EXALTATION & PANIC: LAUREN SHAPIRO’S ARENA, AN INTERVIEW
Ali Black: I’d like to start at the very beginning of Arena and talk about the speaker’s tone in “Presentation.” The tone feels instructional and intentional, careful and empathetic. These specific tones seem to carry throughout the book. Can you talk about the tone of this collection and how you think it impacts the work?
Lauren Shapiro: I’ve always been very intrigued by tone as it pertains to work on the page. The poem you mention simultaneously pokes fun at self-help and academic jargon (and even the narrator’s own ability to understand her grief) while also creating distance between the narrator and the painful events that underlie much of the collection. Other poems, such as “Unspoken Bond” or “10,000 Dads,” employ a certain dryness or sarcasm as a tool to explore a more serious idea. My first book lived almost entirely in this realm, but in Arena I wanted to see if I could make a collection that could encompass a wider variety of tones. I wanted to see if more serious poems could coexist with ones that employed a dark humor. I wanted more empathetic poems, as you say, to live with self-critical poems. We don’t live in a single tonal realm, so why should a collection of poetry do so?
AB: Yes! I guess that is what I mean by intentional. The speaker’s tone feels purposefully sarcastic (a bit witty even) in several poems and I saw that as a defensive mechanism, which is why I really trust and appreciate the speaker in these poems. How important is it to you for the reader to trust the speaker in a poem—especially when exploring serious subjects? Was that something you were thinking about in Arena?
LS: Yes, I think trust is important, but maybe also the narrator acknowledging what she doesn’t know. I’m turned off by authoritative narrators, who are usually just smug and self-involved authors in disguise. I’m drawn to poetry that offers more space for the reader.
AB: In thinking about the kind of poetry that I’m interested in (the kind that pulls me in as a writer)—poems that are raw, thoughtful and honest—I’m wondering what it was like writing poems that grapple with grief and loss. How important is it to face hard and heavy topics in poetry to you?
LS: Well, I typically run from those topics, or hide behind artifice. I have an aversion to wallowing, to living too much in a private grief in a public space (as in a poem). But the grief and loss I was exploring felt important, and larger than my own private narrative. I didn’t want to dance around and poke fun anymore; I wanted to address it. I struggled with that line between the personal and the more universal, living a private grief in a public world full of even greater grief and loss. I tried to situate myself in the world as I saw it in that time. That was an approach that made sense to me.
AB: Thank you for taking that approach. I think it’s the reason Arena is so powerful. Can we shift a bit away from the poems and talk about the images throughout the collection? The images are just as powerful as the poems. How did you land on including them?
LS: I wanted to create the feelings of exaltation and panic simultaneously and immediately, and words often take too long. Elsewhere I wanted to inspire feelings of loneliness or grief, emotions that in many ways resist language. Think of the phrase: “There are no words.” So much of successful art for me is about juxtaposition and space, whether it’s large associative leaps in poems, or unexpected moments in works of visual art that force the viewer to fill the gaps. I was also thinking about cognitive dissonance and the concept of “the real”, which was feeling fluid to me. Photographs are often considered, at least in terms of snapshots, to be “real”. I wanted to create a world in a poem and then augment that with the immediate and visceral emotions inspired by a “real” image.
AB: You have three poems titled “Arena” in the collection and the final one is on repeat in my mind. I admire the valid anger and frustration in the speaker’s voice. Did anger and frustration somewhat guide or inform your writing process in Arena?
LS: Yes, there is definitely anger in the book. I think anger and grief are best friends. They bond through the feeling of powerlessness.
AB: Arena ends with a tender scene. It’s almost surprising, but it makes a nod towards kindness and help and community. Is that something you were thinking about when writing this book?
LS: In many ways the book is about community. It’s about responsibility and family, but also about feeling simultaneously other than and yet represented by the actions of the state, about feeling repulsed by the spectacle of suffering and violence that one is in fact complicit in. I think for any forward movement, personally or societally, one has to be self-aware and generous, to value one’s contribution to community.
Lauren Shapiro is the author of Arena (CSU Poetry Center, 2020) and Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011). She is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ali Black is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is a current graduate student for poetry at the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program and she is the poetry editor for Gordon Square Review. Ali is the recipient of the 2016 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize for her poem “Kinsman.” Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, jubilat, LitHub, One, The Offing and elsewhere.
Arena is now available for purchase.