I am never lonely reading a Natalie Shapero poem. Her fourth collection, Stay Dead, out this September with Copper Canyon Press, is no exception. From cutting, sardonic observations of labor and housing markets, “why / wouldn’t I want more of what God made?” to devastating admissions of helplessness and pain, “I didn’t pin it as grief at first, the feeling / of imagining placing myself / in the path of that truck…”, the speakers in Shapero’s poems refuse to stay quiet, to stay numb, to stay dead.
The poems in Stay Dead are as complex as they are immediate. How do you incriminate the self without seeking absolution? How do you question the conditions in your corner of the world—and still choose not to abandon it? How—and why—make protest art when capitalism so easily absorbs, integrates, and repurposes critique to its benefit? With absurdist humor, explorations of method acting, and layered allusions to Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Anthony Bourdain, and others, Stay Dead unflinchingly interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape.
Stay Dead looks to those moments that force our hands and reveals a wide affective terrain peopled with speakers that desire to live and to die, that repress emotion to survive trauma and have rageful outbursts against bosses and enemies, that haunt the dead and are haunted by the escape hatch of death. It is this capability that renders Stay Dead a vital companion in this latest stretch of years when political repression is on the rise, arts funding is being slashed, and universities are being targeted.
I first met Shapero when she was my teacher, nearly a decade ago in Boston, MA, a city we’ve both since left. It feels appropriate that when we spoke in August over email, our conversation began with a discussion of place and covered, among other things, palinodes and poetic callbacks, the power of the second-person, sanitized in-flight entertainment, writing about pain, and the restorative and destructive power of the sun.
The Rumpus: As a long-time reader of your work, I’ve found great pleasure in tracing certain threads across your writing: acting, fear of the past, identification with bugs, & paintings all come to mind, and formal obsessions, such as the iconic SMALL CAPS, twisting aphorisms and other found speech, absurdist humor, and the understated exit from a poem with an em-dash. How have your poetic obsessions (if you identify with that phrase) evolved over the course of writing four books? What have you come to understand about your obsessions through writing? Between the publication of Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, 2021) and Stay Dead, you left Boston and started teaching in LA, both cities that appear in your writing. How has place shaped your obsessions?
Natalie Shapero: First, Aishvarya, thank you so much for these questions and for spending such deep time with the book. I definitely identify with the idea of poetic obsessions, ha, and I do think the obsessions of Stay Dead are outgrowths of the obsessions of Popular Longing—much of Popular Longing was interested in labor politics and on-the-job performances of subservience and cheer, and this pretty directly led to me doing a lot of reading about theories of acting and ending up with the acting throughline that runs across poems in this new book. Both books also investigate art markets, art valuation, et cetera, but Popular Longing is more focused on how institutional capture and commodification shapes the audience experience of art, where Stay Dead stays more with the artists.
Rothko is a nexus for a lot of the cross-cutting threads in Stay Dead—I actually almost called the book Red Item, which would have worked out for indexing Rothko’s work while also being a reference to one of my other obsessions that figures in heavily here (the visual gag of pulling out a laundry load that is supposed to be all lights, but where one red item has gotten inadvertently mixed in). I’m always interested in figuring through the idea of contamination, the struggle to hold oneself apart from the poisons of the world, whether surrender and survival are complements or opposites. Rothko’s also a go-to for thinking about place, because he took on various site-specific work and so much of it was unintentionally (or at least negligently) impermanent—like, he made these murals for display at Harvard in a cafeteria there, and the murals ultimately sustained so much sun and other damage that the school took them off the walls and stashed them somewhere out of public view. (And yes, I did fail, during my time in Boston, to ever see them.) The sun current takes me into the SoCal poems, but here as something that’s restorative rather than destructive (or restorative by virtue of being destructive??). Burned into my brain is the Brandeis quote, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant…”—I know Brandeis was being figurative there, but I’m not (I mean, except when I am).
Rumpus: In an old interview I found recently, Marie Howe said, “…[W]hat mattered to me was not a book but a poem. Each poem. One poem. It was a world.” I’d encountered the worlds of the poems from Stay Dead in journals and magazines—where they felt wholly complete—and yet, encountering them in the collection, the sequencing was incredibly impactful, refracting new conversations between poems. For example, the way last lines of poems contrasted with epigraphs, such as “everything changes except / I guess for stone” followed by “…everything changes, even stone (Claude Monet)” elicited so much surprise. Could you talk a bit about how you sequenced Stay Dead? Are there any poems that didn’t make the cut, or other modes of organizing you experimented with?
Shapero: Yes, I definitely did want the poems to stand on their own but also to be part of one cohesive project. I did a lot of research about Monet, in the course of writing this book, and he was known in his time for having many paintings in progress simultaneously, working outdoors on a landscape canvas with a bunch of partially completed other canvases at the ready, swapping them out as the light changed. Like, he would work every day at 3:00 pm on his light-at-3:00 pm painting, and then when it was 3:30 or whatever, he was like—“Can’t work on that one anymore, let’s get the 3:30 one.” I thought that was a useful idea, working into and through on a group of pieces that portray the same material but in different lights, and that add up to offer a more comprehensive picture than any one of them could provide individually.
I also, yes, like the idea of callbacks, of having poems that sort of have inside jokes among one another. Some of this had to be engineered kind of in reverse. Stay Dead has four epigraphs that come in at different points and punctuate the book; the Ed Ruscha one, which comes first, is about Monet, and so I thought it might be productive if the other quotes were actually by Monet. When I came across the “everything changes, even stone” line, I felt like that could be a good dialectical moment for the book—to have a poem end with the more hesitant “everything changes, except I guess for stone,” and then that hesitancy gets smacked down by Monet on the next page. I just liked the idea of a poem that would try to take a more tempered or nuanced approach to an issue, and then the voice of history / authority is like—“No, there are no exceptions to this rule.” I had already published “First of June” in Poetry Northwest with a different ending, and I liked that original ending fine, but it wasn’t essential to the project or anything, so I just lopped off the original ending and substituted the set-up for the Monet quote. Sometimes it’s almost like writing a little skit or something, where one page is the straight man and then the next page comes in with the punchline.
As to poems that didn’t make the cut: I had a thought for a minute that the Notes section, which is partly an actual Notes section and partly a joke on the idea of a Notes section / a poem in itself, would include a bunch of additional poems that I’d written during this period but that didn’t fit within the book proper. It ended up seeming a little bit too busy overall, but it’s an idea I’m still potentially interested in for the future.
Rumpus: The title of the collection brought to mind for me the idea of corpsing—when actors break during a performance and start laughing. Calling it corpsing, for me, implies that we are asking actors to “stay dead.” In Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy, she says about corpsing during an academic panel: “Before bursting into laughter during my talk, I was, in a sense, playing ‘dead,’ if you think of ‘dead’ as symbolic of acting out of your socialized self, pushing emotions and spontaneous feelings underground.” Reading Stay Dead, I laughed so much, which made the title function like an imperative and a dare— “Can you, reader, ‘stay dead’ to the conditions these poems name and expose and refuse to look away from?” What role do you think humor has in disrupting societal contracts of numbness, in poems or elsewhere? What elements of humor were you experimenting with in Stay Dead? Also, what’s been making you laugh lately?
Shapero: I much appreciate your phrasing here—“societal contracts of numbness” is a good way to talk about what’s often considered to be professionalism, decorum, et cetera. A lot of the humor in the book is supposed to be sort of unhinged deviations from these norms, often in the form of apology.
As to what has been making me laugh… recently, I was watching an edited version of the movie Sideways (I was flying on Alaska Airlines, and for some reason they still offer only sanitized versions of their in-flight entertainment, even as most other carriers have I think dropped that protocol). There’s a part in it where Thomas Hayden Church’s character is rhapsodizing about Sandra Oh’s character (sorry, I don’t remember their names in the movie), and he says, “She smells different, she tastes different, she fucks different—she fucks like an animal.” But in the edited version, it’s dubbed so that he says, “She smells different, she tastes different, she talks different—she talks like an animal.” It’s just an amazing choice, though of course still not as iconic as the Snakes on a Plane dub, which is widely considered to be the greatest family-friendly dub in cinema history (“I’ve had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-through-Friday plane”).
Rumpus: I have always admired how your poems accentuate the strangeness of mundane language, and so often this work begins with the title. How do you approach titling the poems in Stay Dead? For example, in the poems, “Play In,” “In Something,” and “Wrong Line,” the titles appear in the body of the poem, often as part of a twist or punchline revealing the speakers’ fraught or contradictory emotions about existence. These moments haunt me when I subsequently encounter those phrases out in the world—and that capability is one of the things I value most about poetry. Elsewhere, last lines bounce us back up to the title, resolving it. The poem “And Shove It,” ends with the line “Hey take this—.” The poem, “No One Calls It That,” ends with the lines “after the wrecking / of the ROYAL MAIL SHIP TITANIC—” It’s so satisfying how the last lines and titles click together with this inevitable sense of closure—and inescapability, and circularity. I haven’t encountered that move before and I wonder what you’d call it. How did these titles come to be?
Shapero: I had been thinking a lot about how titles are perceived because, with my previous book, one of the most common questions I got was why the final poem in that book is called “Pennsylvania.” I felt sort of goofy being like, “Because the poem takes place in Pennsylvania… the title is the setting,” even though that’s the actual answer. I think the location-establishing title is a pretty common convention, and I was almost here going to give the example of the movie Fargo, which is referenced in Stay Dead, but actually that’s an inapt example because the bulk of that movie takes place in Minnesota.
In both of the poems you mention here, my hope was that the reader would encounter the title out of context (duh, titles are basically inherently out of context), then forget about it as the poem goes along, and then have a reaction at the end of the poem that almost gets them to say the title to themselves in their head—thereby bringing things back to the beginning. I mean, who knows. But these are two different approaches to nudging the reader back to the title. With “And Shove It,” the poem is intended to prompt the reader to complete the phrase at the end. With “No One Calls It That,” the title is a bristling reaction against the last line. It’s also meant to be a ludicrous potential takeaway for that poem—like, having that title is maybe a gesture toward the poem misunderstanding itself by foregrounding how ridiculous it is to say the full name of the Titanic, when it’s actually a poem about survival, a poem against being written off, et cetera. Like, no one calls it the Royal Mail Ship Titanic, but everyone calls Molly Bloom, in her seven stockings, “Unsinkable.”
Rumpus: Many poems in Stay Dead torque around an encounter between the speaker and another person. Often, these poems use the second-person to converse with a whole range of addressees, not just beloveds, living and dead, but also God and even “yous” that may have perpetrated violence against the speaker. I love this subversive use of the second-person. The final poem in the book, in some ways, turns the second-person addresses on the speaker via its title: “Have You Been Wanting to Go to Sleep and Not Wake Up.”
Can you talk about the uses of the second-person in your poetics? I also think of this technique in parallel to the book’s treatment of “love” poems, such as the cheeky “Quick Love Note,” which ends on the lines: “Promise me / no posterity, nothing extractable, no record, / nothing fixed like an eye on the stock of the sky / and maybe—I said maybe—I’ll look your way.” What draws you to writing towards a “you?” What possibilities has this brought into your work?
Shapero: Yes, I’m really big on the second person! You mention the last poem in the book and how it “turns the second-person addresses on the speaker”—this is definitely a mode that interests me a lot. The entire title of this book is maybe doing that, because it’s in the imperative and might be taken at first to be an instruction from the poems’ speaker to the reader, but, in the context of the poem it comes from,“Oh Boo Hoo,” it’s actually something other people are asking the speaker to do. For anyone who would like to read the most accomplished poem to ever work like this, find Wanda Coleman’s “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead.”
Rumpus: Many speakers in Stay Dead are concerned with the ways in which the pressures surrounding artistic production modify the art that is produced, most significantly through the example of Rothko, who is “A cautionary tale about painting / oneself right out of one’s own life.” There is a way in which I experience your poems about painting as being anti-ekphrasis, anti-ars poetica, haunted by the desire to “get all this language the fuck away from me,” to produce art that can be “degraded by the sun.”
How has having written impacted the way you continue to write? Has the response to your poems and working as a poet shaped what you write? Aspects of Stay Dead reminded me of Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and Danez Smith’s Bluff, both of which trouble the commodification of poetry.
Shapero: Yes, I’m a big admirer of both of those poets, and I’m always interested in how artists’ material conditions shape the work. One of the early quotes in Stay Dead—“Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter”—comes from the movie An American in Paris, which is in part about painting / making music / making art and trying to navigate the pressures of patronage, of production, of paying the bills. In general, a specter is haunting this book… the specter of the boss’s daughter… I was very influenced also by the Sharon Zukin book Loft Living, which is a really fascinating study of artists who moved into abandoned industrial spaces in SoHo, transformed them into live/work studios, and then saw that SoHo loft aesthetic take off, ultimately becoming unattainably expensive. For me, because I’ve made my living as a poet by teaching in universities, I think a lot about universities as spaces of deep thinking and intellectual community and also as spaces of repression, surveillance, casualization, profiteering, et cetera. I don’t know that there’s a way to write within those conditions without also writing about them.
Rumpus: Do any poems in this collection feel like palinodes to prior poems or writing? I can’t help but wonder this about the poem “Fireball,” in which the speaker says, “Please stop circulating the untrue rumor / that I have been telling people I hope there is / no Heaven, that one world / is enough.” This made me laugh and feel personally called out, as a person who often circulates your 2018 essay “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” in which this claim originates. Other images from that essay, including a streetlight “beam, white and garish,” appear elsewhere in Stay Dead as well.
Shapero: I do love poems that return to and revise earlier work — you mentioned Danez Smith earlier, and a palinode I think about a lot is their poem “My Deepest & Most Ashamed Apologies to Assotto Saint” (it’s also, regarding your question above, a poem about poetry’s production, dissemination, reception, etc.). I also love poems that revise themselves as they go along — some touchstones for me here are Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Parallel,” a small and amazing poem that sets up a really smart and tidy central metaphor and then both underscores and unravels it with a quick run of questions, and Gary Soto’s “How Things Work,” which has my favorite self-revising ending of any poem ever. I think maybe the most explicit palinode moment in Stay Dead is actually in the Notes section, which references (though not by name) a poem from Popular Longing called “Green.” There’s a line in “Green” about hiking up to “the obverse side of the Hollywood sign”; during the production process for Popular Longing, copy editor Rowan Sharp correctly pointed out that the obverse side of the Hollywood sign would be the front, so it’s maybe a little weird to specify that you hiked up to the front — wouldn’t you only point which side you were hiking up to if it was the non-obvious one? I completely agreed with this, but I kept that phrasing anyway, just like as a little experiment or tantrum or flex or however is the right way to construe wanting to dementedly bask in the small amount of power that comes with having the last word on what goes in the book. When I got the copy edits back for Stay Dead, Rowan had worked on that manuscript also and had written me a nice little message in that part of the Notes — it was a fun tiny exchange across years.
Rumpus: This book has such a wide range of references & allusions. Perhaps to close, I’d like to ask—what non-poetry practices are fueling your attention right now? Who is the ideal non-poet reader you hope your work might reach?
Shapero: Thanks much for this question, and for the whole interview. Non-poetry is the fuel for most of my poetry, for sure. Currently I’m reading Brian Wilson’s book I Am Brian Wilson; one thing I was taken aback to learn was that, performing late in his life / career, he would sometimes cover the mediocre 90s hit “Brian Wilson” by Barenaked Ladies. From the book: “That was the strangest song we played back then. I didn’t know about it until the guys in the band brought it to rehearsal. It was a song about a guy who is trying to write a song and can’t and he compares himself to me when I was under the treatment of Dr. Landy. In the song, the guy has a dream that he gets up to 300 pounds and then starts floating until the ground is so far away that he can’t see it anymore. I never had that dream, but I was cool with playing the song if we did a good job.” More questions than answers there.
Regarding non-poet readers — when I was early in poetry, in Ohio, a lot of the readings I did were these small punk series that would take place in bars, and it wasn’t like the reading series was renting out the whole bar or anything like that, so there were always people there who were not expecting a poetry reading and had just come to the bar to hang out. It made me very attuned to questions of audience, working in real time within the responsibility to provide something interesting or useful or at least non-off-putting for a non-poetry crowd—that is, an audience that isn’t necessarily pre-programmed to vibe with whatever you do just because it’s poetry.
