaphorical at all? What is it to MOVE?:

As though there were an interruption.

("The Page on Which the Spine is Broken")

We

are invaded like this all the time.

("What Can we Know from the Footage the News Replays") 

There was only a public outcry

When the hedge animals started to collapse

on themselves. The "check brake fluid" light is on again

you tell me. I am not a mechanic.

("Accidental Injury and Those Who Are Liable")

You know, I was helping judge a poetry contest a while back and I got this batch of poems and read and read and when done said to someone, "Damn, everyone was writing about trees and shit. Where are the iPhones? I know some of these people own iPhones."

So I enjoyed Shaheen immersing me in a world I know, of course I know it, know it well: Super Targets, TV specials (talk about an oxymoron), Saran Wrap, Pfizer truck, Celebrities, Police violence, Bullets, Blood...

But I'll be down at the coffee shop, drinking, you know, coffee. Writing down something crass like, "I want to be arrested..."

Oh, do you?

Do you now?

Anyway, as Shaheen writes, "I have a real tendency to ramble." (Unlimited)

I'd like to end by saying I arrive to poetry for many reasons. But always the push. I love the push and thump in the line. This book is loaded with kicky. It sometimes seems poetry reviews should be written in poem form. I mean I feel like excerpting these lines doesn't get to the thing I'm saying, but, trust me, I guess. If you want modern krunch, that frenetic thing that attacks us, that is inescapable, unfortunately. I mean I guess I think Predatory is a Predator drone. That's it, watching us.

A gurney pulls

you slowly down an empty street.

Juxtaposed off a title like,

(IN YELLOWKNIFE, AN INTUIT MAN IS SUSPECTED OF SNEAKING INTO HOMES AT NIGHT AND CUTTING OUT THE ORGANS OF PEOPLE FOR FOOD)

Or... 

In photos, Earth

is an iris drowned in pupil. A crushing black. The

unfurling of a deep fog. There's something formal

about the muzzle of a gun, I've always said, having

never held one.

("Space Phenomenon")

On and on, the jumps, the cuts, the examination of the jump-cutted. It's what poetry can do, the cutting I mean. The blood. But that's OK, just...A buzzing above. A buzzing. What is that? 

Glenn Shaheen: I find one of the most difficult elements of poetry is determining how much artifice I want to leave exposed in each poem. Of course, a poem is by definition artifice (as is all writing), but the layout of a poem is an acknowledgment of that structure, to lesser or greater degrees. In "Dementia Unit" I did want to make it seem relaxed in its diction, but to work that relaxation against the subject matter and the form, destruction and mental anguish written in tercets and an almost regular footed line. I guess it's easier than solving a murder, but it takes me a long time to get it the way I want it, and then I just hope it works for the reader.

AMK: I recently gave a reading where another poet who was reading made the comment that stanzas in a poem implicate narrative. I'm not sure what he meant by this. It seems to me that there are plenty of poem in tercets, couplets, etc... that aren't narrative at all. Which brings me to "Dementia Unit"... would you call this a narrative poem, a lyric poem, or something entirely different or in between? Why the tercets rather than a single stanza?

GS: That's an interesting view for that poet to have - it sounds like somebody with an agenda. If by "narrative" he meant a directing hand, the poet trying to lead the reader to experience a set of images or meditations in a particular manner, then I can get behind that. When one creates a stanza, you are choosing a mode of isolation, which of course presents a unity among the words located within that division. If sometimes that forms a story in the reader's mind, that's ok I suppose - but placing the corpse of a squirrel next to a hatchet can also create a story in the reader's mind and that doesn't mean there is one.

If there's a narrative I'm interested in with my poetry, it's a tonal narrative. For example, if I try to tell the story of a bat coming into my house at night, I could present to you the factual details of the event. You could pass a test about that Bat Night, yes, and depending on what descriptors I use, maybe it would even be a scary and funny story. But if instead I presented a series of images and linguistic fragments that accurately replicated in you the reader the series of emotions I experienced when the bat came into my house, then isn't that a more faithful narrative? Even if none of those fragments and images have anything to do with a bat? You may know nothing of the bat, but you would know (if I was successful) the particular terror of the bat for me. That might be the goal of all of poetry, actually, now that I type it out.

AMK: "A Guarantee of Protection" is a wild poem. I can see it being quite a performance piece. Do you ever "perform" your poems? By perform I mean something beyond merely reading... What's your take on the whole reading versus performing debate/discussion?

GS: I try to read my poems in an exciting manner, not in the poet reading voice that I'm sure everybody can do a great impression of, but I don't consider myself a performer. I think when we do readings we should put in an effort to read our work in a more interesting way than if a stranger picked up our stuff and read it out loud for the very first time. Even that is too much for some poets, though, based on the readings I've attended.

AMK: I recenty went to see "Slam Nuba," an award winning slam team here in Denver. They were pretty amazing; the acting was phenomenal and energetic in a way a typical reading rarely achieves (if ever), and the writing was pretty good. I left the show trying to figure out what it was about slam that I innately felt was different from poetry. It eventually occurred to me that slam poem is more like a monologue than freeverse. "A Guarantee of Protection" might be both...

GS: That works for a lot of first person poems where the lens is turned inward - I think that's the charm of slam poetry a lot of times. It is very performative in nature, like we're watching people tell us honest and true things about themselves in an intimate manner, with all of the emotional ticks you might notice your best cousin demonstrate when telling you of her recent breakup. But if you watch a slam poet do the same poem twice, all of that is revealed to be a different kind of artifice - all of the ticks happen in the same place, it's carefully rehearsed. To perform slam poetry, you need to be part poet, part actor, I say in all of my authority of never having performed any slam whatsoever.

AMK: How did you come up with this structure of "I, ..., I, ..." Why is this poem not a prose poem given its free-flowing nature?

GS: Earlier I spoke about wanting a line to work in tandem with the sentence (or fragment, here) and image (and of course by "in tandem" I also mean by subverting them). Here it could be easy for a reader to become trapped by the form, to ignore it because of the repetition, and I felt by placing those line breaks in some rhythmically abrasive places (after an "I," for example) it continues to call attention to the obsession with self.

AMK: What's up with your titles? They're rather random at times.

GS: Ha, I don't think they're random! These three poems I think the titles are pretty self-explanatory, but in my book, for example, there's a poem called "The Blueprints Of The Disastrous Medical Complex Are Hung In The Expensive Museum Above Selected Pieces of Bone And Rubble And A Fake Burnt American Flag On Which The Stars Have Cleverly Been Replaced By Dollar Signs." It gets a big laugh when I read the title, sure, and that particular image (narrative moment perhaps? There's a subject, verb, and object!) is never referred to again. In this case, though, I want the absurdity and violence of the title to affect the reading of everything that comes after it. I look at titles as the haze that drapes over a poem, and while they don't need to be related in a linear sense, I feel that they affect the reader's approach to the poem, even if it may seem random.

AMK: Is there a term for a stanza of a single line, like couplet, tercets? Why compose "Cant" in this way?

GS: A monostich is a single line stanza. There's a few poems in Predatory written in monostichs. I feel that form allows one to segregate a particular lyric moment more drastically than even a stanza would allow. It works (in my head at least) the same way a numbered section works, without the tyranny of order numbering imposes. Each monostich ends on a period, and there's no real line to balance against that. "Cant" is one of the starker poems in the book, and I felt that extreme stutter worked best for its subject.

AMK: I love that line "O' gods of fear!, are we arrogant enough to think the world will end in our lifetimes..." It reminds me of a discussion I had with friend and fellow poet Jeffrey Shultz about the end of the world and the Apocalyptic Literature that has emerged from this notion over the years and, seemingly, quite a bit more in the last few years. He said, essentially, that every generation, every society fears its end not because it's actually scary but because it would validate the fact that we so fear it in the first place. Is that part of what this poem is about?

GS: I think its extraordinarily conceited to think the world will end in our lifetimes - not just because, as the poem says, the idea that we are so special to see the end, but the idea that the world couldn't possibly continue without each of us. That's like imagining that every time you leave a party it instantly stops. The next day somebody tries to tell you about some crazy hookup that happened at two in the morning, and you're just like "No, the party ended at 11:30." Ha, no, that's just when you left. Everybody else kept having fun. I think it's "fascinating" that we are so obsessed with the end right now - a time when interconnectivity and the ease of communication have made us exponentially less violent. Of course, it's in a lot of powerful people's best interest to keep us in a mindset of fear, because it makes us purchase or vote according to their needs, and what greater fear than the End of Everything? Whatever "Everything" is, and whatever "End" even means.

AMK: I presented a paper on the Southern poems of Brian Barker a few years back and read some of his works as part of that presentation. At some point, a professor of Modern Poetry (not be mistaken for Contemporary) expressed his annoyance with "our [Contemporary poet's] obsession with the list poem." They've been done a million times before, he said.

I, for one, love list poems and really could care less if it's a form we've seen a million time. It's kind of like the observation Chris Rock made on the Daily Show this summer, that people hate it when they hear a joke they've already heard but will watch ridiculously predictable TV shows and will watch the same movie over and over again, and will even get angry when they go to a rock show and the band fails to play their big hit, which they've of course heard already.

What's your take on poetry and originality and/or "newness?" Publishers deem to be more obsessed with it than ever before...

GS: How quaint that a professor of Modern Poetry would berate any kind of obsession in any era - the modernists wear their influence on their sleeves as much as anybody. Not that I'm criticizing the modernists of course.

I don't believe in newness, really. We're all writing toward one voice screaming (whimpering?) against the behemoth of history. That is, poets now end up saying the same things in the same ways poets have been saying for centuries, albeit maybe a computer or television will show up every now and then. Just various shades of suffering and promise.

AMK: Do you think your poems are new, original? They certainly don't feel terribly derivative to me.

GS: I don't think any poet thinks of himself or herself as new and original - we're too intimate with our own influences. They're always shifting, too, as I read new stuff. I'm as influenced by a poem a friend emails me as I am by Lunch Poems or Overlord or a video game I play

Click here for an interview with Glenn Shaheen at Regarding Arts & Letters

Click here for an interview with Glenn Shaheen at Poetry Society of America