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Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Reginald Shepherd 1963-2008
Last week, after a long and painful illness, the poet Reginald Shepherd died.
He was the author of five volumes of poetry—Some are Drowning; Angel, Interrupted; Wrong; Otherhood; and Fata Morgana—and a volume of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry. He edited two anthologies, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries and Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries. There are additional volumes of poems and essays forthcoming. He also kept a weblog the last couple of years, which can be found here, and also did some posting at the Harriet blog.
He was one of the best poets of his generation, and one of the smartest of this era. The course of his life—born and raised in Bronx projects, exiled to Macon, Georgia, then rising up to Bennington and Brown and beyond—was the stuff of an Oprah-list memoir. The motor of that progression, his adamantine integrity that would not swerve nor stoop, was heroic in the old-fashioned sense: it brought him to glories and it brought him to calamities. But he was no cliché. His friends, and those students and readers who were drawn to him, knew he was a rare spirit. As one friend puts it, “what I love about Reginald is how cantankerous, bellicose, generous and celebratory he is all at once, which is to say how gobsmackingly alive, and making more out of that than the rest of us lazy SOB’s.”
There are many online tributes to him. Ron Silliman has a large list, as well as his own thoughts. The Harriet blog posting has a long comment thread. Some good accounts not listed are from his student Jasper Bernes here and his partner Robert Philen here. I agree with almost everything people have said, and many have said it better than I ever could. I would like to note some aspects that could be emphasized or have not been touched on.
I would call attention to two of his poetry’s most distinctive features. Though the poems see clearly the pain of this life, they strive for beauty. For Reginald always wished to make beautiful artworks. There is a lyrical lushness to them, an unembarrassed exuberance. In addition, the poems are never ironically dismissive or smirky. They never apologize for themselves, never go for a cool detachment, and never guard themselves with hip anomie.
If these and other features distinguish his work from much or most of today’s poetry, that is not to say he isolated himself. Reginald was thoroughly engaged. His capacious intelligence was capable of seeing and understanding much (to me it seemed he understood everything), and his quicksilver eloquence was capable of imparting that understanding to anyone who would listen. As is attested to in the accounts of his friends and students, and in his own writings, he worked hard to make his thought understood.
Which leads me to another feature of his character: he didn’t use his intelligence as a cudgel to beat his interlocutor into submission. Yes, he was proud, and he wanted his intelligence to be recognized. But the point of any discussion with him was to reach a better understanding of the world. He was essentially and not just vocationally a teacher.
For Reginald there was no fatal distinction between poetry and criticism, or between creativity and theory. Because he believed in both art and truth, he was at once highly romantic in his aspirations (see his “Why I Write”) and highly sober and clear-eyed in his perceptions. He had the strength to carry through on Gramsci’s prescription for “optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect.” Thus he greatly respected Adorno, but also loved the pleasure that the artwork brings. However the objects of our desire may be our undoing, he would never stint what satisfactions are available to us.
He had a great sense of humor (the dreadful humorlessness of this posting is all my fault, a symptom of my lesser ability). He may have refused the smirky irony that runs through much postmodernism, but he loved popular culture as much as high culture. He owned more copies of Richard Strauss’s Electra than anyone should, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of boy bands, both American and European. Popular music was as important to him as poetry, as is evident in the various references throughout his work.
He was never a prig, nor was he ever naïve or credulous. But he was passionate. The things he loved, he loved, and the things he hated, he hated. He had no detachment from what he thought was important. Nor did he care to pay attention to those things he thought were unimportant. He would spend hours and hours working with a student or friend whose poetry he believed in (sometimes more than the poet him- or herself did), but he wouldn’t waste a minute talking to an established poet whose work didn’t interest him.
He never kissed anyone’s ass, no matter how much power they had over his education, his career, or his ability to pay the next month’s rent. He was self-made. In our supposed meritocracy, how many have made it from the Bronx to Brown? Despite the ravings on Foetry.com, every single publication he got through his own efforts. For years he tirelessly submitted poems to journals and submitted manuscripts to book contests. He never moped. The same day a packet came back rejected, that same packet was sent on to the next journal. I don’t believe any poet achieved more with less patronage.
He never backed down from his truth, nor did he compromise on his integrity. Such a character has trouble in the social world. He was a polarizing figure: that he was deeply loved is evident in the on-line eulogies, but he suffered more enmity than anyone I’ve ever known. For much of his life, he didn’t bother with social niceties, which often created troubles. Later in life he had mellowed enough to wish he had been a little obsequious with those who could have done him favors. But he knew why he had been the way he was.
He never had the least shred of actual power: he never had the power to keep someone getting into a school, or to kick someone out of a school, never had the power to deny someone a job, to deny them tenure, or to get them fired. Despite his powerlessness throughout his life, he was seen as a threat by a number of people who had such power and who brought the full measure of that power to bear on him.
He always fought back. To fall back on another cliché, he was a fighter. He had fought from the first to carve out a meaningful life. This last year, he fought like hell to stay alive, lasting much longer than the doctors expected. No lesson could be more important for me to take from him than courage, that my problems don’t amount to a hill of beans, that I, one of the lazier SOB’s, should get off my ass and get to work. As long as it’s important work.
In closing, I apologize for my sloppy hyperbole. His beauty deserves an aria, not this tuba obbligato. I also apologize for my anger. Reginald’s work was never bitter or reactionary. It was a positive, decisive drive toward what he thought a poem could be. And what bitterness and anger he had when I first met him, more than fifteen years ago at Iowa, he had released these last years. This was, more than words could say, much because of his partner, Robert Philen. Reginald had been so profoundly lonely; with Robert he was just as profoundly loved and in love. That is one last fact I would want noted: I have known no one whose inner life improved so much as he got older. For most of us, our spirit decays with our body, but Reginald was blossoming as his body was betraying him.
In the first draft of this posting, I closed with “You, Therefore,” the last poem from his most recent book, but Emily Warn at the Harriet blog also knew how appropriate a final word it was. In place of that sweetness, I will close on a contrasting note, the last poem from his first book. It is a meditation on his lost mother, a pervasive theme in that book. Perhaps it is wrong in this time of mourning to strike such a note, but I recall something from that book we spent so much time on together, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “Even in a legendary better future, art could not disavow remembrance of accumulated horror: otherwise its form would be trivial.” His friends may be devastated by his loss, but he has shown us a path through such pain:
Until She Returns
This is how I say it ends, Bronx County, 1978.
Packed up all my cares and woe in a plastic
garbage bag. It took an hour, maybe
less.I take myself into the river of salt
for pages at a time, lying for the sake of
accuracy. All that summer it was winter; I said it
for her sake.(For a year after she died
I dreamed of her; she came to say
she was just hiding. Death was just
a place to stay, a drift of cloud smeared half-way into
snow. I watched it fall.) (It never snowed there,
pine needles on red clay and heat-reek of the paper mill
for months. Mere decor, you might say, caves of kudzu
and no sidewalks. I missed sidewalks
most of all.) Some Thursday’s drift of cloud stole forty years
in passing, and an extra for good luck. Some other spring
I’ll give them back.Days spent
curled around a tattered name, erased: white
piss-smelling flowers, intimate
spring air against the throat, some warmth
not far enough away. My little sister said
we’ll have to find another…; we were named
after each other, before the fact. Who isn’t her these days?
Hat boxes and a closet full of coats with fur collars,
someone to betray over and over. (The personal effects
incinerated, with no one to say
mine. I’ll take the rhinestone buckles on the shoes.)When death comes he’ll be a fine young man
and I will kiss his rotten lips and find her there.
Here I go, singing low.
Comments
Thank you for reminding us of Reginald Shepherd’s spirit and the importance of his work.