“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.” ThinkingWritingLongBookRealPastEnjoyStruggleComfortMemoirProseLove To ReadLong Book Author:Shane McCrae
“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.” ThinkingKindMeanLongKidsTogetherAudienceImpulseConfessionTied Up Author:Shane McCrae
“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.” ThinkingLongMomentsProblemOpportunityIdentityBest Opportunity Author:Shane McCrae
