John Shoptaw’s poetry notebook. Photograph by John Fiege © 2023.
I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.
John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.
John Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer.
John Shoptaw, Berkeley, CA. Photograph by John Fiege © 2023.
John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.
This episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
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John Shoptaw at home in Berkeley, CA. Photograph by John Fiege © 2023.
John Shoptaw is a poet, poetry reader, teacher, and environmentalist. He was raised on the Missouri River bluffs of Omaha, Nebraska and in the Mississippi floodplain of “swampeast” Missouri. He began his education at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with BAs in Physics and later in Comparative Literature and English, earned a PhD in English at Harvard University, and taught for some years at Princeton and Yale. He now lives, bikes, gardens, and writes in the Bay Area and teaches poetry and environmental poetry & poetics at UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative. Shoptaw’s first poetry collection, Times Beach (Notre Dame Press, 2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and subsequently also the 2016 Northern California Book Award in Poetry; his new collection, Near-Earth Object, is forthcoming in March 2024 at Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Jenny Odell.
Both collections embody what Shoptaw calls “a poetics of impurity,” tampering with inherited forms (haiku, masque, sestina, poulter’s measure, the sonnet) while always bringing in the world beyond the poem. But where Times Beach was oriented toward the past (the 1811 New Madrid earthquake, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the 1983 destruction of Times Beach), in Near-Earth Object Shoptaw focuses on contemporary experience: on what it means to live and write among other creatures in a world deranged by human-caused climate change. These questions are also at the center of his essays “Why Ecopoetry?” (published in 2016 at Poetry Magazine, where a number of his poems, including “Near-Earth Object,” have also appeared) and “The Poetry of Our Climate” (forthcoming at American Poetry Review).
Shoptaw is also the author of a critical study, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Harvard University Press); a libretto on the Lincoln assassination for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); and several essays on poetry and poetics, including “Lyric Cryptography,” “Listening to Dickinson” and an essay, “A Globally Warmed Metamorphoses,” on his Ovidian sequence “Whoa!” (both forthcoming in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Environmental Imagination at Bloomsbury Press in July 2023).
John Shoptaw’s writing table. Photograph by John Fiege © 2023.
By John Shoptaw
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Unlike the monarch, though
the asteroid also slipped
quietly from its colony
on its annular migration
between Jupiter and Mars,
enticed maybe by
our planetary pollen
as the monarch by my neighbor’s
slender-leaved milkweed.
Unlike it even when
the fragrant Cretaceous
atmosphere meteorized
the airborne rock,
flaring it into what might
have looked to the horrid
triceratops like a monarch
ovipositing (had the butterfly
begun before the period
broke off). Not much like
the monarch I met when I
rushed out the door for the 79,
though the sulfurous dust
from the meteoric impact
off the Yucatán took flight
for all corners of the heavens
much the way the next
generation of monarchs
took wing from the milkweed
for their annual migration
to the west of the Yucatán,
and their unburdened mother
took her final flit
up my flagstone walkway,
froze and, hurtling
downward, impacted
my stunned peninsular
left foot. Less like
the monarch for all this,
the globe-clogging asteroid,
than like me, one of my kind,
bolting for the bus.
Monarch butterfly in John Shoptaw’s front yard, Berkeley, CA. Photograph by John Fiege © 2023.
John Shoptaw reading from his collection Times Beach at the University of California, Berkeley.
John Fiege
I’m continually amazed by the immensity of the world that a small poem can conjure. In just a few lines or words, or even just a line break, a poem can travel across time and space. It can jump from the minuscule to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. And in these inventive leaps, it can create, in our minds, new ideas and images. It can help us see connections that were, before, invisible.
John Shoptaw has conjured such magic with his poem, “Near-Earth Object,” combining the gravity of mass extinction on Earth with the quotidian evanescence of his sprint to catch the bus.
I’m John Fiege, and this episode of Chrysalis is part of the Chrysalis Poets series.
John Shoptaw grew up in the Missouri Bootheel. He picked cotton; he was baptized in a drainage ditch; and he worked in a lumber mill. He now lives a long way from home in Berkeley, California, where I was lucky enough to visit him last summer. You can see some of my photos from that visit at ChrysalisPodcast.org, alongside the poem we discuss on this episode.
John is the author of the poetry collection, Times Beach, which won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of On The Outside Looking Out, a critical study of John Ashbery’s poetry. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
John has a new poetry collection coming out soon, also called Near-Earth Object.
Here is John Shoptaw reading his poem, “Near-Earth Object.”
---
John Shoptaw
“Near-Earth Object”
Unlike the monarch, though
the asteroid also slipped
quietly from its colony
on its annular migration
between Jupiter and Mars,
enticed maybe by
our planetary pollen
as the monarch by my neighbor’s
slender-leaved milkweed.
Unlike it even when
the fragrant Cretaceous
atmosphere...
