King of Shadows

by Aaron Shurin

Based on the author’s life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall. Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms , named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

175 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

AARON SHURIN is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including the poetry collections Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), The Paradise of Forms (Talisman House, 1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book and, the prose collection, Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997). His work has appeared in over twenty national and international anthologies, most recently Nuova Poesia Americana Contemporana (Italy: Oscar Mondadori, 2006). Shurin's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commision, and the Gerbode Foundation. He is Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. "

Reviews

[Selena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t familiar with Aaron Shurin’s work until I read it in my creative writing class. We read from his book of experimental poetry titled Involuntary Lyrics. I then had the extreme fortune of reading his book of personal essays titled King of Shadows. If I hadn’t already known, I would never have guessed that these books were by the same author. They inspire such different emotions and garner such opposite reactions.

Involuntary Lyrics is essentially a “riff-off” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In Shurin’s world they no longer follow iambic pentameter or line couplings and A-B rhymes. What Aaron does is takes the last word from each line of a sonnet and rearranges them in a specific order (I actually sat down and figured this pattern out). Then writes his own poem. You’d be surprised how similar the general topic is in some of his experimental poems when compared to Shakespeare’s sonnets.

King of Shadows, on the other hand, is Aaron’s collection of personal essays and reflections on life. It broaches a lot of relatively controversial topics: the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, the good old Leary days, drug experimentation, etc. But it also talks about his experience teaching elementary school students poetry, how children are or are not like flowers, and his experiences as a gay man in San Francisco.

King of Shadows was my favorite of the two. After having read most of the book in one fell swoop, I felt like I knew him personally. It felt like the next time I saw him, I had to tell him a secret of mine, to be fair.

Coincidentally, he was in town and doing a reading through the University of Washington. This was on Thursday the second. It was an intimate-sized event as only UW students were permitted. He was planning on reading from both Involuntary Lyrics and King of Shadows, so I brought both so I could follow along.

He began with a short introduction and told us that he’d read one story from King of Shadows, quite a few poems from Involuntary Lyrics first, then King of Shadows. And that we’d try to make that as natural of a shift as possible.

He read the Shrine from King of Shadows. It sounded different when he read it aloud then when I read it in my head. He read it with more feeling. Then he started reading sonnets. And his whole body became a part of the reading. As he read, his arms moved and his head leaned forward, moving closer to us. He finished off with Dahlias. One of the most touching reflections contained within King of Shadows.

Afterward, we got a chance to do Q&A. His answers to the questions were all incredibly thoughtful. He is very careful with his words. He spoke a lot about his influences - he was fortunate enough to study under Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan. When the event was over, many left, but a few of us stayed.

We spoke to him about his obvious Beat influences, his love-affair with San Francisco, his odd jobs between publishing books and before becoming a professor. He talked to us about how being a writer was putting on a pair of glasses, that allowed you to remove yourself from the world, to see yourself outside of yourself but in the moment. he said that you had to “be in the Way of poetry,” that being a writer was like being a wayfarer. He signed King of Shadows for me.

“To Lena, in the Way of poetry.” He feels like a friend.

[Jennifer V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Closing my eyes and placing my hand on the bookshelf, I had the indomitable guidance from the universe to lead me to something that unbeknownst to me at the time would shake my soul to its core, in the best way possible. I did not need to read more than a few lines before I was walking towards the check out. Aaron is a wordsmith, his ability to form words and tell stories takes your spirit on a journey and excites your brain leaving you craving more. I don’t know what I did right to deserve such a book, all I know is this book taught me to stay curious, and that we are capable of great things.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays chronicling the author's gay life and life as a poet in San Francisco since the 1960s. In the title essay, Shurin describes his coming into poetry and gay identity via a high-school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Other essays tell of his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and the influence of the sexual politics of the '70s. In “The Bars of Heaven and Hell,” we are given a personal history of venturing into gay bars in pre-Stonewall San Francisco. Written in a lyrical, literary, yet highly personal style, Shurin’s intelligent and insightful essays circle in and around issues of identity and sensibility, and how our interior and public lives are shaped by them.

Praise for King of Shadows:

"There are lots of reasons you want to read this book. Among them: because there are quite a lot of astonishingly apt and incisive and occasionally uproarious descriptions of the subtleties of everyday life; because many of the sentences are also as perfect as English allows; because it's a wonderfully wry and roundabout guide to gay and literary San Francisco; because you actually do need to know how a person is like a flower and a flower like a person; because it also dowses for and find unexpected pleasures that we particularly need at this moment in time." —Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows, and Hope in the Dark

“His luminous descriptive prose . . . injects lightness. . . . Shurin scatters several short pieces about gardens and flowers throughout the collection; these read like gorgeous, airy confections. Gradually these disparate essays coalesce into autobiography, and a picture—appealing in its completeness—emerges of Shurin as thinker, as poet, as member of the San Francisco gay community, and as human." —Katherine D. Stutzman, Pleiades

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stellar, elevated English, essays by a poet. Aaron Shurin came to read from this book of essays at Open Books, a poetry bookstore in Seattle, because the owners love his writing. He read three short essays each from a different summer. He teaches, and for his summer break he rents a house near home but far enough away to have a true break, there he immerses in a practice of reading: Proust; The Road to Xanadu (about Coleridge and his writing the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner), and Don Quixote.
What I like most about this book is his ability to word the ordinary in an extradinary way. He is a gay man who lives in San Franciso, so in addition to the many flowers he describes deliciously, there is much writing about the urban life, written in his mature, academically educated, and gay, sensibility. He knows the literature of Whitman, Shakespeare, Virginia Wolf and Dante, he has studied with Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. His essays about writing are an ars poetica supreme.
One sentence, "...the poem's everyday agenda is to read the world's hidden text of correspondences." Wow.
Another, " To write in poetic mode as a discoverer is to patiently house a biomorphic disposition, an itch in the mind, a disequilibrium that is an urge toward clarification or expression, at once a lack an an excess. It's a means by which a community of vital intetersts is visited upon the mononuclear family of meaning..." He goes on.
There is much in this book, including much on identity. Read it if you can, live with it for awhile, enjoy.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaron is my friend, and I also reviewed this book for the Colorado Review. As a prose stylist, Aaron is lush and gorgeous: guaranteed to give the reader pleasure. There are pieces on gardening, teaching, and, especially, being a queer man in the Bay Area. Terrific pieces on his coming of age, being a "maturing" gay man (hilarious!), and on having been a student of both Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov.