Eric Paul Shaffer lives on O'ahu overlooking the Kalihi Valley in Honolulu. His books of poetry include Lāhaina Noon, Portable Planet, and Living at the Monastery. His fiction includes the novel Burn & Learn, and he has been honored with numerous awards and fellowships. Known as "Reckless," he is a charter member of the "Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers," an aggregation of writers including James Taylor III, John Kain, Kathryn Capels, Michael Adams, Padma Thornlyre, and the members of the publishing collective known as Turkey Buzzard Press, named in admiration and celebration of the work of Lew Welch. He is an avid fan of the blues, bad science fiction movies, horror novels, five-mile runs, Hawaiian language and culture, star-gazing, contemporary poetry, Hōkū and Nalu (the two wildest cats he's ever known), and, most of all, his wife Veronica.
How would you describe what you do?
I write poems. I
teach. I think. I comment.
I attack. I disturb. I annoy.
I commemorate. I guide. I commend.
I read. I respond. I condemn.
I amplify. I contradict. I adjust.
I correct. I deny. I confirm.
I observe. I connect. I do.
I affirm.
Is this different
than what other people think you do?
Others who write poems are definitely working differently
than I am. Many are doing all I
mentioned above and more; many are doing otherwise, elsewise, and lesswise. The number and character of the
responsibilities a writer of poems embodies determine what he or she is doing. Of all the possibilities for writing, I most
want to make literature. Not every writer
does. Whatever making literature
requires, I will do.
How do you know if
you’re on the right track with a project?
I never know. Writing
means bushwhacking through unfamiliar territory with little hope of getting
anywhere and little hope of knowing when you do. The only hopeful sign in the territory is
practicing until I have a workable draft.
From there, I go farther: creating a publishable and performable
draft. I’ve gone as far as I can go down
the right track when someone turns to me and says, “That’s a good poem. I read it to my friends.”
How do you go about
making choices?
Choices make me. We
may think we make choices, but as we weather our ages, surroundings, and
circumstances, all we seem to do is navigate between the options nearest our
particular selves, limited as both are. From
there, we make ourselves with what we come to and what comes to us.
I love
writing because in writing I have the largest, broadest, greatest selection of
choices: I am required and allowed to examine and make every choice of word,
line break, verse break, figure of speech, sentence structure, detail, narratorial
stance, and direction in every poem I write.
In writing, I can even create choices available to no one else, and I
make and re-make those choices until I am satisfied for the moment--until there
is a new moment.
How do you know when
you’re done?
A writer’s work is never done. I hear Leonardo da Vinci (although probably
at least a hundred others said the same thing) said, “Art is never finished,
only abandoned.” I laugh every time I
hear that. After all, that observation is
not only true of everything, but it is least true of art. Art is an effort to get something done to
perfection, no matter how much time is required, and if a block of marble
chipped into a figure, some streaks of paint wiped on a canvas, a bunch of
noise arranged symmetrically in the air, or a batch of words inked on a page become
art, it’s not because somebody only did just enough work. Who makes art spends much more time working on
that art than anybody else does on anything else. Any good writer returns to a poem years later
just to change a single word because that is what the work requires. So I repeat: A writer’s work is never done.
What’s your workspace
like?
Veronica and I just moved into a house too small and quirky for
most to consider, and the place particularly appealed to me because there is a
room at the front of the house with windows on three sides, a tiny view of
mountains, a breeze from the sea, and, in this odd little space alone, room for
all of my books. There is light from
everywhere, a place for cats to snooze while I work, my angled desk set in the
middle of the room, and best of all, a view into the living room and kitchen so
that I don’t feel lonely when I’m alone writing. I can see my wife and cats going about their
business while I do my work. I’m home.
What are your
essential tools?
My essential tools are the poems, classic and contemporary,
of my fellow writers of poems. I read
everybody, all the time, which makes me cranky and creative. As a writer should, I am evaluating the work
of everyone around me, and I am learning what I will do with their excellences
and excrement. As my students and peers
will tell you, I’ve never been one to suffer bad writing silently, so, as you
can imagine, I am popular and beloved.
No matter what, reading as much of the work of others as I can is an essential
tool for improving my own work.
What’s the most
surprising tool you use?
I am surprised by what many think is my most surprising
tool: my ear. I write lines only after
speaking and listening to them. Many
basic errors of rhythm, wording, and meaning are eliminated by using the ear to
create poems. Of course, using the ear
necessitates using the other unsurprising surprising tool: the tongue. Licking the lines into shape, tasting the
words, sending the work tripping, flipping, and skipping across the tongue are
all part of writing poems, too, and the ear is the tool by which that work is
measured. The bottom line is this: if
the poem doesn’t sound good, it isn’t good.
Listen and listen hard. You’ll
see what I mean.
What was your biggest
mistake or the one you learned the most from?
My life is filled with big mistakes, and I’m certainly not
qualified to judge which is biggest.
Here’s a list of my big young mistakes:
I believed literature was important to everybody. I believed everyone knew gathering money had
little to do with success. I believed
cheating was universally condemned. I
believed quality trumped acquaintances.
I believed most people would think carefully, deeply, and frequently,
and act on their thinking. I believed
that I could say whatever I meant to say.
What I have
learned from all of these mistakes is that in any world we work to make truly
human, they are not mistakes at all, and my responses to these attitudes have
led to life and writing strategies with which I deal directly with undermining,
overturning, and blind-siding all of the aforementioned and mistaken attitudes.
What do you wish that
you would have known earlier?
I wish I’d known earlier that most people have more bad
ideas about what poetry is, what poems are, and what both do than I could ever have
imagined. Had I known, I would have
gotten to work sooner.
What’s the worst
piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
“Get a job.” This
advice is contradictory, tangential, or irrelevant to everything significant
I’ve ever done in my life. I need a job,
and I need to do my job well, but I need my work more.
What’s the best?
One day in late December 1986, my writing buddy James Taylor
III and I had the astounding audacity to drop in on the poet Philip Whalen in
Santa Fe. We three spent an hour or two
talking about anything and everything, about which I remember nothing except
Whalen climbing like a skinny, robe-wrapped, bald, white spider across the face
of his floor-to-ceiling bookcase to retrieve a book he wanted to read to
us. His last words to us were the best
writing advice I’ve ever gotten. As he
closed the door, he smiled and said, “Write when you find work.” The wisdom in that little joke still cracks
me up.
What are you working
on now?
I am reading more poems.
I am writing more poems. I am
building and re-building my sixth manuscript of poetry and offering the book to
publisher after publisher. I am attending
and planning public readings of my work and the work of my fellow writers of
poems. I am paying attention to the
times and the customs. I am revising. I am teaching new writers to read, recognize,
and make literature. I am thinking. I am watering the avocado tree. And I am rubbing Hōkū’s tummy while I type with one hand.
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