AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Brian Tierney and Charif Shanahan on Poetry as a Verb, Truth vs Fact, and Love

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Brian Tierney: The whole creative act is a pursuit. Poetry isn’t a thing you are, it’s a pursuit.

Charif Shanahan: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Charif Shanahan guest editor of the magazine. This week, I’m speaking with poet Brian Tierney, who joins us from Oakland, California. Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, out from Milkweed Editions in 2022. Today, we’ll hear Brian talk about that book, as well as poems from a new project that are featured in the May issue of Poetry magazine. Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Tierney: Hi, Charif. Thanks so much for having me.

Charif Shanahan: I wanted to start by asking you about your personal motivations as a poet, what need does poetry fulfilling your life? And why have you chosen to build your life in and around poems?

Brian Tierney: That’s a big one to start with.

Charif Shanahan: Yes, it is. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: It really is. I love it, though. You know, I think that there’s a couple things. You know, one is, for a lot of writers and a lot of people who do artistic things, I feel like, at some point, usually teenage years, you have a desire to make something. And I don’t know about everyone, but it took me a lot of sort of trial and error with different mediums. You know, there was photography, I wrote music, I tried to paint and sketch. And then eventually, you kind of find the one that’s your instrument. And it started with writing music. And, you know, thinking I would be Bruce Springsteen or something. And having music and language together is how it started for me, which probably begins in my Catholic upbringing, honestly. I’m an atheist now. But, you know, Catholicism is really strangely ritualistic, but also kind of beautiful in ways. And music and the musicality of language and the ritual repetition of language, all of those things, that pulls you into poetry naturally. So I think, in some ways, it’s something that was beyond my control. My control was to kind of choose to go that direction or not. And that’s a luxury in itself, to be honest, it’s a privilege in itself. But yeah, I think it’s a force that was in me, for whatever reason, that I had to either listen to or not. And the whole world tells you not to listen to it.

Charif Shanahan: Of course, yes. And we will, we will talk about that. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: Yes, you know, I’m really curious in the way that you started the answer to this question, which is that at some point, you have a desire to make something, you said.

Brian Tierney: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: Where did that desire emerge from in your particular case? You know, it might be irretrievable, you know, the answer. But if you were to just meditate on where that desire to create emerged from for you, where does your mind go?

Brian Tierney: You know, growing up, I had a great, you know, family, but also, you know, like, a lot of us, dysfunctional, and a lot of mental health problems and a lot of intense emotions, good and bad. And I think maybe subconsciously, you know, making something was a way to, to understand volatility, and also deep effusive love in ways that predated adulthood. You know, in ways that I couldn’t have a language for, only the language of making something could kind of process certain things.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: You know, I write about my aunt in Rise and Float, who died by suicide before I was born, about 10 years. And she was a ghost that kind of loomed in my life, from an early age. And we didn’t know how she died for a long time, they kind of hid that from us. But there was something I remember as a kid, feeling like I wasn’t supposed to touch about her, or I wasn’t supposed to know. But she was very creative. She played music, she painted, I have a painting of hers right now in my kitchen, you know. So there was also ways in which people would say, “Well, you’re like Tricia.” And sometimes they’d weaponize it, you know, and they’d mean, “Oh, you’re unstable.”

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm. What I find so striking about what you just offered about your aunt is the silence that she as a figure in your family was shrouded by and within, you know, in that there, there wasn’t communication happening around her story, her death. And one of the things that I’ve been struck by, in my conversations with other poets, you know, across generations, across all kinds of social boundaries and borders, is the way that often, I have found, early in life, at some point along the way, there was a constitutive element of experience that was not addressed. That was not discussed. And that it need not be of a traumatic nature, it need not be of loss. It could exist anywhere on the emotional spectrum. You know, it could be a lack of acknowledgement of joy and happiness, right. But that there was, there was non-communication, there was active resistance to articulating whatever the thing was, that seems to have inspired or engendered in these folks that I’ve spoken to a need, a real need that is nearly physiological, to speak, to talk. And so I don’t know if that resonates with you, but that’s what your response called to mind for me, you know, and I thought, “Ah! Another one.” (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: More silence. You know?

Brian Tierney: It’s absolutely, yeah, whatever the thing was, I think, is what you said

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: Whatever the thing was. And I think, boy, that’s everything. You know, that’s poetry.

Charif Shanahan: Mm.

Brian Tierney: The whole thing of poetry is a pursuit of the ineffable, the mystery of the universe, to some extent, right, even if that mystery is super localized. It’s drawn from a group of people, for whatever reason, the grouping poets who tend to, like, I don’t know, they feel that itch, as what you’re just kind of what you’re saying. And part of that is related to, as you said, a silence. Maybe another way to think of it is a question. You know, there’s something that has to be answered that most of the time can’t be answered. The whole creative act is a pursuit. Louise Glück once said that to me, poetry isn’t a thing you are, it’s a pursuit of something. It’s a verb in some way, it’s not, “I’m a poet,” which I struggle with, because I do identify as a poet in my mind, but it’s not so much a stable position as it is a consistent pursuit of something.

Charif Shanahan: Mm. I’ve so been looking forward to this conversation, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Tierney: So have I!

Charif Shanahan: Thank you for that.

Brian Tierney: Sure.

Charif Shanahan: And you know, there, there are questions that I’ve prepared. But your response to that makes me want to skip ahead. Do you think of your atheism and spiritual engagement through poetry or outside of poetry as mutually exclusive? And what would the relationship be between an atheism as perhaps a kind of spiritual orientation—and, again, maybe it’s not—and the ineffable? Wherever that organism, that entity, that spirit exists in universe?

Brian Tierney: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: So we’re gonna have light, casual questions today, Brian. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: I love the heavy questions.

Charif Shanahan: I knew you would.

Brian Tierney: My dad would be so happy with this, because, so, okay, I should say this. My dad was a priest. He was a Roman Catholic priest. For several years before he met my mom, he worked in Paterson, New Jersey, and was assistant to the bishop. And he was kind of a theologically oriented priest. So I grew up, I mean, they wouldn’t have called it this, but it was essentially a kind of socialist minded, leftist Catholicism. Again, my parents probably would never use those terms. But that’s kind of what it was. And so, you know, as I got older, my father died, it’s maybe a classic story, you fall away from God, I definitely was a believer. And I think my atheism, I don’t know that it’s a spiritual position. But it is kind of cosmological orientation, I’ll say, which makes it sound better to me. So I think it’s the idea that I don’t need there to be a kind of divine source for the mystery of the universe to leave me in awe and keep me questioning it.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: You know, I think of Oppen. You know, I love George Oppen. He’s always a mystery, no matter how many times I read him. It’s new every time. Every time I go to Oppen it’s like the first time. He has some—I can’t remember, I think it’s the last poem in This in Which, where he writes, “Soul-searchings, these prescriptions,//Are a medical faddism, an attempt to escape,/To lose the self and the self.//The self is no mystery, the mystery is/That there is something for us to stand on.” Which I just like, has kind of oriented me in a certain way. There’s something for us to stand on. And that speaks to kind of partly why I move toward materialism. You know, physicalism, I think is a new term for the idea that, you know, the things of the earth, the things of the universe, you know, are physical. And there’s something about that, about the concreteness of things. Even the invisible is physical. We just can’t represent it as humans. You know, dark matter exists, but we can’t see it or quantify it, but it, like, exists, and it has a physical quality to it. And now instead of religion or God, it’s like poetry, which is again, not uncommon. Poetry swoops in to be the conduit to what essentially is a spiritual interest. Not a religious one, but a spiritual one.

Charif Shanahan: The mystery—so Oppen says that the mystery is that there is something, that we do have something to stand on.

Brian Tierney: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: That that is the mystery. The mystery is not that we don’t. I love the way that that flips expectation around what it means to be alive, unanswerable questions, right? That we maybe have the information that we really need.

Brian Tierney: For me, poetry is like, the best I can do to take down all of, all of the boundaries between me and being alive. That’s the—and the farther I try to cast my mind, the more diffuse the subject matter can get. And sometimes the intensity, it’s, it’s why I think sometimes, I’ve taught it myself to students, people have taught me, you know, beware, go in caution of abstraction. But at the same time, we’re all driven by that abstract, you know, the drive to make, again, to make and to write, is trying to get at something that can’t be understood, or spoken or heard exactly. Yeah. So I think for me, it’s like, poetry again, is that instrument. It’s trying to, it’s trying to play a frequency that I can’t even hear yet. You know?

Charif Shanahan: Yeah, absolutely gorgeous. Yes. And I love like the spatial framing of that answer, that, you know, the casting the net outward makes, the subject matter makes the touch of the poem or the materials of the poem more diffuse. And that resonates for me, because when I think about the experience of encountering the ineffable through a poem, if for me, spatially, if we, if we continue with the spatial framing, moves us in the other direction, it moves us deeper within our bodies, and deeper within or perhaps beneath the self, which is obstructing easy access to this available, ineffable thing.

Brian Tierney: Yes.

Charif Shanahan: The division inherent in the self, you know, that it’s, it’s this way, it moves this way. And what you’ve just shared, actually echoes perfectly with the another question I wanted to ask, which was really about the poems in Rise and Float, which is an exquisite book, which I love, as you know.

Brian Tierney: Thank you, Charif

Charif Shanahan: Thank you, thank you for it, thank you for offering it to us. And in that book, you engage with many emotionally difficult subjects, right. So the transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, and the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide, as, you know, primary examples from the book. And you are, I imagine, writing from the materials of your life and experience, as we all are, right, regardless of how we metabolize that experience into a particular aesthetic, or of what elements of poetic craft and language we choose to prioritize in the making of our poems. And so, what I wonder is about the capacity of lyric poetry for you. Does lyric poetry give you access to these subjects in a way that is otherwise unavailable to you? In other forms of healing and survival, say, faith, as we’ve talked about, or therapy or even friendship, right. Is there something available to you through lyric poetry that is otherwise not available?

Brian Tierney: Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if I know what it is, but it definitely, there is something available, it’s made available through lyric poetry that, you know, I think part of it is, for instance, therapy, you know, I go to therapy, I think a lot of people go to therapy, certainly who write, you know. And I think the thing about therapy is that it’s, the truths of it are kind of rooted in the factual. That’s a little bit of a big statement, but, but they are. Things that happened to you, sometimes recovering things, not always trauma, but, you know, there is something to do with what is the thing below the thing. And I think, the one thing a poem does, and a lyric poetry that is dealing with autobiography which Rise and Float is, is that it, it frees you from fact. And so, once you’re freed from fact, but you’re pursuing answers or understandings of the same source material, something different happens. Because now it’s about what does speech give you? What does language give you that isn’t about transcribing things that happen to you or your family, etcetera. But it is about, you know, I shudder to say, expression, you know, it’s about—it’s way more expressionist than you can be in something like religion or something like therapy or something like even, maybe even friendships. It depends on the friendship, I suppose. But you don’t have to be beholden, I don’t think, to your own narrative. Which seems ironic because people, as we know, read a book of poetry that is autobiographical and assume that everything in it is perfectly you. And, you know, Rise and Float is all me, it’s all my experiences, but, you know, I take lots of liberties, you know, and those liberties are what allow my experience, I think, to echo and be multicolored and polyphonic to people’s, you know, stereo, to people’s own kind of experiences and consciousness, you know. And it’s funny, that wouldn’t happen if I just sat down and wrote a memoir about it. That would be a different kind of engagement.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah, I love that. And it, it raises a question. And it also reminds me of an essay by Louise Glück, who you’ve mentioned. In Proofs and Theories, there’s that essay, “Against Sincerity”—I might be flattening the complexity of the argument, but there was a binary that Louise establishes, you know, at the beginning of that essay between the true and the actual. And that the objective of art, in this instance, poetry, is to find the TRUTH, all caps, immutable, and the actual, or the events of the life, like the things that literally occurred, which maybe are not the vehicle to the truth.

Brian Tierney: Yes.

Charif Shanahan: And I hear that’s what, that’s what you’re saying. And so then that raises the question for me, which Louise has answered in, you know, my recapitulation of that argument as I understood it, is the objective. It’s the function of the engagement. So, if the function of therapy is to optimize living, to understanding oneself, to healing, it would be against the point to lie or to make stuff up.

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: I’m not sure that we can call it lying when we do it within a poem if the objective is finding the truth. And so, is that how you think about the function or the objective implicit in the engagement of writing a poem? Where you have these liberties, you’re looking at material that is actual, that exists in your life and your memory and your history, and you are pursuing something through the making of a poem around it? And is that something—how would you describe that something? I realize that we’re, we’re talking at the edges of, of language and knowledge, but, you know, Louise calls it, I believe, as I remember that essay, Louise calls it truth.

Brian Tierney: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: How do you think about that?

Brian Tierney: I’m immediately reminded of Richard Hugo’s book, The Triggering Town, which I teach to, you know, beginning students especially, but applies to kind of all poets. I’m surprised by how much it’s still teaches me every time I read it.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: And he has some line, I’m paraphrasing, in it, where you owe nothing to the facts and everything to the truth of your emotions.

Charif Shanahan: Hm.

Brian Tierney: And I think that’s kind of what Louise is talking—right?

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: I mean, that’s kind of what Louise is talking about. When it comes to my own work in that regard, I think it, I think it depends, because I think there are poems that might register to someone as something that I’ve gone deeply into in my own experience, and it’s fiction. You know, Tim Liu, who we have in common, we know Timothy Liu, the poet from New York, you know, he once told this anecdote about Phil Levine.

Charif Shanahan: Okay.

Brian Tierney: Phil Levine reads this really powerful—I don’t even know what the poem is, but this really powerful poem, apparently about his sister or his cousin or somebody, I think his sister, dying of cancer. And the whole room is like moved at the end, and this woman asked a question, she’s like, “I have to ask you, you know, how’s your sister doing?” And he’s like, “I don’t have a sister.”

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS) Which is the extreme example, right? I don’t know that, I don’t know that, there are, of course, ethical boundaries to what a poet should be lying about and not.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: That’s not one of them, I don’t think, but there are, there are certain ethical considerations one has to it has to have in mind. But, you know, I think some poems are meant to be, listened, this is something kind of what happened to me, some of them are, something else completely.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Some people are writing more purely autobiographically, even though none of—the speaker and the “I” of course are different. And other people are not as much. They’re thinking out loud. You know, I think of like a Jorie Graham where, this is born out of being alive, but so much of Jorie Graham’s work feels like it’s thinking, you know? It’s thinking out loud about being alive. And so it’s different than a corollary of things that happened.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: Or an experience in a life that has, like, plot or has a narrative. It’s just kind of like, transcribing the process of thinking things out, you know?

Charif Shanahan: I do, yeah. And it recalls two binaries, which I’m completely resistant to generally, but in the framework that some people use where, you know, all poems either demonstrate the mind having thought or the mind thinking. I had the honor and the privilege to interview Lucie Brock-Broido years ago, when Stay, Illusion was published. And her binary that she offered was the poet who said, “Come here, I’m going to tell you what it was like,” and the poet who said, “Come here, you have never felt like this.”

Brian Tierney: Oh, my word. That is gorgeous. That is powerful.

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS) You know?

Brian Tierney: Yeah.

Charif Shanahan: Like, I’m going to tell you how it felt. And you have never felt like this, right? And what that means about the poet’s orientation, conscious or otherwise, to the materials that is the life or that is the subject, you know, to pursue in the poem. And do you, do you feel drawn to any of those in particular?

Brian Tierney: I think I’m drawn to both.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: And I think, and I think we can resolve the binary which, which, by the way, for the young poets listening, just disregard all binaries.

Charif Shanahan: Basically. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: In writing, but everywhere, but in writing, still.

Charif Shanahan: Yes.

Brian Tierney: And, but there’s, what they are are poles, right?

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: And I think there’s a continuum between them.

Charif Shanahan: Yes.

Brian Tierney: So I think there are, there are poets who do kind of both things at the same time, you know?

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: Where it’s saying, “I have a secret to tell you.” And another one is saying, “This is how you needed to hear this thing you didn’t know you needed to hear all this time, just like this.”

Charif Shanahan: And both can happen in the same poem, you know.

Brian Tierney: Yep, and that can happen in poems that tell stories or poems that express or do both and, etcetera.

Charif Shanahan: Beautiful. So maybe at this point, we can move into hearing some of your poems. You know, you have three poems and the May issue of Poetry magazine, and before we talk about them, I thought maybe you could read “Long Distance.”

Brian Tierney: Love to.

(READS POEM)

“Long Distance”

Midway through, a haunted computer types its own questions:
“Would you like to meet a ghost?”
“Do you live to shovel sand or shovel sand to live?”

It’s the best part of the movie,
I think you’d like it.

There’s this melody one character hears after
in his head—it is the answer, we discover, to everything
not yet asked; a sort of dial tone
overtakes you with dread while you’re watching

him listen to a wind-blown curtain swell
into a cello or a pear-shaped person, illegibility’s the point

and also the mood. Or is it a vibe? I think moods
are for people with choices
and children—

Anyway the room’s crummy,
how was karaoke?
Will you call again later and sing it for me?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: So the poem that we’ve just heard, “Long Distance,” along with “The Butterfly” and “Renting,” which are the two other poems that appear in the May issue of the magazine come from your eventual second book of poems, a project that I imagine is still revealing itself to you. Could you talk to us a little bit about your new project? Its concerns, your goals as you understand them at this point, the terrain of exploration and discovery thematically, formally, emotionally? And, you know, is it an extension—in what ways might it be an extension of or departure from Rise and Float?

Brian Tierney: Yeah, you know, I feel like, as with Rise and Float, the second book is kind of revealing itself like a nesting doll, which is deeply frustrating, and also very exciting. (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: And maybe that’s not true for how other people write. But for me, it’s like, I need to write five books to get one book.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: There’s a phrase, I’ve had mind, “love in the ruins,” which is a title of a Walker Percy, kind of, I believe, dystopian fiction. It’s dystopian fiction from the ’70s. It’s been a while, I read it in college, I don’t even remember it. But that idea, love in the ruins, keeps kind of presenting itself to me as I write this book. Because I think we are in a time of ruin. Ruin being maybe literal in some places and metaphoric in others. But it’s a time in which there’s a real antagonism to all the beautiful things that make being alive so interesting as a human. Love and beauty to me are, in a fascist time, are radical.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: And a lot of the book is dealing with love. You know, love poetry. And other parts of the book are trying to allow the kind of rising militarism and fascism and the oppressive capitalist society we currently are living in, to kind of encroach from the edges or bleed through at spots, as opposed to writing at those things. Because I think there are poets way more suited to that and gifted in that way than I am, I think, to write at it. You know, I can only write from my own position. And so I think there’s a way in which, if you’re awake to the world you live in, you can’t not see or feel these things encroaching constantly. Again, Oppen: “There are things we live among them to see them is to know ourselves.”

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: Just gorgeous, you know, that idea. And I think that’s driving, it’s driving the book, to try and witness love with my, you know, my wife, and I’ve been together 15 years. She last April, I’ll say trigger warning, was hit by a car while walking across the street. And we spent last year, the year Rise and Float came out, recovering. She had to learn to walk. And, you know, she’s, she’s great now. I mean, she’s, she recovered pretty much fully. But it rocked something loose in the best way. And some of these poems that are in issue come from that time where I was caretaking for her and trying to write early in the mornings. Which is to be reminded, you know, of kind of what matters in a time where everything is noise. So the book is trying to bear witness to a long term relationship that also came up against a kind of close call, you know. And that can happen in a lot of ways for a lot of people and, and sometimes it doesn’t work out quite as well, but it’s interesting, it’s like the end of Rise and Float, you know, the last poem, is a direct address love poem to my wife. You know, I think it’s been said that the last poem of the last parts of a book can sometimes be a signal for the next thing that’s gonna happen. I don’t know if that’s true, but it does seem to be holding true to some extent.

Charif Shanahan: The first question that emerged from me listening to you talk just now, is you said at one point that there were other poets who maybe were more effectively exploring this other theme or interest of the kind of anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-police, so on. And I just wanted to bring us back to that and kind of push into that a little bit to try to understand—and forgive me if it’s too probing or invasive, but I’m immediately suspicious of your conclusion. You know, that

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: And not because I understand you as a gifted poet, but because what I heard inside that was that there was something about subject position, there was something about identities, perhaps, that made that so. That made it something that could be more effectively be done by others. And maybe I’m making too much of that moment. But I wanted to return to it and push into it a little bit.

Brian Tierney: No, no, I think that’s a, you know, it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, you know, and I think, as a white man, you do have to be aware of what kind of voice you’re bringing to the conversation and what kind of subject matter you’re claiming, as, I guess you’re right to engage. There’s a way in which I, when I say that, I’m kind of constantly talking to myself about how do I bear witness without falling subject to trying to perform some kind of virtue signaling as a white person. Like, how can I do this in a way that is true to my life, as opposed to writing a poem that is about state violence, of which I’m the least likely person in this country to be subjected to. You know, and so there’s ways in which that’s a hard balance, you know? Because you don’t want to renege on the poet’s duty, I think, to bear some witness to the social aspects of the world they live in, and the political ones and the cultural ones. I never want to surrender those things. But I also don’t want to confuse that for a kind of egotistical approach to bearing witness, which would be, “Look what I believe. Let me tell you what you already know.”

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: It’s hard because you don’t want to be—I’m not an art for art’s sake person, though I think that is legitimate. I, you know, I do think people can just make art, you know, and it can just be beautiful to look at, but whether they want to or not, there’s a political aspect to that. You know, I think Szymborska says something like, in one of her poems, you know, if you walk through the forest, you’re walking through a political forest, something like that. (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yes.

Brian Tierney: And so I guess, I guess my approach is both, you know, an ethics. It is a subject position. It’s recognizing, you know, does the world need a white, straight presenting poet to say cops are bad? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we need, as my subjectivity, and my positionality is the dominant cultural position that has the most power, if I don’t kind of bring that consciousness to the thing I’m making, then I’m, I’m really, you know, complicit to some extent, or at least I’m, I’m allowing something. I’m not using my voice. But then there’s the other side, which is, how much room am I going to take up? How much space am I going to eat in poetry, that could be engaged in a way that actually does bring a different kind of lived experience to the expression of that encounter with police violence, you know, with capitalism, with, you know, fascism. And so I think, for these poems, I hope that comes through once I get this book together is that, those things are present. They bleed in from the edges, but I, I don’t necessarily write about them. They are part of the world and the universe of the book, as I see it. And I think that, aesthetically, that’s a different approach, you know?

Charif Shanahan: For sure. Yeah. I love everything that you just said. I have more questions. And one of the questions that I have is about how you think about love poetry as a particular mode, or conduit to certain possibilities, lyrically, aesthetically, politically, socially? I think you’ve maybe, in a way, answered this already. But, you know, in the way that every poem is always already a political poem, there are those who believe that every poem is a love poem. Right? That love poetry is the strongest, perhaps, expression of an anti-capitalist, anti-war, -police, -nationalist and so on poetics. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Brian Tierney: You know, I think immediately of Montale.

Charif Shanahan: Which?

Brian Tierney: You know, I think those three books, you know, Cuttlefish Bones, I’m forgetting the second book.

Charif Shanahan: Le occasioni.

Brian Tierney: Yes.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah. The Occasions.

Brian Tierney: Yes. And then The Storm, but all of them are, I think all of them are written in a fascist moment.

Charif Shanahan: Yes.

Brian Tierney: And there’s a lot of love poetry there. Especially in the second one, there’s, you know,

Charif Shanahan: Have we talked about Montale?

Brian Tierney: No we have not.

Charif Shanahan: I lo—okay, go ahead. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: Yeah, but Montale is also somebody syntactically I love, I’m obsessed with Montale. And admittedly, I don’t read Italian. So it’s only in translation. So there’s always something about that. But yeah, but I think there’s a way in which he chose to write love poems. And there were poems that were maybe coded against the state.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: You know? And I think that’s true of like, Ritsos and other people who wrote kind of in that same general first half of the 20th century. But I think there’s, there’s something about that, right? That to do the thing that is anathema to fascism is one of the most powerful things you can do.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

We’re at a time where everybody wants everyone to do everything. And I get that because it feels—it’s an alarming time. But there’s a way in which like, my power, my gift that I can do for this whole moment, is to make something that moves people. That doesn’t absolve me from living in my life, like helping my community or protesting, I do those things. Absolutely. But there are people who organize, you know, and that’s the thing they’re contributing against the kind of capitalist and truly militaristic, scary state-oriented future. Which, by the way, has been the present for like a lot of people in America since the beginning, but is now dawning on you know, all the white people, that, oh, this is not the best, this is not the best situation, fascism.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: It’s like, no shit, you know? So I think love poetry, you know, in a time of ugliness, hatred, violence, corruption, and just absolute bad faith that’s coming from the right and from whoever, I think love poetry is, is an antidote. It doesn’t mean that it’s, you know, some people want something else out of a poem. And that’s fine. I respect that, too. I think there’s, you know, poetry is a big umbrella.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: You know, so, and there’s something for everyone. My whole thing is like, let’s keep that umbrella big. And there’s, that’s, that’s one of the things I think I’ve resisted about certain subject position, or, you know, there is a, the industry aspect of poetry has bled into people’s artistry, and it asks people to perform certain things, and it asks people to, to take on certain things. And that can happen in any number of ways. I think there’s a lot of pressure on poets right now. And it’s not a pressure that is conducive to freedom, so to speak, which I, I kind of hate that word, but the kind of creative freedom that is necessary to make great poems.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: So I would, you know, my hope for poetry in this time is that people can write whatever the hell they want. But again, not absolving people from the ethics one must bring to an aesthetic practice. And for me, the way I can resist in an aesthetic way is to look around the world I’m in, to praise beauty, to find humor in tragedy, to find expressions for love that other people need to hear, because nothing is more powerful against the kind of forces this country and the world, frankly, are up against than love. You know, then feeling love in all kinds of different facets. You know, I think every elegy is a love poem.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: So yeah, I guess, I guess love poetry is something I feel drawn to, because it’s something that reminds me of my humanity in a time that is dehumanizing for all people. And some people way more than others, of course, that goes without saying,

Charif Shanahan: Thank you so much for that beautiful, thoughtful response, Brian. I want to go back to Montale, I want to ask you about love, I want to hear another poem. It’s—you’re taking me to all these different places, and I know that you’re doing that for listeners, too. We had Marie Howe on the show earlier this month, and I asked her a question, which I recognize is impossible, and that returns to me now, listening to you speak about love poetry, that I want to ask you, you know, given all that you just said about love poetry, but also the emphasis on love poetry within the second project, which is—and again, I know that it’s impossible.

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: And I apologize. How do you define love?

Brian Tierney: Wow. You know, maybe I’ll come at it from a less direct. For me, love is somewhat recognizing that your self as you know it is inextricably linked to another self. In some way. You know, and that love can be friendship, it can be, you know, platonic, it can be erotic, you know, it can be familial, it can be romantic, whatever, you know. And, and I think that’s something that is, that’s a good way, that’s a segue into another idea I was having I didn’t get to get to it when I was entering the last question, which is, I think love poetry is broad. And it isn’t just a sonnet. It’s not Shakespeare’s sonnets, all of them. You know, some of it is, they don’t, some things don’t seem like love poems, and they are. And sometimes, you know, I think erotic poems are love poems, you know, I mean, that’s a different kind of a thing, poems of desire. And so I think love takes on, has many faces, but it also fundamentally is a humbling of the self in the face of another self or many selves.

Charif Shanahan: Mm. Thank you. Could we hear “Renting”?

Brian Tierney: Absolutely.

(READS POEM)

“Renting”

Dogs barking do you hear me do you hear me yes I do
the abridged version, sun having shone all day on their chains.
Late-lunch squirrels lathing loquats
with their buck front teeth and carrots

disappearing from the community garden for seasonal soups
no one likes to eat, least of all me. Unless there is good country bread
of course, and there is, often,
even if there’s little else in the house
to have. Simple black tea or green or white or green

beans and garlic. Mondays monkfish. Cheese and apples from the market
stalls selling ponytails of sage and premium coffee
we can’t afford and sometimes splurge on.
Your lipstick drying on a porcelain cup

by a line of  bruised apples. A free concert of insects singing
when the light withdraws and the air is cooler
and we prop the screen door open to the world and the boundary
that was false and never there is proved not there

between us or anything. You me the half-concealed palm out back
we fucked against once when our landlords were away,
and which no one owns or ever has, least of all
landlords, who even when they do can’t own a tree

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: Thank you, Brian. I wanted to ask just one more question, which is about poetry and mentorship. I understand that you’re a teacher of poetry. And you’ve studied with a host of celebrated poets, you know, during your time at Warren Wilson and as a Stegner, and elsewhere. What’s mentorship as a mentor or a mentee meant to you, you know, and what does teaching do for you, spiritually, or artistically?

Brian Tierney: You know, mentorship, in my experience of being a mentee, you know, has—the best people who’ve helped me, who’ve mentored me creatively have been those who understood what I wanted to do, and tried to help me do it better. And that’s different than coming to a poem, assuming there’s something, one, that needs to be fixed. But two, that there’s a kind of rigid set of rules that one applies to all writing and all poems. And yeah, there are some that I think we all generally accept as practitioners, there are some things that are general, but, you know, the mentors that did the most for me saw me. And they saw something about my mind on the page, not the page as a place to teach larger lessons about poetry. But the page as a place to teach me about myself as a poet.

Charif Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

Brian Tierney: That isn’t as—it’s not as present, maybe, as we think.

Charif Shanahan: Yeah.

Brian Tierney: I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot, as you said, a lot of esteemed and terrific poets who are also great teachers mentor me. But that’s kind of what I try to bring to students or poets I work with, is to meet them on the page. We want to ask not, is this thing good or bad? But how is it built? What is this poet trying to do, and how can we help them do it? And that’s really hard. I mean, even as a teacher, it’s hard. There’s times when I know I’m projecting taste, or I’m projecting my subjective position, you know, in relation to, you know, poetry onto it. Yeah. To talk to, to answer your question about, you know, how does it kind of affect me to teach and be a mentor, one of the things is that I often find what poets suggest to younger writers not to do or avoid are often the things that they do and are very self-conscious about. That’s something that is a learning experience, if you’re open to it. If you’re like, “Oh, that’s something I do. Why am I, why am I saying not to do it to them? Is it something I don’t want to do? Or I have anxiety about the future of, of the things I work on?” It’s very interesting to me. And I think other, I think that’ll resonate with other people. I’m not sure, but it’s been my experience that you’ll get advice that is meant to swerve you away from the anxieties that that particular maker also has about their own work. And that can be instructive. You know, that brings me back to my own practice in a different way. I think you also, you learn how to articulate what’s happening on the page in a way that can be really powerful to your own practice as a poet. There’s that balance between you know a lot and then you know too much, right? You want to keep that mystery. And the more I write, the less I know how to write. (LAUGHS) I find. Like I know conceptually, but it’s still a mystery. You know, I still struggle to make things like anybody does. And so I think I’m always a student. I try to always be a student.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Charif Shanahan: Thank you so much for that response, Brian, and for your time today. I thought to close we could hear a poem that you mentioned earlier in the conversation from Rise and Float, “You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With.” Would you read that for us?

Brian Tierney: I’d love to.

(READS POEM)

“You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With”

for Jess

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living. Even actors don’t
exactly love the spotlight they move through,
as your sister, the actor,
has told us; they just need to be lit
for narrative motion
to have meaning. As such it is
with artifice and embarrassment
that I move through fear
to you, tonight, where I had dreams,
a short nap ago, about lines
of poetry I struck through
with everyday blues, month after
month, in dream
after dream; an attempt
I guess to forget, if I could: defeat
sometimes is defeat
without purpose. The news, at least, tells me
that much. I know now,
in fact, we don’t have to be brave,
not to survive a night
like any we’ve looked on
together, seeing blue-tinted snow
once in a Kmart
parking lot’s giant, two-headed lamp—
and my father hooked up,
up the street, with no chance
of waking—as many years ago now
as how much longer I’ve lived
with you than without.
Forgive me, again, that I write you an elegy
where a love poem should be.

Charif Shanahan: That poem is so fucking gorgeous. (LAUGHS)

Brian Tierney: (LAUGHS)

Charif Shanahan: Brian, thank you so much for being with us today and for making time for this conversation. It’s a privilege. Thank you.

Brian Tierney: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful. I’m honored.

Charif Shanahan: A big thanks to Brian Tierney. Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, out from Milkweed Editions in 2022 and winner of the Jake Adam York prize. He lives in Oakland, California. You can read three poems by Tierney and the May 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.