Shaindel Beers is a teacher, a poet, a mid-westerner, and she's a friend of mine. So I am excited to host Ms. Beers on her whirlwind virtual book tour "On the Hood of a Cutlass Supreme," wherein she presents her first book of poems from Salt, "A Brief History of Time," released in February of 2009.
Shaindel Beers earned a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago in 2000 and her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Vermont College in 2005, where I met her. Her startling new book is a dense collection of time travel that carries the reader through decades and centuries and spans the geography and psychology of a young woman's life. And though she is only 32 years old, Ms. Beers' life, one could say, seems as densely packed and successful as her first book of poems. Shaindel Beers lives in Oregon with her husband. She teaches English, poetry, and creative writing classes. Beers also does her farm work, personal training, an online radio show, "Translated By." She edits for "Contrary," a poetry and fiction webzine. In addition, beers is the poetry reviewer for "Bookslut," an online monthly devoted to literature.
In "A Brief History of Time," Beers deftly blends incongruent elements such as love and samurai. Her poetic voice is frank and multifaceted. She tells her life's stories while enchanting the reader with her use of language, form, imagery, stunning emotional insight, and social empathy.
This first book, composed over ten years, includes award-winning poems in various styles: sestinas, plainsong, free verse, and the exotic ghazal. Beers' poems give voice to a range of characters, from the pedestrian to the sublime. Through this poetry, we see the world from a virtuous and honest narrator, as in the poem "Return," "I lived there, and now I need to go back, feel my legs merge again into fins/ and swim through time. Have tea with the Lady of the Lake, / laugh with the sirens at their stories. Shudder at tales of / strange men cutting holes to the realm above."
Shaindel Beers' second book is a work in progress, forthcoming from Salt, and tentatively titled "The Children's War."
I had the opportunity to ask Shaindel a few questions about "A Brief History of Time:"
Bluemoon Northeast: Your book's title comes from the poem, "A Brief History of Time," an appropriate title for this collection in which time recurs as a theme: "for the nine o'clock break (6)," "songs from my childhood sprang back..(31)," "because I have you this weekend..(61)…." There are many examples of time references in this collection. Can you say a bit about time and how it emerged as a theme in this collection?
Shaindel Beers: I think of time as something we can't escape. When we come into the world have a birth date. And, if we are buried, there are two dates with a dash to represent everything that happened in the interim on our tombstone. That dash is everything. Time is utterly fascinating. Our lives are shaped by it. We wish we could go back in time. We want time to slow down. We want time to speed up; we wish to see into the future. We regret not valuing time. I remember, especially when I was a teenager, waiting for a boy to pick me up for a date and thinking that the time when I would hear his car in the driveway needed to GetHereNow! Then, one day I thought, someday I'm going to be eighty and regret all the minutes I spent just waiting. As I get older, I realize how relative time is. A year seemed like forever; now, it's hard to believe it's 2009.
I'm also a theoretical physics geek, as evidenced by the title of my book (an homage to Stephen Hawking). I daydream about things like the Grandfather Paradox and (yes, in Star Trek terms) the Temporal Directive. What if you could go back in time like in my poem "Rewind" and change these events? Would the world be any better? Would we (humankind) just find different ways to destroy ourselves? Or, would we have good intentions but do more harm than good?
Bluemoon Northeast: In the title poem, we are taken on an odyssey through a history of love that seems random yet delivers the reader to a very deliberate location. Tell me about this poem.
Shaindel Beers: I wrote this poem while studying with Richard Jackson at Vermont College, now Vermont College of Fine Arts. Rick is a great associative poet. He asked me to look at other poets who write this way: Dean Young, Robert Bly (the father of Leaping Poetry), and many Eastern European poets who write this type of poem. Think of stream-of-consciousness in prose if you're not sure what I mean. I began writing about love—specifically, the crumbling of my first marriage—and then I started thinking about other times' and cultures' concepts of love.
It was a fun poem to write. Anything that popped into my mind I went with, without self-editing. I did research the poem; thank G-d for Google! I went from marriage being a war of attrition to wondering about warriors. I've always been fascinated by the samurai. I studied various classes of samurai. I thought about how my (romantic) relationships with people never seemed to work out. I tried to think of what I really love that will be here forever (theoretically, at least). I thought of mountains and researched when certain mountain ranges were formed. This poem took me on a journey more than I wrote the poem. I love that I ended the piece with Jenny sitting on the hood of her 1983 Cutlass Supreme. Those were some of the best times of my life, speaking of time.
Bluemoon Northeast: I noticed that while much of the work here is free verse. However, there are a few instances in which you use a form, particularly the sestina and the ghazal. How does your poetic expression in formal conditions differ from expression in free verse?
Shaindel Beers: I think that strict form is a maddening exercise that hones the poet's skills. Whereas, it's difficult to ride a motorcycle, at least for me, since I haven't had much practice. It's difficult to jump a motorcycle off a ramp and fly perfectly through a flaming hoop to land safely on the other side. That's the difference between free verse and prose to me. There's a lot that can go wrong with all of these restrictions. I'm aware that some of the form poems in this book might not seem as strong to the reader as the free-verse poems.
I'm still sort of waving to the crowd going, "Okay, a little singed, but I made it over here alive!" I hope they're rooting for me instead of pointing out the burn marks on my suit. Some forms work philosophically with their content. For instance, sestinas seem obsessive because of those six repeating end words throughout. I think it works to have a sestina about something obsessive, like love. In "Moonlight Sestina," the end words are you, moonlight, real, touch, infatuation, and once. In a love poem, you, "the beloved," is important. Moonlight is blamed for lunacy, which could be obsessive; there is also moonlight in snow, which reflects, hence the repetition. We often wonder if love is real. This is also an obsessive tendency. Touch is an end word for the same reason. I shouldn't have to explain why infatuation keeps repeating. And, I think there's fun irony in the word once repeating throughout a sestina. This wouldn't be close to the same poem if the parameters of the sestina weren't there.
Although poetry is beautiful and artistic, the sestina is like algebra. The formula is laid out; you just plug in words. But they have to be the right words; in a Ginsbergian "each word = right word" sort of way. There's no room for mistakes, especially when trying to stick to the iambic pentameter!
Bluemoon Northeast: Also, can you say a bit about the ghazal as a form and why you chose it?
Shaindel Beers: The ghazal (pronounced like "guzzle" in English) is a hard form to explain. It is an ancient Persian form of poetry, and there are certain things that one can do in other languages you can't do in English. Therefore, if you're writing in English, you choose which rules you want to follow. For "Weekend Rain Ghazal," I tried to write couplets with no enjambment and where each couplet stands alone as a poem. I also used the same end word in both lines of the first couplet and followed through using "rain" as the end word for the second line of each couplet. I signed the poem with a pseudonym in the last line. Traditionally, the ghazal is about illicit, unattainable love. My poem was written in the early crazed infatuation stage of my relationship with my husband. I guess it fits; he was supposed to be working across the state building a fence right after we met. Instead, the rain kept him with me.
If your readers Google "ghazal," they will discover lists of rules and examples of poems to last a lifetime!
Bluemoon Northeast: Natasha Saje said that "your poems stitch together an autobiography whose questions of gender, race, and class remain open." Would you call these poems confessional? Can you talk about writing autobiographical poetry?
Shaindel Beers: The problem with calling my poems confessional is that this label seems to be a way for men to not take women's poetry seriously. Someone says, "Oh, she writes confessional poetry," and it means we don't have to hold the writing to as high a standard, or it means that it will never reach the same standard of quality as other types of poetry. I think that a lot of my poems are rooted in autobiography. I'm a firm believer in the 1970s-personal-is-political-brand of feminism. Many women write relationship poems because their lives are viewed through that lens. In parts of the country, women are still so-and-so's wife or so-and-so's mom. I don't know if we've come as far as a lot of people think we have in terms of gender equality.
What I worried about most when this book was released were the people who are mentioned or alluded to in the poems, reading them and freaking out. I never thought about this as I was writing the poems. I guess I was a pretty selfish writer.
My loyalty is to the art; life is a raw material for poetry, anything goes, sort of thing. I do believe that, to an extent. But when my parents told me they had ordered the book, I had this sinking feeling. I thought, "Ohmigod! They're going to sue me!" In the first poem, I mention my mother trying to stab my father. (I've never asked either of them about it. It was something I heard from my brother). I also mention my mother being in jail for two counts of attempted murder. These were actually reduced to manslaughter charges. Such is poetry. But my mom emailed saying, "We received your poetry book, and we think it is very good," which is not at all the reception I had expected.
I'm slightly relieved that my next book is ekphrastic poetry, where I am looking at children's art. There will be less of me out there for a while. But, I'm sure I will still be writing confessional poetry. I feel like one of those people who won't go to Europe until they've been to all fifty states. Sure, I know there is a giant world to explore, but I don't even feel like I know myself yet.
