Excellent interview with Alan Shapiro in The Atlantic. Shapiro recently published a book of prose about his sister's death, and a book of poems about his brother, who also passed away. Yet, what luminous things he has to say:
The kind of poetry that I needed back in 1999, when my brother was dying, and frankly still need now, is one that wants to raise the dead—that wants to bring the beloved back to life, and that refuses to settle for any kind of substitute, however beautiful. I want the kind of poem that recognizes that since it can't raise the dead, everything else is a piss-poor substitute. I want, somehow, to develop an aesthetics of inadequacy—inadequacy as a way of honoring the dead. The occasion of the work I've done over the last several years has been loss, mortality, illness, and grief of one kind or another. But the subject, really, of my last several books is the beauty and supreme value of human attachment. Mourning, lament, every song of sorrow, is simultaneously a song of praise, because you wouldn't grieve for something you lost unless you valued it very highly. So it's praise poetry, ultimately.
Poem white page white page poem
something is streaming out of a body in waves
something is beginning from the fingertips
they are starting to declare for my whole life
all the despair and making music
something like wave after wave
that breaks on a beach
something like bringing the entire life
to this moment
the small waves bringing themselves to white paper
something like light stands up and is alive.
