Creators on Creating: Keith O'Shaughnessy

Who are some of your literary influences? Do you have any favorite poems, short stories, or books to teach as a professor at Camden County College?  

By and large the writers I admire most are not ones whose sensibilities — let alone sentiments — I assent to, but those whose uncompromising extremism appeals to me temperamentally. Among their number I would count, with astonishing originality, Mr. Laureate-of-the-New-World himself, Walt Whitman, whose exuberant affirmations I still find radically invigorating — like ode after ode declaimed whole-heartedly, and full-throatedly, from a mountaintop in praise of all Creation. And a local Camden boy at that! ‘Proud to be an American’ indeed. 

At the same time, I will confess to very much digging the slighter lyrics — and a few of the longer numbers — of everyone’s favorite fascist paranoiac Ezra Pound for their austere, perplexing elegance. One of the true freakazoids of the medium, he. As inveterately obstreperous as they come. (But then, from time to time every art form needs a cranky malcontent to whip it back into shape). In the same vein, surely I am the lone weirdo in the Anglophone world who delighted in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno — entire. Really, simply cracking the spine was like getting zapped by a max-voltage jolt of static electricity. Like some kind of versified shock treatment. Truly — the man damn near fried the bejesus clean out of me. More minutely, the same could be said of the octave of Hopkins’ no less exultant “kingfisher sonnet,” wherein the phonemes quiver like charged particles in an atom (if that’s actually what happens in an atom). To further mix (equally ill-informed) science metaphors, an analogous chemical reaction was catalyzed by Beckett’s Molloy — as well as, come to think of it, Paradise Lost — once upon a time.  

Suffice to say, I favor the beamed-down-from-outer-space, Hey-Kool-Aid, we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore effect, such as simultaneously takes your breath away and knocks the wind out of you with gob-smacking, flabbergasting force. I also prefer an idiom totally remote from the colloquial, as one might associate with a rune or spell. Not for me the affable gabbing or heartfelt testaments (much less indignant screeds) of so much contemporary verse. To clarify, this is not some theoretical criterion I’ve traced out in the abstract and committed myself to in principle, just an inexplicable predilection of taste. A wise woman once told me all lyric poems should read as though written in italics. Hear, hear!

Last, banal as it may sound (and be), Shakespeare’s boundless vitality still exhilarates me, and I am never not teaching at least one of his works, which always succeed in putting the play back in the drama. In fact, I can assert with near-absolute certitude, as I do with punishing regularity in my survey courses, that if the Bard were alive today, he wouldn’t be wasting a moment of his time penning genteel period pieces for Masterpiece Theater, complete with ruff collars and stuffy accents, if not the odd pair of silk slippers for good measure. No, the consummate entertainer would be out in Hollywood making a mint producing blockbuster after blockbuster, putting on the greatest show not only in town but on earth. 

This is your third book, and you've authored three chapbooks. How is it that you are so prolific?

Truth be told, I’m not sure I’m prolific so much as just prolix. Since birth I’ve been afflicted with a wicked case of never-shutting-the-funk-up disease (as my students would be more than happy to attest). So, though I’ve produced only the three volumes, considering the most recent one’s heft, I’d gladly take the word-count challenge with just about anybody this side of Joyce Carol Oates. I am a maniacal reviser, but a compulsive adder-on-to as well (much to the chagrin of all involved). ‘Brevity is the soul of wit,’ far from a nugget of gnomic wisdom coined by the playwright himself, was just a pat maxim dutifully parroted by an obtuse doofus who was not only decidedly longwinded but witless in the extreme. Shakespeare’s own speech spewed forth in bountiful, at times ungovernable, profusion. My tongue is too in love with the sensation of utterance to hold its peace for long.

What is your writing process? Any favorite rituals, if you believe in them? 

For me, vast spans of time can elapse during which I inscribe nary a character, but when the Muse moves, I not infrequently find myself seized by a kind of hectic frenzy, as if taking dictation from a reverie, à la that most notorious of opium-imbibers in the throes of ‘Kubla Khan.’ (Hmmm — ‘Weave a circle round me thrice,’ anyone…?) Thence ensues a frantic scramble to get it all down before the fever breaks. Editing, meanwhile, I often reserve for ceremonial performance seaside. No finer way to pass a Sunday afternoon than sitting on the sand with a prodigious pile of print-outs, slashing away ruthlessly with one’s trusty red pen. Plus, the ocean has always felt like my element, as it were. ‘Ah — The mighty Being is awake!’ (Just about the only line of Wordsworth I have any use for, but its place in my greatest-hits package is secure.)

How do you know when a poem is ready to send out into the world?

Very rarely, in the tumult of the initial inspiration, but more often than not, only after having drawn its author out on the rack for eons on end. Ultimately, either I’m done with it, or it’s done with me. All in service of the same vague, nameless intuition leading me hither and yon like the divining rod in a cartoon desert. Sometimes, at the moment of culmination, I sense an invisible clicking into place — Ah, just right! — more often I simply reach a point of such exasperation that I’ve no alternative left but to cry uncle and reconcile myself to my inadequacy to the task. I’ve been known to put up quite a fight along the way, but even the doughtiest of spirits flags at the last.

Ifeanyi Menkiti, late owner of the historic Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, spoke highly of your "play with language" and said he loved the freshness, boldness, inventiveness, and confidence of your writing. How has your voice evolved over the years to be so singular? 

While I do prize a style that is distinct in itself and discrete among others, never would I call any voice my own (including, I dare say, this one). Optimally, one invents a special dialect, with almost its own grammar and vocabulary, to speak the language of each new work in answer to its peculiar atmosphere and mood. More like a medium channeling heavens-sent energies than a human personality telling you its identifying truths. There are, of course, dozens upon dozens of writers who excel at direct self-expression (or at least some passable facsimile thereof). After all, it’s quite alright to be self-centered provided one is in possession of a self around which to be so, meaning I can take a little ‘Egotistical’ as long as there’s some ‘Sublime’ to go with it. But to my taste, in the lyric mode, any reference to private life or the general pedestrian realm is to be eschewed. Few critical descriptors strike me as more odious than ‘relatable.’ Years back, when teaching at a Catholic boys school in pre-gentrification Jersey City (which is to say, getting my clock cleaned in just about every measurable respect five times a day five times a week, excluding cafeteria duty), I mysteriously, if fleetingly, became a daily communicant. I suppose we all need to affect at least the pretense of dignity from time to time. More to the point, I sought out early-morning masses in Italian, Polish, and Spanish since, if I wasn’t going to get the Latin, a living foreign language would be the next thing, because Heaven forfend I might actually understand a word of it.

How has living in Princeton influenced your writing? 

Bear in mind that, as a near-lifelong greaser townie, I haven’t spent all that much time hobnobbing with the campus swells, so don’t imagine there’s been any direct literary effect. At the same time, I have to believe that growing up surrounded by people who were not only exceedingly well-educated, but uncommonly vibrant and engaged, made the fruitless pursuit of poesy not seem too outlandishly fanciful an undertaking. 

Congratulations on your recent book publication! Could you share a bit about your new book of poems and fables, Petrushka? 

Ah, Petrushka — my magnum opus! (Hey, at least SOMEONE’s got to call it that…) Our leading man, if you will, is the gleefully belligerent, aggressively indecorous Russian puppet of the same name, he who, on a platform mounted in the town square, whiles away his time squeaking nonsensically on his signature pennywhistle and thwacking savagely at his nemeses the policeman, physician, priest, and conscriptor with an arsenal of implements — and getting smacked back threefold in return. Interspersed among these interludes can be found a set of symphonically-arranged lyrical fragments from an implied, overarching narrative featuring a chess master, ballerina, opera tenor, and figure skater, as well as, in supporting roles, an urchin, idiot, and organ grinder. Presiding over the proceedings is a trained monkey outside an asylum screeching at his leash in the street. I believe the accompanying press release aptly characterizes the finished product as a cultural curio of sorts — in this case a veritable compendium of the ungainly and unsavory, one everywhere reveling in the perverse and grotesque, albeit with more than a little pep in its step, if not a modicum of dash, flash, and panache to boot.

What are you currently working on?

What I am working on now, with assiduous industry, is anything that doesn’t concern words (the ones set forth before you even now notwithstanding). I’ve long since become obsessed with language. If I’m not careful, I grow positively possessed by it, until such intense pressure is being exerted that my psyche is in danger of undergoing some kind of rupture. Even now I can feel my faculties straining against the gravitation of the discombobulating Petrushka patois — almost as though I’ve written in it so long it’s become my only known form of speech. That’s when I know it’s time to take my business elsewhere — the ocean, the woods, what have you. Just nowheres near print. Happily, I’m also an unregenerate museum junkie, so perambulating the various galleries within striking distance of my native Princeton can be just the thing for un-mediating the brain. To adduce still more proof, when you first proposed this interview, part of me was rooting for the old-school, live-and-in-person, back-and-forth informal chit-chat model so I wouldn’t have to confront the prospect of frenetically rearranging letters on a page.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I feel honor-bound to add that Petrushka has — not exactly back by popular demand — a sequel, entitled Snegurochka, the name of the Snow Maiden of Russian folklore who, according to at least one of the myths involving her, falls in love with a local shepherd boy and appeals to her mother, Spring Beauty, to let her experience mortal love, but at the warmth of his touch, she melts. Pretty bad-ass, no? But have no fear! Either way, it’s decades away from completion. Only fair the world be granted a — very — extended grace period to convalesce from its predecessor.)

Do you have any advice for young writers? 

Well, aren’t you in luck, my friends! Why, just follow my proven one-step program and you, too — for five easy payments of wholesale chunks of your soul — could end up toiling away interminably in deserved obscurity. Ha. Lest this devolve into an infomercial testimonial, I’ll limit myself to the following admonition: the cure for writer’s block is, surprise of all surprises, simply not to write. Chances are, there are no hordes of some adoring public ready to storm the Bastille if your flimsy leaflet of pensive reflections isn’t released by the deadline. Wait until you are impelled, as if by biological necessity, to let forth whatever noise issues, per force, from your vocal chords when twanged by one or another of those damnable “thorns of life” a certain husband of Frankenstein once rhapsodized about ever-so-emotively on his proverbial harp aeolian. 

What are you reading these days? 

Generally I hold off until at least the second date before completely discrediting myself, but oh well, no sense in deferring the inevitable, so here goes: I cannot tell you what I’m reading these days because, well, I’m not reading. Any longer, anyway — that is, beyond casting the odd glance at a periodical. This sorry state of affairs is not the result of some across-the-board policy change. Somewhere along the line I just up and lost the knack of it. The main reason being that — I can only assume due to some sort of deterioration of the brain — my poor eyes can’t manage to break the plane of the page. That is, as suggested above, instead of a mystical portal through which to be spirited off to some fantastical realm, my gaze is met with a flat, impermeable barrier. A vacant plane across which so many otherwise stray marks take variously unintelligible shapes.

The second explanation is that over the years I have grown so accustomed to teaching literature in the classroom that it has come to seem almost a communal activity, akin to theater-going, so retiring to my study with a snifter of cognac for a night of private perusing would be tantamount to poring over pages of sheet music in reverential silence in lieu of hearing it performed orchestrally. I wind up squirming in my chair like a defiant child fidgeting on a piano bench when made to practice his scales. In sum, I give at the office. My off-duty hours I spend otherwise. My page, methinks, is not so unlike the screen insofar there is only so great a percentage of one’s waking day one can dwell there without being deemed downright unviable as an organism. I never stop being appalled at the lengths people will go to not to live their own lives. After all, we only get the one of them, don’t we. 

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In 2011 Keith O’Shaughnessy’s first book of poems, Incommunicado, won the inaugural Grolier Discovery Award, sponsored by the legendary Cambridge bookshop of the same name. His second, Last Call for Ganymede, followed in 2014 from Ilora Press. At long last, his magnum opus, Petrushka, was released by Ragged Sky Press in March of this year. Along the way he has also authored three chapbooks--Carnaval, The Devil’s Party, and Snegurochka—all with Pudding House Publications. A near-lifelong resident of Princeton, he teaches English at Camden County College in southern New Jersey.

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