Finding Love in a Poetic Hellscape

On a Thursday morning in August I’m at the gym, listening to the audiobook of Shane McCrae’s Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself, so when I check my email between sets and see the email from Shane, his voice fills my head in a kind of cross-modal stereo: Can I call you Sebastian? I hope so. Thank you for reaching out—I would be honored and happy to participate in this interview . . . The remainder of the email is what I now recognize as pure Shane: cordial, friendly, warm, expansive, and—from the first breath—revisionary in spirit. Tinkering. Perfecting. He informs me of the changes he has already made to the hardcover edition of the book in question—New and Collected Hell: A Poem—specifically in the section titled “I squeezed through,” in the 12th and 13th stanzas. He sends the new wording.

I love this impulse in Shane—the impulse not to let his verse rest. New and Collected Hell weaves a narrative by collecting and revising “hell poems” that appeared in previous collections—The Gilded Auction Block, The World Is Wild and Sad, and Cain Named the Animal—alongside entirely new material. We see glimpses of hell, purgatory, and heaven throughout Shane’s collections, but this is the first of his books to feature, exclusively, a narrative journey through the afterlife. The result is rich and strange. An unnamed narrator dies and descends to hell, guided by a saucy, robotic bird named Law. It is hard to get a handhold in this hell. But the poem rewards work. Which is to say, it rewards the reader’s own boomerang impulse, the spirit of circling back and reading again. Each time you return to Shane’s poem, it reads anew. It transforms like Law—now a bird, now a gleaming molten-metal Terminator. The tortures are real. The violence visceral. And yet for the reader willing to undergo the full journey, the redemption is real. The love. The ascent.

Here we are discussing hell, Shane’s new book, his approach to writing, and the Love that moves the sun and other stars.

Sebastian J. Langdell: New and Collected Hell: A Poem is partly composed of shorter “hell works” from your previous collections. Did you always have a sense that you’d spend more time with these texts, bring them together, expand upon them?

Shane McCrae: Not at all. I wish I had been a bit more intentional when I started what would eventually become New and Collected Hell, but instead I wrote the first poem (at the time I thought of it as an independent poem, but now I think of it as a section of the epic), “Intake Interview,” without any notion that I might write further poems featuring the same characters. But I did notice, as I was writing it, that “Intake Interview” was more narrative than most of the poems I had written before. In retrospect, I can recognize the ways in which it was suggesting the epic before I was aware of the epic.

SJL: You have “purgatory” and “heaven” pieces in previous collections, too. Are there plans for a potential trilogy—New and Collected Purgatory and New and Collected Heaven?

SM: The purgatory and heaven pieces are actually components of an early attempt to make a trilogy, but now I think New and Collected Hell ought to be considered a standalone poem. I am, however, trying to write a new purgatory poem. The poem feels stalled at the moment, and I find myself considerably more interested in lyric poems—I want to explore the possibilities of a more severe strictness with regard to meter and rhyme than I have heretofore practiced.

SJL: We get a Virgilian guide in your robot bird, Law, who functions as something of an embittered and explosive employee of hell. How did Law enter the pages for you? Where did it come from and why did it feel right for this version of hell?

SM: Law appeared just as it does in “intake interview.” I ought to have known then it was a Virgil-ish (much diminished, of course) guide, but the thought didn’t cross my mind. One must, I think, maintain a high degree of unknowing—not a problem for me—if one wants to be a poet, even as one attempts to be as perceptive as one can be. And, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never even thought about whether Law felt right for the hell I wrote—Law just kept talking, so I kept writing.

SJL: I’d like to talk about the process of reinventing the afterlife—especially hell—for our present day, and specifically in America. What, for you, is the urgency, the import, the necessity here?

SM: Certainly, the present moment feels like a moment in which a reconsideration of the afterlife, hell in particular, might be called for, though not necessarily a reconsideration done by me. I would like to say the poem rose out of a sensitivity to the needs of the particular moment—after all, Trump is in the poem, and is the only recognizable contemporary figure in the poem—but, as with most poems, New and Collected Hell arose out of my inchoate desire to write it, and its desire to be. Indeed, I started writing it a few years before Trump started running (and Trump is, to a large extent, the present American moment, at least, he is why one can’t breathe in America). All that said, one does sense a cultural collapse. But because I’m old, I find it difficult to determine how much of that sensation is colored by my own, personal feeling that the world I knew is vanishing, a feeling one often has as one’s generation is displaced from the center of things.

SJL: You mentioned that Law kept talking, so you kept writing; and you mentioned the poem’s own “desire to be.” To what degree does writing feel like receiving to you?

SM: Writing feels more like negotiating than receiving to me—though, of course, one could negotiate as one receives. Because I write in traditional forms, when I establish the formal parameters of a poem I’m writing, I give the poem the tools to resist both my whims and my thoughtful intentions with regard to its composition. The poem becomes a being with a will, and the writing of the poem becomes an effort to balance, even as I discover them, my desires for the poem with its desires for itself—a strictly iambic pentameter sonnet will refuse the dactylic heptameter line I wish to add to it. The negotiation tends to be foremost in my mind while I’m writing; whatever receiving I might perceive under different circumstances, I don’t perceive.

SJL: How important is Dante as a literary interlocutor, for you? The publisher site for New and Collected Hell says this book “takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.” Can you discuss what you see yourself inheriting, grappling with, and/or positioning yourself against, when it comes to Dante?

SM: Dante is difficult for me to think about—at least partly because I find his persona in the Commedia a bit unpleasant. But he has been central to my poetry almost since I started writing it. I couldn’t say why—I’m not even sure I like the Commedia, though I’ve read it any number of times. Does one like air? One likes breathing it (when one bothers to think about breathing it). Dante’s attempt to make sense of the world via making sense of God’s action in the world seems to me the right effort. And I suppose he is so often on my mind because I would like him to be an exemplar for me, though I don’t have a fraction of his skill and vision.

SJL: God often feels far away in Dante, like a high stained-glass window. But somehow he’s present here, in New and Collected Hell. I’m thinking of the way he (not Beatrice) is the inciting/inviting force behind the narrator’s tour. I think of the “love / I couldn’t see” that reconstitutes him after he’s torn apart, too. The idea of the blessed dead being joined to “a great hunger in the sky.” How did that sense of the divine as a solicitous, curious, and healing force come into play?

SM: I’ve been thinking hard—as hard as I could sustain—about God for decades, and I’ve not yet developed much of a notion of what God might be like, except that I think God is like, and is, Jesus. So, as with pretty much everything else in New and Collected Hell, when I wrote the parts having to do with God, I felt I was inventing, and I felt my inventions probably didn’t correspond to reality. I do not hope for God to be any ways other than the ways God is, but I suppose I like to write God—or God’s actions—so that God’s personal concern for individuals is apparent. I do think God loves each of us, but also that God loves the universe through each of us, and God loves me through you, and you through me, just as God loves me on my own terms, and you on your own terms. All of us human beings encounter God’s love for us in each other, and even in the landscapes we inhabit. When the protagonist perceives love, though that love is disembodied, that is the love he’s perceiving.