“I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.” ThinkingWritingKindListeningListening To Music Author:Shane McCrae
“I don't know that I find either aspect of Jesus more interesting than the other, although maybe I think about the God one more.” ThinkingKnowsJesusInterestingAspect Author:Shane McCrae
“I think I cause a lot of headaches for editors - it's impossible to keep up with the ridiculous amount of changes I make.” ThinkingCausesImpossibleAmountRidiculousEditorsHeadache Author:Shane McCrae
“I think about the body kind of all the time, being as how I'm really uncomfortable in mine.” ThinkingKindBodyMinesUncomfortable Author:Shane McCrae
“I was just thinking about how my grandparents, who raised me, would be considered "white trash," whatever that means - mostly for being racists, I'd say. And how, as a child, I wanted to be like them, and identified with them culturally.” ThinkingMeanChildrenWould BeWantedWhiteRaisedRacistGrandparentTrashWhite Trash Author:Shane McCrae
“If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse."” ThinkingWritingMusicalVerses Author:Shane McCrae
“I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language.” ThinkingTryingLanguagePossibilitySensibility Author:Shane McCrae
“Certainly for me prose has a dilatory capacity, insofar as I don't trust my abilities in prose. I imagine I could have done the same thing in poetry, but sometimes I feel more fluent in poetry than in prose, and as a consequence perhaps I might pass too quickly by a thing that I might, in prose, have struggled merely to articulate. That struggle creates space, and it seems to me a particular kind of space into which memory flows easily. I suspect I think better in poetry, however.” ThinkingKindSometimesDoneMemoriesAbilityStruggleImagineConsequenceProse Author:Shane McCrae
“That's a fairly Wordsworthian way to look at things! But yeah, actually - part of the poet's work, I think, is to maintain or reintroduce the imaginative capacity of their earlier self while nonetheless maturing. And I do think the more successful the poet is at this particular thing, the greater their achievement as a poet.” ThinkingSuccessfulPoetAchievementMatureImaginative Author:Shane McCrae
“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
“Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.” PeopleThinkingFallGraceCatholicPoetry IsPsychoanalysis Author:Shane McCrae
“People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them.” PeopleThinkingPoliticalBlindAnxiousGenesis 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
