On “Tanya,” Writing about Art and Full-Length Poetry Collections
After the panel for Writers@Drew on Sept. 25 in Mead Hall, Brenda Shaughnessy sat for an interview about her poetry and her writing practice. Shaughnessy is the author of six poetry collections, the last two of which are titled “Tanya” (2023) and “The Octopus Museum” (2019), both published by Knopf. The interview funneled outward into a rich conversation on art, queerness, politics and the practice of writing poetry in collection form. The following is an abridged version of the conversation:
Michael Indovina: So my first question is: what is your mindset when it comes to writing about art, or specifically ekphrastic poetry, in this case?
Brenda Shaughnessy: Well, I used to think that it was about talking back to the work. You know, here’s the work, I’m looking at it, and I’m responding to it, and I’m talking back to it. But I’m not sure I think about it that way anymore. I think, now, I think about it more like, I have this encounter with art, and it kind of mixes with my “art,” with my words, my poetry. My creative place. And so what I do, so it feels like I’m not regurgitating it, is re-present it in words, and with a kind of claiming it, almost like absorbing it, almost like taking on its voice.
MI: Yeah, absolutely. Like, the persona of it.
BS: Yes.
MI: Especially with, like–I’m writing a lot about Nan Goldin’s photography at the moment. I’m interested in queer art, especially from the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
BS: Yes. Good. No, we need the people to be writing and thinking about that time period. It was crucial. We lost a whole generation of artists. In all fields.
MI: Yeah, and I think about, I mean–I’m a queer person. I’m bisexual. I have two moms.
BS: Me too. I don’t have two moms, but I’m also bisexual. I guess yesterday was like, Bisexual Visibility Day?
MI: (laughing) I don’t even know.
BS: I don’t even remember. I didn’t feel very visible.
MI: Yeah, that’s fair. I definitely relate to that a lot. Bi erasure is an issue. But another question I had—and I’m asking because, you know, we’re a young community of writers who are just getting started–when it comes to writing full-length collections, what does your process look like? And how did that process differ, if at all, between writing “Tanya” and “The Octopus Museum?”
BS: I have written six full-length collections. They’ve all been different. For the earlier books, usually I would just sort of start writing random poems. And then, as certain themes would develop, over 30, 20 poems, then I would start to say “okay, there’s a theme here.” Usually that theme is just something pretty basic, like heartbreak, or a philosophical change. But lately, I’ve just been trying to write from life, in a way. “The Octopus Museum” was written in the years 2016-2019. So, the Trump years.
MI: Really pivotal time.
BS: And I felt like everything was disappearing, falling apart, and dying, and being destroyed. So, I was really worried about our kids, worried about our future and worried about the possibility of freedom or not, really. The possibility of democracy just imploding. It was too big.
MI: Yeah.
BS: I couldn’t understand any of what my fears were. They felt overwhelming and they took over everything. So all I could do was write. And you just catch the tiniest little corner of it. You just catch the tiniest corner of all of that fear, and you just write that little corner. And I had to tell myself that. I can’t do the whole thing. I don’t know the whole thing. I’ll never address all of this. I’ll never get to the heart of it. The fear is massive. It’s too big. So I just do a corner here, and a corner there, and a corner there. And I allowed myself to build the world of “The Octopus Museum” as a physical space. It’s a museum, and the poems are pieces of art shown in the museum.
MI: Right.
BS: Or pieces of archive, basically. So, “Tanya” was different because I had gotten a lot of commissions to write poems for artists. So a lot of those ekphrastic poems were not things that I chose. Well, I actually chose all those pieces, but they were assignments. I wrote the Méret Oppenheim piece for MoMA [the poem she is referencing here is called “The Impossible Lesbian Love Object(s),” published on MoMA’s website].
MI: That’s so cool.
BS: Yeah. So for that piece, I was allowed to pick anything in their collection to write about. And I was like “is that Méret Oppenheim fur teacup [Object, 1936] available?” And they said “yes.” I couldn’t believe it. So I wrote that, and I really wanted to use a lot of curse words in that poem, because I knew it was going to be connected. It’s in the audio archives now, at MoMA. And I thought it was important to make sure that that stayed extremely sexual, that piece, and that the commentary and analysis of it stayed in this realm of… that piece is like, pure fuck, right? It is so extreme. And I just felt like it was an opportunity to get that into MoMA. Because that piece is the first piece by a woman they ever bought. They couldn’t be bothered to buy any pieces by women until that one sort of emblematic, key piece came up. For a major institution of art history, I find that upsetting.
MI: Right. Yeah. And the idea of protest within art, within institutions. I was talking about Nan Goldin before, and I feel like she would very much relate to that idea. So, my last question: what would be your advice to any poets writing their first full-length poetry collection, especially to younger poets, like poets at Drew, for example?
BS: I think… trust in what drives you mad. Trust what drives you wild. Trust what you feel is obsessing you. Sometimes we feel like “ugh! All I write about is this one thing, and I gotta stop! I gotta do other things,” or “I shouldn’t just write about my dad,” or “I shouldn’t just write about my lover.” Write about it. Write your future where you want to read this kind of poem, you know? You also have to get your parents’ and your aunties’ and your mentors’ opinions of you out, in a way. Like out of your head. You can’t be serving them. Your art has to serve art.
MI: Absolutely.
BS: And so, we can’t dumb our work down because of some idea that “oh, people don’t get that.” We have to serve the art that we have inside of us, and serve the idea that it all corresponds with our little world. And by that, we have to not just stick to our truth, but to actually create our truth. It’s really easy to go like “oh! Greek myths are the kind of thing that people think make a poem serious.” This is the kind of thing where you have to actually interrogate, and be like “or, does this really have to be Orpheus?”
MI: Right, yeah. There are so many symbols outside of Greek mythology, or outside of what’s already been written.
BS: But also, I think it’s so important to do what you’re doing, which is totally, constantly see art, see theater, see dance, see music of all kinds. Just see everything. Good, bad, doesn’t matter. Because that’s all food. That all goes into your imagination, and then you do whatever you want with it. If it’s bad, you might just get a great idea from a bad piece of art you saw. You know, so just the kind of openness to whatever catches, and to trust it when it does, to trust it when you’re like “I think I really like that sculpture. I’m gonna write a poem about it.” It’s just important to trust oneself because there is nobody else that is going to know the art that you need to make. No one else is going to be able to give you permission to do it. No one is going to tell you “you should” or “you shouldn’t do that.” It’s all you. And put yourself out there.
A note from the interviewer: Thank you to Courtney Zoffness for helping to set up this interview—this would not have been possible without you. And a huge thank you to Brenda Shaughnessy for being such an inspiring multihyphenate poet, and for this wonderful conversation we had. This was a fantastic experience.
(An unabridged version of this interview is available in audio form)
Michael Indovina is a senior double-majoring in English with a creative writing concentration and studio art, alongside a theater arts minor.
Featured image courtesy of Michael Indovina. Image caption: A copy of Tanya, by Brenda Shaughnessy. Cover artwork: Mirror, 2022, by Clementime Keith-Roach. Cover design by Janet Hensen.
