Excited to report that my interview with Aaron Shurin is now live on the Poetry Foundation website. Aaron’s insights, poetics, and his all-around eloquence are really worth checking out, as our his experiences with Robert Duncan and a career that began around the time of Gay Liberation. And quite a bit more. Here’s one of my favorite spots.

CH: Reginald Shepherd writes that in your poem “Multiple Heart,” the prose pieces “enact the intercourse of sexuality and textuality that is so central to [your] poetry.” He explains how you deploy “song [as] sex, the poem is a wedding of writer and reader.” What’s your personal sense of your relationship to the reader?

AS: In “Narrativity,” I used erotic terms for describing the writer-reader dynamics of narrative versus lyric [poetry]. I decided that narrative performs an act of seduction, which is to draw the reader into person and place via the transparency of language: Come to me! And then the counterforce, lyric, is display. I imagine a peacock, or one of those crazy birds building its magnificent nest: Look at me! Just look at this! That’s also a mating call, a dazzling act, a spell.