Shaindel Beers, interviewed by Jonathan Taylor

Shaindel Beers is the author of two full-length poetry collections, A Brief History of Time (2009) and The Children’s War and Other Poems (2013), both from Salt Publishing. Her awards include First place Karen Fredericks and Frances Willitts Poetry Prize, Grand Prize Co-winner Trellis Magazine sestina contest, First place Dylan Days Poetry Competition, and others. She currently serves as English department chair at Blue Mountain Community College, as Poetry Editor for Contrary Magazine, and on the executive board of PAWS, the Pendleton Animal Welfare Shelter. She lives in Pendleton, Oregon, with a zoo of pets and a wild five-year-old son. Her website is here.

JT: You've written two full-length poetry collections, A Brief History of Time and The Children's War and Other Poems (both with Salt Publishing). How far do the collections share similar preoccupations (e.g. time, memory, feminism, violence)? In what ways do they differ? And do you feel that you "progress" and develop as a poet, or is it more complex than that?

SB: This is a really interesting question. I like that you’ve picked out time, memory, feminism, and violence as my themes. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard my work pinpointed that succinctly. Michael Chabon theorizes that all writers are obsessive compulsives, and everyone is writing the same thing over and over, hoping to get it right, so those might very well be my themes for the rest of my life.

I think the way they differ is that A Brief History of Time was my first collection, so a lot of it was written over a long period of time, and I didn’t really have a theme in mind. It was essentially my creative thesis for my MFA, so I just wrote with no plan. If a graduate advisor said, “Try this, write in this person’s style,” I did. I think it ended up being largely autobiographical and having a larger arc as a result.

The Children’s War started out as an obsessive project where I did nothing for a while but look at children’s artwork from war, and then it became a philosophical question – should it be a whole book of just that? Would people read a whole book of just that? Would I be lessening children’s war experiences if I put poems about something else in there? So, in my first book, I had a broad scope and narrowed down, and in my second book, I had a narrow scope then broadened. If you put one on top of the other, it’s an hourglass!
I think the progression is always more complex than that. That’s the journey. Figuring out who we are, seeing how we turn out.

JT: You write short fiction as well as poetry - and I understand that you're also in the process of writing a novel. What do you see as the overlaps or differences between the demands of these genres?

SB: Everyone is writing a novel. At least, that’s how it feels. I actually have a few novel starts where I’ve gotten “stuck” at the same point. I think it takes a lot of guts to write a novel, to keep going with something that big and assuming that people are going to stay with you. I don’t know if I have the confidence for it. I assumed my career would go in a sense like, poetry collection, short story collection, novel. I need a few more short stories to round out a collection, so I think I’m going to stick with that first.

If I ever do finish writing a novel, I’ll probably have to do it in a course or with a novel coach. I’m not sure if I’m disciplined enough to do it on my own. That’s sort of the beauty of poetry. It’s a small, intricate work – like painting a tile. You can have an idea, and you do it, and you might touch it up now and then, but it’s done! You have a little four inch by four inch work of art. I don’t think I’m ready for murals yet.

I think a lot of the pressure to feel like I had to have a novel is gone. I think it was mostly from outside, from people who only know novels, who expect something you wrote to be made into a film and for you to become rich. I think I’m past that now. It helped me to meet Peter Meinke, who is a wonderful poet who is now in his eighties. He has written many, many books of poetry, and I believe two short story collections. I asked him about that because his one short story collection won a Flannery O’Connor award, and I loved it. He told me he’s always writing poems, but he writes maybe one short story a year. That’s just how he works. I might be the same. I guess we’ll see. It’s kind of nice to be still under forty and calming down about these things.

JT: What can poetry achieve which other art forms can't, do you think?

SB: When I was a dance major, I used to get into “trouble” for admiring the other arts more than dance. Dance was so hard for me, and it seemed so easy for everyone else. I spent a lot of time being amazed by everything else – sculpture, music, painting – that I didn’t really appreciate the art that I was working on at the time. I don’t think there is any one particular art that can capture anything that another particular art can’t capture. All of the arts are sisters, and I love when we can collaborate and do them together – poetry and music, dance and sculpture, etc. One of the choreography projects I did when I was in college was that we had to go to a Rodin exhibit and start a choreography piece from the beginning pose of a sculpture. It was amazing to think of negative space in that way – the way a dancer and a sculptor both use them.

I think the goal of all art is to express human emotion – to somehow make it last, to make it more understandable and universal, and there are different ways of doing that. I’m for all of it.

JT: Would you say that your writing is heavily autobiographical or memoiristic in its subject matter? How far is it "confessional" poetry, for example?

SB: This is always a tricky question. I feel like “confessional” poetry was a phrase used to denigrate the writing of female poets. No one calls male poets writing about war “Confessional” poets, even though they’re certainly writing autobiographical, personal work. I’m still figuring myself out. I’m still becoming, so I think I’ll always be a part of my writing in that way.

JT: You teach as well as write. Does this help with the writing? How do you see - in more general terms - the place of the "poet" in contemporary capitalist society?

SB: I think that teaching while writing is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I’m a professor, so I get to talk about writing and books and ideas all day. I teach at an institution that values my creative writing, celebrates my publications, sends me to conferences, and writers’ retreats, but then there is the feeling of always grading or always being behind grading. If I were a person who could hold down a 9-5 job at a bank or something like that, I might get more writing done, but I don’t think I’m that kind of person. I like to spend a lot of time in my head, staring out the window at clouds.

As far as the place of the poet in contemporary capitalist society, I think that the song “Cold Dog Soup” by Guy Clark says it nicely: “Ain’t no money in poetry / That’s what sets the poet free.” I like to ignore the fact that the next line is “I’ve had all the freedom I can stand.” I like to think that as long as I’m not making money as an artist, I’m not beholden to a market. I can do what I want. Would it be nice if poetry made money? Yes, but then, I’d probably lose some freedom.

JT: What are you working on at the moment? What are your medium and long-term aims for your writing?

SB: I’m always working on a bunch of different things. I’m sort of a poster child for adult ADHD, so various things occur to me, and I get obsessed and do them right then, and then sometimes they fall to the wayside. I was working on a sonnet sequence about boxing and domestic violence, somewhat inspired by Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and the amazing article on him in Grantland, “The Boxer and the Batterer” by Louisa Thomas:
 
http://grantland.com/features/floyd-mayweather-pacquiao-domestic-violence-allegations/.

I recently finished a long-form essay which is very important to me that I’ve been working on for a long time, and I’m working on a series of circus poems as part of a collaboration with the cellist Jesse Ahmann:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abtWPBb5g8k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36kOU3MDgYE


We seem to have the same artistic sensibilities, and I feel very fortunate to be working with him.

About the interviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the short story collection Kontakte and Other Stories (Roman Books, 2013), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "A Brief History of Time" by Shaindel Beers

At one point in her remarkable poetry collection, A Brief History of Time, Shaindel Beers remarks that 'perhaps / Derrida was right - that the center is not the center, / but is perhaps the center of something else / whether we are speaking of time, language, the universe.' The whole collection might be seen as an empirical testing-out of this philosophical hypothesis: to put it another way, in Beers's poetry - in the words of Blaise Pascal - time, language, the universe are spheres in which the 'centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.' No doubt Stephen Hawking - as well as Pascal, Derrida and Einstein - would understand. 

The poems themselves understand and test out these ideas, particularly as regards notions of time. In many of the poems, the present - what should be the 'centre' - cannot hold; the poems' present is always unstable, volatile, always prone to slip backwards of forwards, into present and future. The title poem, for example, starts with the word 'Now' - the 'Now' of a present love affair - but quickly moves backwards to the Elizabethans, the Greeks, the poet's own past, and forwards via insurance policies to a loveless future ('though I'll [still] love mountains as only a flatlander can'). The present is always ready to collapse into past and future: in 'Sleeping Man and Woman, Circa 2000, C.E.,' contemporary lovers are viewed like museum exhibits from the distant future; in 'Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping,' the dominant present tense encompasses both the start of a stripper's career, and its horrific end in violence and pornography; in the wonderful final poem, 'How Time Betrays Us,' the present of the writer ('Right now, I am 27 in human years. / My cat is 83') might be very different to the 'present' of the reader, which is also necessarily very different to the multiple presents of everyone else around the reader - as, indeed, Jacques Derrida himself might have predicted:

In the time it will take you to read this,
somewhere in America, a woman was raped. 

171,233 animals were slaughtered for human consumption.
32 children worldwide died of starvation.

I may have already died, but you are reading this,
thinking I am 27 and very much in love. 

Clearly, there is an implication here that written language survives us to be read in the future; and the same implication pertains in the poem 'I Give You Words': 'Because the body is so ephemeral and corrupt, / what is beautiful today may not be so ten years hence. / I give you words.' In this sense,  words can reach out to the future; but they are also marked by the past: 'I try to use old words, inherited from generation / after generation, and try to make them say new things.' At the end of the poem, though, Beers admits that she has 'failed ... / to say the thing anew.' Always reaching out to the future, words - marked as they by 'generation / after generation' - also collapse into the past, and 'newness' is almost an impossibility. 

The only real escape from the flux of time - from the overwhelming co-existence of past, present and future - in Beers's poetry seems to be death. Only in a 'dying man's house' (for example) is the 'bathroom clock / ... stopped at thirteen 'til two.' Only in this house are 'the weeds ... certain as death.' Death, in this sense, is like 'hiding under covers' - hiding from future and past. Still, in the poem 'Overview of the Carbon Cycle,' whilst is it true that 'it took death to wrench us apart      for good,' at the same time, the narrator imagines a future in which 'someday ... / our carbon bases [might] combine ... / to burst forth the head of the same daffodil.' So, even in death, there are encoded possible futures which reconfigure the past. 

Not that the interpenetration of past, present and future is all negative; time doesn't always 'betray us': after all, a transient love affair reconstituted in a daffodil is a beautiful possible future, and in the superb and disturbing poem 'HA!,' one man's cruelty towards a cancer victim is answered by a possible karmic future. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.