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10 Questions for Neil Shepard


There is no sadness like today’s sadness¾
a spring day so achingly alive I want to break
out of my body. But somebody already said that.—From “There Is No Sadness” Volume 60, Issue 3 (Fall 2019)

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
In my formative years—grad school in the mid-1970s—I immersed in the contemporary poetry of the time: The Beats, the Feminist poets, the New York poets, and the Deep Imagists. I found a deep affinity, in particular, with this latter group, especially for the nature poetry and elegiac tones of Bly, Wright, Merwin, and Kinnell.  Despite the thousands of other poets I’ve read and absorbed since then, these four poets are still in my cadences and content, for better and worse.  

What other professions have you worked in?
Like too many of my fellow poets, my adult work-life has been spent almost exclusively in university settings, teaching literature and creative writing; whereas, in my youth, I worked in plastics factories and furniture factories; I painted houses and barns; and I played piano in coffeehouses and bars. How far I’ve fallen.

What did you want to be when you were young?
I wanted to be a doctor, a radiologist in particular. I thought it’d be cool to look at skeletons beneath the flesh.  I went to college pre-med but changed majors after two years to psychology and literature. I didn’t enroll in my first creative writing class until senior year of college. Then, of course, grad school and more grad school, and poems and more poems about the skeleton beneath the flesh.

What inspired you to write this piece?
My poem “There Is No Sadness” tumbled out of me sometime in the midst of reading Jonathan Blunk’s wonderful biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. The biography sent me back to Wright’s poems, and the poems sent me back to my own formative years as a poet, when Wright’s elegies sang in my head.  I wrote “There Is No Sadness” from a double perspective, remembering back to my first experiences with Wright’s particular type of sorrow—a human sorrow mitigated, somewhat, by the blessings of the natural world—and interspersing these old memories of Wright’s poems with my currently jaded, distanced, and wry response to elegy, even as I move closer to my own undoing.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I live half the year in rural Vermont, half in New York City, and I seem to write equally well or poorly in both settings. Three places abroad have spawned lots of poems: Shanghai, China, where I taught for a year; the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, where I accompanied my anthropologist wife for another year; and Paris, where I lived for a third year and to which I return frequently.  Of imagined places, I favor the Byzantium imaged up by Yeats.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I sometimes perform with a group called PoJazz, reading my jazz-poems to music. When I’m writing that kind of poem, I listen to jazz—and don’t even get me started on individual composers or players.

For all my other poems, I need external silence so I can hear my own internal rhythms.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Though I don’t recommend this for others, I often write when I’m driving long-distance.  I used to write long-hand with my notebook perched on the steering wheel. Now that I can dictate poems to my cellphone, I’m slightly less of a hazard on the highways.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Three poet-friends, with whom I’ve exchanged work for years, read the first polished draft (usually revised at least a dozen times). These friends have different poetic sensibilities, so when all three of them like the same poem I know I’ve got something.

What are you working on currently?
I’m working on an essay about a strange, tense meeting between the poets Linda Gregg and David Budbill, both of whom I’d invited (years ago) to the Vermont Studio Center during the same two-week session.

I’m also working on a series of poems called “Icelandic Sagas,” based on my recent travels in Iceland and my long-time interest in Old English and Old Norse poetry.

What are you reading right now?
The Poetic Edda, by Anonymous
The Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturluson
In Parenthesis, by David Jones
Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky


NEIL SHEPARD'S latest book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018. His sixth and seventh books of poetry were Hominid Up, and a full collection of poems and photographs, Vermont Exit Ramps II. His poems appear in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, and Sewanee Review. He founded and directed the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center and the literary magazine Green Mountains Review.


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