Brenda Shaughnessy's Crush on the Octopus

Brenda Shaughnessy discusses her most recent book, The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), with Peter Mishler for Literary Hub. One of the important questions: "Could you talk about your reading, thinking, or researching about the octopus?" Shaughnessy's response, and more:

BS: I’ve long had a crush on the octopus, and saw one in the wild, years ago, with Craig. Sy Montgomery’s 2011 article in Orion magazine “Deep Intellect” changed my brain. More recently, I read Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds, in which cephalopod evolution is explained so elegantly. That infatuation and amazement for the species came crashing into my despair and anguish over who and what was running our world now—and octopuses being in charge just seemed like a big old relief, a welcome regime change.

PM: What was it like for you to work in longer lines than those of your last two collections?

BS: Oh how I love a long prose line with no self-important line breaks! It just ends where the margin says it ends. These lyric-essay/prose-poem vignettes are the correct shape for the content—almost all rectangular, as if framed, teleological. There are some regular, stanza-ed poems in the book because they are relics: humans used to write poems in which we wasted space...

Read the full interview at Literary Hub.