Aaron Shurin Converses With Micah Ballard at Open Space

Introducing their conversation, Ballard notes, "I started to read Aaron Shurin’s poetry and essays when I moved to San Francisco in the late ’90s." The go on to discuss Shurin's latest title, The Blue Absolute (Nightboat). From there: 

When I found out he was the first graduate of the storied New College of California Poetics program, I wrote him a letter and sent him my privately printed MA thesis. I had to, not only because it was for the same program (and an easy way to introduce oneself) but because I used his thesis, Out of Me: Whitman and the Projective, as the main idea for mine, Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners. He wrote back instantly and we began to send one another letters until we actually started seeing each other at poetry readings and hanging out together. In the last few years I’ve almost finalized my collection of his work, (over fourteen books of poetry and prose, spanning five decades). His writing is rooted in social activism and collective participation, from Stonewall-era Gay Liberation theory of the ’70s to experimentation with gender and form during the ’80s to a thirty-year engagement with teaching in the Bay Area at City College, New College, San Francisco State and the University of San Francisco. Two recent books that I keep returning to (and which serve as a sort of guide to his history and presence) are The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks and Flowers & Sky: Two Talks. I recommend these to anyone curious about how to live a life in service of imagination and experience.

After the New Year I caught up with Aaron in regards to his new book of poetry, The Blue Absolute, just out from one of my favorite presses, Nightboat Books. I’ve been lucky enough to be a first reader of his poems for quite some time, in that I get the work fresh from him, either read over the phone or delivered in person (we live in the same neighborhood). I hear his voice very clearly; when I read his work I experience and live with the cadences, encryptions, and em dashes carried in his everyday speech. Often I see his words write themselves into the air, on a floating page, right between us. I feel that’s the way it’s supposed to be, when you know someone through their poetry. —MB

Pick up with their conversation at Open Space.