On Sept. 10th, Reginald Shepherd passed away after a battle with cancer. An estimable poet and critic, Shepherd was also at the forefront of a movement for a new type of writer–the one with an accessible online presence. He had a particular way of being a poet in this world, and I think it a model worthy of praise. In addition to his creative and editorial work published in five books of poetry (a sixth is finished) a book of essays (a second is finished) and two edited collections, Shepherd wrote lovely, eloquent blog posts, both on his own blog and as a writer for Harriet (the wonderful blog of the Poetry Foundation). One read through the many comments on his posts, and you’ll be immediately struck by his generosity–a sort of anti-Salinger, a writer willing to interact. Shepherd was a beautiful poet, one who sometimes wrote difficult poems–but he was willing to stand by their difficulty while also working to demystify the cult of the writer. He did this by continually making himself accessible online, as I and many others eventually came to best know him. What a delight to tiptoe through his blog posts, to read all the comments. Auden once developed something of a critic’s statement in his essay “Reading”–a series of questions about that critic’s Eden, the answers to which would provide a thorough understanding of the critic’s baggage. These answers were to be a precursor to the critic’s article or book. In other words, you’d know the critic a little bit before you had to grapple with his or her opinions. Shepherd’s blogging, in a way, was his de facto explanation of his Eden, and in this way I know I, and I would hazard to guess many others, felt like we knew Shepherd just a little bit. His blogging, as much as his other work, felt like a wonderful gift. He made a community by writing, commenting, arguing, and agreeing–but mostly by caring to do any of it, with any of us.
Read some of Sheherd’s work at Poets.org.
Below is a Shepherd poem that originally appeared in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 21, Number 1 (Winter 1999).
SOLSTICE AS DEMON LOVER
You disappear again, December sun
turns light to ice, fracture
of frozen stars responsible for months
of snow. Now that you’re gone it’s winter:
I can sleep, but don’t. Cold bright
guided me to you: save me
some fragment of its linger. Poured
over glacier meal’s cracked
maps, I stumbled through mist’s
occlusions: now recognize
the face never turned to me, myriad myths
of you. Of course there was a portal
you led through, underworld of
wind-twisted trees. The preoccupation
with endings breaks open, two equal
-ly irregular shreds of cloud: white sky falls
from the rent defining them. Who turns
in this version, fixes me to either side
of mourning? Your heliotrope gaze
turns and I am caught adjusting my sorrow
among spilled waves and crashing
particles, breaking open the day
to see what it contains. (Look at me
now I’m losing you.) Light-footed
gods traverse the light between the living
and the too-loved dead like messengers
or echoes; the body breaks in two
but walks away. (I pissed my name,
Orpheus, with doubtful penmanship
into the white. I had to
scar it somehow, undo its clean efficiency.
The frost will fecundate another crop
of ghosts.) Cold bells
of breath second the snow, the winter
you became. (Wind again: there is
no sound. You must have a
winter’s mind.) I walked out
of cold hell, mourned well
when you disappeared from view:
same voice, no face, rubbed clean
by renown. I need some music now.