A Poet Reflects

Perhaps this is my mesh of hours, my muscular ache, my guardian sash, twist of rope carved around an old maple trunk, my rod of power red with anticipatory friction at the edge of an emerging set of planetary rings.

—Aaron Shurin, from “Cool Dust” in Citizen (City Lights Books, 2012)

“For me, sound haunts language even when it’s silent text, and ‘incantation’ is sound raised to the level of meaning. Not ‘fixed’ meaning, as you say, but something nevertheless apprehended, felt. I think my work may be essentially sonorous. If I were going to get down to brass tacks, I would say, for me, that’s poetry’s defining element, the power that engages me most complexly. I mean the full range of prosodic values: [Robert] Duncan’s idea of ‘the tone leading of vowels,’ or the rise and fall of syllables, or measure, repetition, rhythm—all of what I call the countersemantic aspects of poetry. Of course, in the end, there are no countersemantic aspects; that’s the point. They all add to the semantic complexity of the poem. The experience you call incantatory or casting a spell is fundamental to my work. It’s sound in conversation with fixed meaning, and that tension is dynamic. It can bring you to non-quotidian attention, into another order of meaning, the way mantras or chants or even songs do. And for sure I read my poems aloud, and they’re not complete until I’ve understood them through my body.”

—Aaron Shurin, from “I Make You Make Me Sing,” an interview with Christopher Hennessy (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/244168)