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OMAR SHAPLI | |
| Interview excerpts | press release | ||
| When, and under what circumstances, did you begin to write poetry? I concocted a few items for my high school literary magazine, probably to score points with my then girlfriend (a poet herself). Later, in Korea, the apparition of a tank grinding and bumping its way along a rocky path got me going, crudely. And in the '60s, as an actor in Second City, I wrote a few lyrics for the shows. Writing poetry as a matter of habit started in the '70s when a friend gave me a blank book and suggested I fill it. Some minor research reveals that you’ve been an actor, a teacher, and a theatre director, among other things, in addition to being a poet. Do you feel that any one role fits best as a definition of who you are? I doubt that any of them does: those are all things that I've done, not what I am. My chief profession has been teacher, since that's the way the bills were paid. I entered into it precisely because the bills weren't being paid any other way, with two children and a third pending. Acting paid the bills for a while; directing (playmaking)—which absorbed me considerably—paid them not at all. All three have been, at one time or another, absorbing, gratifying, and immensely frustrating. Where were you on September 11, 2001, and what were you doing? I was here, in Williamstown, at my computer (as now). My wife had NPR's Morning Edition on the radio in the living room: she heard the initial report and called me to come quick, which I did. We turned on the TV and watched the ghastly spectacle from an angle very reminiscent of our perpetual view of the Trade Center from our NYU faculty apartment on Houston Street. I couldn't believe the buildings were actually falling until I saw the south tower's TV mast slowly tip and slip into the burgeoning mess. Tell me a bit about the genesis of the material comprising The General Is Asked His Opinion, and the origin of its title. Given some of the subject matter here – the present Iraq confab and the folks who instigated it – it’s diverting sometimes to pretend that you’re an actual wizened general responding, in verse form, to reporters’ questions regarding the sagacity of present-day U.S. military planning. I take no exception to your vision of me as a 4-star general. In the dull old real world, I never rose above corporal. In any case, yes, much of the book is a direct response to the headlines of the time. I was and am appalled at the dust storm of information/disinformation that flooded the press and the airwaves—it still does—and the crazy, self-damaging consequence to the country. My actual sense when I wrote the title poem—late at night on a table at Murphy's in Hanover, New Hampshire—just before the invasion of Iraq, was that the generals were aghast at the situation in which they found themselves—a sense pretty well borne out by later revelations. Later, I perceived a wider sense to the title, more or less as you have. I am profoundly incensed also by the wave of religious literalism—NOT fundamentalism, which ought to be a good thing—currently sweeping the globe, denying both common sense and the intuitive wisdom of the imagination in our quest for some sort of harmony with the godhead. There are, of course, other issues touched upon, different though related: the fall of communism, the mad dance of present day-capitalism, the crunch of our wacky economy on simple human functions—and, God help us, the simple startling messages bounced at us by the world around us. Where have you been published, prior to now? Various little magazines: Exquisite Corpse, Main Street Rag, New Orleans Review, Small Pond, Wisconsin Review, Café Review. No books, other than the much-reduced chapbook version of The General... published earlier this year by Pudding House Publications. Where did you grow up? Born in Egypt, brought over the water at age 4 by my American mother, went to or was sent to various schools on the East Coast, lived mostly in or in the environs of New York City. How, and why, did you come to join the military ranks? I was drafted! That happened to people in those days. As a University of Chicago dropout, I had no student exemption. Who are your poetic icons or influences? Dunno about icons, but Shakespeare woke me up at age 13. I am not a voracious reader of poetry (or anything else), but Blake and Yeats and Brecht have left their marks. Include Pound and Eliot, I guess. Individual poems stick with me: Karl Shapiro's “Scyros” is to me the ultimate World War II poem—even more than Auden's “September 1, 1939,” which (for me) lives close by. Auden's threnody for Yeats, certainly. And Edna Millay's “Moriturus.” Have to include Shelley's “Mask of Anarchy.” Have you thought about collecting and publishing your early poetry? Most of my stuff is filed in book-like folders, about the same size as The General..., from Wog Scofflaw Poems on to now. I'd have to look it over, and will should the actual opportunity present itself. As an art form, poetry doesn’t seem to have as much cultural relevancy today as it once did. There are likely as many practitioners as before if not more now, but the potential audience seems to have shrunken in large part because the diversionary outlets have multiplied. In this context, what can The General... represent, what can it accomplish, what can it mean? I have no idea what The General... is likely to "mean," in the social sense. With a little luck it can do what poetry always does, that is, create a specific community of readers (no mean accomplishment). Such communities may be large or small, active or quiescent. If I have a choice, I of course opt for large, and active. There is much to do out there in the physical world: some of the diversionary outlets you mention speak to these things, others lead the crazed retreat. I hope The General... finds some resonance among those who sense no clean distinctions among the personal, the spiritual, the political. Truth may or may not be beauty (or vice versa), but it's not all we know and, oh God, not all we need to. What sort of responses, if any, has your work garnered? Not a lot. Some praise, some bafflement, some raw rejection. What’s your writing process like? Do you find the work coming in fits and spurts, or fully formed? Fits and starts is right. When I'm lonely, or idle (out of work, or nowhere to go), or scared, or deeply frustrated, or even especially happy, poetry results. Sometimes my other occupations have totally absorbed me, other times they've run in tandem with occasional poetic blurts. I'm by no means a no-day-without-a-line poet, but when I do write I generally write much. Then there's revision. I go back to poems and dicker with them. Sometimes it’s only then that I get a handle on the form of the thing, the shape it's trying to assume. Form's a very important matter: sometimes more, sometimes less under my conscious control. If it's not there at all I tend to scrap it, or start from scratch. True formlessness is a kind of lie. Are we all doomed? Hoho. I hope not, but I do believe we make a mistake in assuming an anthrocentric, or even vivicentric, universe. The force that animates us has plenty of other stuff to occupy it: wouldn't be bored or that much put-out by our absence! Sure, I think our species and our planet are in tremendous danger. Huge population expansion, technological eruptions far beyond our ability to comprehend and absorb, unbridled acquisitiveness bordering on actual clinical madness—not a pretty picture. If we are going to pull through this, I fear it will have to be through adjustments many of us will find profoundly distasteful: decreasing relevance of the nation-state, increasing degrees of social organization, planning and restricting use of resources, drastic "leveling" of standards of living, conscious channeling of energies which, unbridled, have been the source of many of our proudest accomplishments. If all of that can be done without extinguishing the mother lode of individual insight—we may have a chance. Otherwise, we ought to be let loose with the merest shrug. And have a good day! |