A Review of The Selected Shepherd, edited by Jericho Brown— November 1, 2024 by Jessica Reed
Reginald Shepherd (1963–2008) wrote fierce, brilliant poetry—supremely musical artifacts of self-interrogations, “difficult” (he usually found poetry described as such to be the most edifying), in dialogue with the whole of Western tradition. The Selected Shepherd, edited by Jericho Brown and released earlier this year, is an excellent introduction to this important poet. Brown praises Shepherd for his tendency to wrestle with questions and not to shy from issues that beset him. Shepherd’s abiding love of sound acts a delightful counterpoint to the knotty truths he ravels and unravels in his work. His way of thinking on the page, of doubling back and asking harder and harder questions, is complemented by his assiduous attention to language at the level of conjunction, preposition, article, even punctuation.
As I looked over the body of Shepherd’s work, I was struck by his parentheticals—complex, wide-ranging, ecstatic, and departing from conventions of parallelism or grammar (as if to say the ideas he’s handling resist tidy arrangement). Take this parenthetical from “Antibody”:
Up and down the sidewalk stroll local gods (see also: saunter, promenade, parade of possibilities, virtues at play: Sunday afternoons before tea dance, off-white evenings kneeling at public urinals, consumed by what confuses, consuming it too).
This cumulative sentence could end long before it does, its rhythm mounting as the parenthetical progresses, the list breaking from itself after two synonyms for “stroll,” moving from verbs to nouns, which are elaborated upon before a second colon preceding a list (he asks his readers to hold several ideas in mind) until “urinals,” where what follows is an emotional comment. All this momentum creates a performative text of the “consuming” idea, which returns at the poem’s close:
What’s left of burning burns as well: me down to blackened glass, an offering in anthracite, the darkest glitter smoldering underground until it consumes the earth which loves me anyway, I’m sure.
Shepherd can make a colon feel like raising the curtain on an operatic performance. He devotes lines and entire sections of poems to prepositions and articles. What rests between parentheses is vital: “(The voice // is full of distance, sounds like clay, / thick, red, refractory, hard to work through. / It stains the hands and finger / nails.)”
In Shepherd’s formulation, a voice—he had such exquisite sensitivity to words—can make a physical mark on a body. This was often violent: “purple lesions” are “harsh syllables” and a man’s skin is “annotated by the wound.” Shepherd wrote in the introduction to Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetics that the poets he chose were interested in both how the mind makes its way through a world not of its own making while at the same time making “a world of its own out of the world it is given.” Shepherd’s extended metaphor of text and body made one—another striking element that’s hard to miss when you look at his work as a whole—is one place we can see his own impulse to make a world, to be artist of himself: “Mere world, where every man’s / the artist of himself, body / his medium, interference (an inference / at most).”
We all speak of the body as a text—a person’s gestures can be read; her body language might be inscrutable. In three poems not included in The Selected Shepherd (“Transitional Objects,” “One of Their Gods,” and “Wicker Man Marginalia,” all from Otherhood), desire is “scrawled down the thigh,” a mouth is “frozen in parenthesis,” a body is “lyric” and has “curtness,” and “my words” are “mere wounds.” But it gets complicated: skin as (white) paper. Within further parentheticals: “(blank body a white page / where wishes write themselves)” and “blank page I’m reading into, white text or / white skin. (Is skin burning paper, palimpsest, the written / over only, face again?)” Shepherd writes of paper-thin skin in “A Plague for Kit Marlowe,” one of several poems that explicitly takes on racism and sexual desire: “I wanted some white immortality, / but find I from myself am banished in these lines, ghost body / of the light I poured away. My hands are stained helpless / here, black ink spilled uselessly as any blood.” Here, Shepherd pursues one of the most difficult questions imaginable in his own “sexual lexicon” (“Apollo Steps in Daphne’s Footprints”). Brown writes in his introduction, “I can’t think of any other poet in history who uses the poems themselves to figure out and discover how and why he became, as he refers to himself in a 1998 interview with Charles Rowell for Callaloo, ‘a snow queen.’” Shepherd wrote of his preference for white men with considerable self-awareness and poignant honesty, though of course he only spoke for himself. For a nuanced discussion on this, I point readers to Brown’s interview on Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast (April 2024).
Shepherd wrote frequently about Wallace Stevens in his essays, but it wasn’t until I read The Selected Shepherd that I saw how “Jouissance” complicates the subject of “Man Carrying Thing.” In both poems, there is snow, suddenness, cold, and horror, and in both, a person is trying to make sense of a world in pieces. In “Jouissance,” the speaker tries to piece the world together in vain, and it incorporates imagery from what Shepherd called the “urban pastoral,” blending with the pristine snow the often-gritty objects of a cityscape: freeze-dried dog shit, rats in caves under pavement, and broken glass. The snow flurries cannot, by themselves, make the scene cohere. And to add difficulty to Stevens’s scene of “secondary parts” and the “obvious whole,” a history of exclusion features in “Jouissance”: “I tried / soldering a scene together out of white, my / absence, but snow collapsed inside my palms.” In one brilliant swoop, Shepherd simultaneously dialogues with a poetic tradition while acknowledging that this tradition did not carve out a place for him. Instead, it “left me just indented lines and street signs / someone scribbled over before my time. Another / wall whose writing I can’t read, another eye / helping itself to a second portion of light.” “Jouissance” gives us an alternate reality to interrogate—one with “lost // single gloves pressed into the broken sidewalk” and one in which “glitter from smashed bottles” is now fused with the pavement.
And Shepherd’s poems are in dialogue with each other. There are echoes of “Jouissance” in “Black Ice on Green Dolphin Street” (“your winter […] leaves limbs and broken angles / on the slope and green bottle glass / smashed into the speckled pavement”) and in “Locale”:
Observe the snow: it changes and remains the same. Single and severed at once, a manyness of one. You find yourself in a place and you find yourself in the place, seeing
and scene, these arguments in the picture plane where matter steps from its molds and goes shapeless, naked of form or ornament: discarded streetlight, brick, horizon-line with sun falling into
purple-blue; an ochre leaf gone to gray pavement.
T. S. Eliot wrote that only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to wish to escape them, a comment Reginald Shepherd described as “marvelously bitchy” because it “contains a profound truth about the burden of identity, the suffocating weight of selfhood” (Orpheus in the Bronx…). In our cultural moment, certain aspects of identity are considered inextricable from an individual, and it is right to acknowledge the way that systemic oppression is inescapable. Shepherd understood this; he also pushed back at the idea that his race, his sexuality, and his socioeconomic background fully determined his identity. Shepherd’s gift to poetry is that he saw it not only as a means to escape from the world but also to challenge that world. It is fitting that Eliot also wrote: “What happens when a new work is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it….The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (“On the Intentional Fallacy”). Shepherd understood the ways that art has historically been positioned for the privileged, and by incorporating autobiographical material into his poems—poems arguably about other ideas—he ensured his place in an evolving tradition.
