I first read Michael Martin Shea’s work, I believe, when we were published in the same issue of Tyger Quarterly in the Spring of 2023. I’d certainly seen him (and his Frank Stanford profile picture, shout out Frank) around on social media, but, reading his actual work for the first time, I remember mostly how immediately it caught me up in the stream of its keening, its associative sprint: “I never asked to be born into this life. A ziggurat bows before its people. A dog shits according to its whimsy. The clouds amassed in the western oval before settling themselves like fat grackles in the branches of the pear tree. Hegel was a little bitch with an ornate member.”
I’ve always preferred work that prioritizes imagining—constant, loud creation—i.e. work with a willingness to actually feed its reader fireworks, but what stuck in my head most about the poems in that issue was their ability to breach the bounds of “acceptable poetic behavior” while still maintaining a real measure of artfulness and—I’m going to say it—legitimate beauty. There is, as you will hear Michael explain here, a real music to the way these chunks of language, image, and lived life fall toward the reader. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think that Hegel’s member, as an image, has a beauty “in itself.” It’s the way each word worms alongside those around it that gives his poems the textured presence that makes them last the way they do.
Michael was kind enough to sit down for a phone conversation with me at 3:45 PM Eastern on June 6th, 2025. Below is the transcript, which has been edited down slightly for your reading pleasure.
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I’d like to talk first about your use of obscenity. You are, perhaps, more willing than most of the poets I see around to insert moments—and moments I love—like “balls of prophecy in the nutsack of the real” or “when I cum I hear the fawn beneath my door.”
That willingness to take part in obscenity is one of the things that makes your poems ‘un-American’ in a way I really like, which we can perhaps get more into later, but I wanted start by asking: what draws you to that register? Is it just another texture, something to contrast with sentiment, or what is your thinking there?
I think the way that I try to use language in my poems—the way that I’ve been writing for the past few years, anyway—is really centered on creating overlapping textures, thinking about words as having semantic content but also having these other registers or other forms of meaning. On some level what I’m trying to do in my poems is to create a sort of music outside of my body—almost like an act of translation, but where what I’m translating is a kind of rhythm of perception, or a sense of affective urgency. And so the poem serves as a form to receive and contain that complex thing that was and is inside me, like a black spot of alterity, if you will.
With that in mind, the shock or pinprick or swerve you can get by shifting registers is really appealing to me. Obviously something like “balls of prophecy in the nutsack of the real” is a line that moves you out of where that poem had been going, which until that point is simply cataloguing fragmented observations. And it’s particularly the obscene quality of that line that’s so jarring. So obscenity is definitely integrated into my poetics in that sense.
But also, on a content level, the lines that you’re referring to as obscene—and they are—are also bodily, in that they call to mind the kind of awkward materiality of having a body, right? And that’s something that I’m really interested in pursuing in my poems. In part, that’s a personal desire—I’m also a scholar and a translator, and I sell my labor in the classroom, as many of us do, so I spend a lot of time doing a certain kind of cognitive work that tends to exclude the lower registers. The poems are a place where I’m able to unite these other aspects of experience. So having those lines that act as a testament to sexual desire or the awkwardness of having a body is something I’m interested in pursuing, and what we call obscenity is a really good way to get there.
But I’ll also say—when you said “un-American,” it made me think about when I was a very young poet in an MFA program where Dave Smith taught for a couple years before retiring. He has or had (I doubt it has changed) a very conservative notion of what the poem should be about: for him, it’s about values, more or less American or masculine values, and projecting a kind of “nobility.” Poetry as a way of dignifying existence. To me, that just felt like so many Sunday school sermons. That didn’t fit into my life. And so I’m constantly trying to turn my back on that model of the poem. I don’t know if it’s anti-American, exactly, but it’s certainly anti-Dave Smith.
That’s great. You mentioned earlier in your answer the general form that the poems take… I want to talk about, if not their form, I do want to take a moment to talk about their format. Because the kind of dynamic project you’re describing—you know, the overlapping textures, the movement between registers—could happen in a lot of different poetic “formats,” and I think it’s not strictly “necessary” that it be a kind of lyric-shaded one.
I’m asking about this, specifically, because your poems use a lyric I—or something that seems like a lyric I—in a particular way. So, let me just ask the question as it’s written and we can narrow down things as I talk:
There’s this one moment in the very beginning of the book that I think it might be fun to talk about. I’m talking about the quotation “empty like the lyric is, cornered / by the operation of its thought.” I don’t want to over-literalize that moment, but I do maybe want to use it as a way to lead into a discussion of the lyric format as it exists today.
I suppose I just want to ask: do you think the lyric is empty? In what ways does it fall short, and how have you attempted to fill that emptiness in the sections of your book that use an I?
That’s a really difficult question. I guess I’ll just start by saying that I think it’s evident in the poems that I have a vexed relationship to the stability of the lyric speaker. In a similar way to how I don’t want my poems to be about “great values” or whatever, I have a complicated relationship to the notion of the lyric I as a vehicle for personal testimony, a framework that has been endemic to a certain vein of American poetry for a long time. And so in that sense, I don’t think the lyric is empty—I think it comes freighted with a whole host of assumptions and expectations. It’s not a neutral container, even if I think there’s a certain emptiness to the lyric impulse.
But of course, in terms of format, these still are lyric poems in some way and they use a lyric I, and they’re also lineated poems, and that was kind of a return for me. For a long time, I’ve been writing prose poems—and that still tends to be the dominant mode. To Hell With Good Intentions came out of this sudden burst of interest in lineation, that—maybe we can talk about the background to this project—really afforded a different form of thinking. I think that’s one of the things that’s really important to me in poetry, both in the kind of research work that I’m doing and in my writing: thinking of the poem as its own mode of thought. Conventions of the lyric aside, the poem doesn’t prescribe—and I don’t want it to prescribe for me—where the thinking goes. I approach the poem like an empty vessel, and it’s my task to put things inside of it, coming from different registers, coming from different experiences—of language, of self, of music—and see where they end up. And for a lot of these poems, I didn’t have an end in mind. Some of these lines are very old, they come from previously aborted projects and sort of crept their way back in here. And it’s rarely a conscious decision. Instead it’s like, “Oh, this is actually where they fit, where they resonate.”
One of the reasons I’m not as interested in autobiography, or autobiographical poems, or lyric-epiphanic poems, is that I think they just don’t do justice to the entire breadth of being human and having a brain with language running through it. In a lot of respects, I feel like the language that runs through my brain is not mine, not necessarily in a woowoo sense, but in more of a Lacanian sense. Maybe also in a Jack Spicer sense. Like: language comes from somewhere else. It runs through me and produces things—and so, if I narrow down that experience to just what I as a conscious perceiving subject did or thought, that wouldn’t really reflect for me the totality of the experience of language. So, that’s also what I’m interested in in poems. I don’t know if I’ve really answered the question… *Laughs*
*Laughs* That all sounds great to me man. To go off-script for a second, I do want to ask about that shift from the prose poem to the lineated forms in this book. One of the things you mentioned about formal “emptiness”—the poem being something that, in a way, takes on the form of your thought as you fill it—reminds me of something Nikki Wallschlaeger said: that the prose poem is good for “when you have something to say and you don’t want to be interrupted.”
I guess I want to ask, here, how you feel about the emptiness of the prose poem vs. the emptiness of the lineated lyric. How differently do those emptinesses treat you? In what ways do you feel differently about the process of composing in them?
Yeah, absolutely. The prose poem was, like I said, kind of my home, poetically speaking, for a long time—and in some ways still is. And now I’ve done a truly terrible thing, which is that my current project is broken up into two sections, and one is prose poems and the other is lineated, so I’m just explicitly enforcing that dichotomy. No convergence of the twain!
But what I like about the prose poem is precisely its emptiness, its productive emptiness, which feels greater than that of any other form that I’ve encountered. In some ways, I think of it like a shipping container, even to the extent that I tend to justify the poems so they really do look like these stackable blocks on the page (though of course real shipping containers have, like the lyric, a certain network of expectations for their use). But the emptiness of the prose poem, perhaps because it’s at the limit of poetic form, is particularly freeing for the sort of purposes that I’ve discussed above. At the same time, I think it makes very clear demands on the poet to keep the energy moving through the poem. How I can keep that metaphorical ball bouncing along—conceptually, sonically, texturally. I really like that challenge, and it feels sort of natural to me to approach language that way. But that’s not to imply that there’s a lack of technique or revision. There’s a lot of shaping to the prose poem, a lot of going back and forth for that rhythm and seeing what fits and what doesn’t when I’m trying to capture the kind of music that I’m after.
A lineated poem has a different logic. I think it allows you to be accretive in a way that is different from the prose poem: it allows you to make these little leaps, these little parallelisms that are more available to because of the technology of the line. When I was young and impressionable (and I am still impressionable), the poet Tim Earley said to me that line breaks are a violence done unto language. And he was being funny to an extent, but it also stuck with me. So when I was working through this project, To Hell With Good Intentions, there actually was a conscious choice, like I want to do that violence to language. I want to separate these things from each other. I want to see what that separation does: to the way that I’m thinking and the way that I’m experiencing the language and how it comes out of me.
That’s interesting… there’s a lot of places I could go from there, but we might as well just dive into your imagery. Your poems, if they aren’t focused on images, do make great use of imagery. They’re interested in, if not standalone images, images that speak quite loudly in themselves in the moment that they’re in the poem. What is it about that kind of image that draws you to it? Where do those images come from, for you, and what work do you feel like they do in your poems? Because they have quite a presence, at least to me.
It’s interesting that you say that. To couch my answer in someone else’s language, the poet Quan Barry has this understanding of the poem as being driven by either image, rhetoric, or sound. I might have butchered that—I never studied with her but a dear friend did and he conveyed this idea to me at some point. And whether or not she actually did say that, it’s a useful framework—that each poet or each poem lets one of these three aspects of the poem take control. All of which is to say that in some ways I felt like this book was really focused on the poem as a rhetorical object, using that technology of the line break and the stanza break for their juxtapositional force. You can contrast these poems to what you might find in something like a Natasha Tretheway poem, where you’re often moving through a richly detailed scene. Obviously her poems have their own rhetorical positioning as well, but that’s kind of the point—all poems have sound, all poems have images, even the most experimental sound poems can’t help but evoke images. So it’s more a question of what you’re allowing to predominate, to guide your language production. And for me, in To Hell With Good Intentions, it was that rhetorical aspect, the idea of the poem less as a scene than as an argument or a conjecture. I don’t want to say that the image was an afterthought exactly, but I wasn’t really writing about things. I mean I was, of course, but I didn’t have a sense of, “here’s what I want to depict.” The images were products of how the poems were thinking, and how that thinking was evolving as a result of the poem’s own rhetorical devices. It’s not like these poems are re-staging conscious memories, exactly, though there are some memories in there.
So, to give an example: there’s a poem that talks about a woman whose balloons we didn’t want. That comes from something that happened in our neighborhood in Philadelphia in the early days of COVID. There was a woman who—I think she had a job that involved balloons, though she definitely wasn’t a clown, and she could no longer work because of the lockdowns? Something like that (and you can see how the memory really doesn’t matter too much). Anyway, suddenly she had a lot of extra balloons, and she started leaving them on people’s doorsteps, tying them to the handrail that goes down the stoop. Which seems like a nice gesture, but then there was also a sense that they were a bit menacing—again, these were the early days of the pandemic, we were in that information haze where no one knew exactly how the disease worked, people were generally being a bit paranoid. So, a balloon that someone else put their mouth on, potentially, showing up on your doorstep unannounced—it was a little unsettling, or at least that was how people in the community Facebook group experienced it. And that really stuck with me, the idea of these mysterious balloons that no one wants to touch or get rid of, and then learning that it was this sad woman—I guess I don’t know if she was sad, but it felt sad, that she was out of work and trying to bring cheer but in this way that people weren’t fully appreciating. So that was an image that I worked into the poem, but not in a conscious effort to stage that experience; rather, the image presented itself at a moment in the poem’s composition, as a place where the poem’s form of thinking might go next—that sort of fragmentary associative form of thinking that these poems, as non-standard lineated free-verse poems, were really interested in doing.
At the same time, there are other poems that really do start with the image, like curds lingering at the top of your coffee, though that poem’s progression is driven more by its associative and rhetorical capacities than by the contiguity of image. But to come back to your question, I would say that I’m interested in blending a mix of images, some drawn from the quotidian, some drawn from something more like a dream state, and some drawn from memory. Again, it’s that idea of trying to work in various registers and with various textures—sonically but also imagistically. And the role memory plays here is important as well. The collection is dedicated to Matt Henriksen, a poet who passed away right around the time I started writing these poems. Matt was a friend when I was younger, and he played a really important role in my development as a poet, in my sense of what it meant to be a poet, what kinds of values a poet should have. So a lot of these poems are working through memories of Matt, of being in Fayetteville, of the legacy he left, for others and for me—but they’re also using those moments as a pivot to think through the distance between my present self and earlier stages of my life. And all of this is coming together under the associative powers of the poem, so the images come in insofar as they are this sensuous form of thinking that allows the poem to move from the quotidian to the grief-stricken to the frustrated, not as end states in themselves, but as vectors. It’s a question not of making a claim for what those feelings and memories can mean, but rather seeing what they do when they’re put in action through language into the form of the poem.
I think that’s very interesting. Y’know, looking at these again I can see what you’re saying: that there’s a rhetorical surface to these poems and the images are almost struggling to push their way up through it into the air.
Anyway, let’s get off that track for now *laughs*. We’re talking so much about other poets, too, I wanted to ask while we’re here: I’m curious about your relationship to, literary history is a big phrase, but I did want to ask about who and what you feel joined to—in your own writing and your own thinking. And I’m also interested, I suppose, in what trends you might feel like you’re trying to buck or detach yourself from. I’m always interested in how poets situate themselves in “cultural time,” I guess.
It’s funny that you say that in terms of “bucking trends,” because one of the first names that comes to mind is Alice Notley, who also passed away, quite recently. I didn’t have a personal relationship with Alice at all, but her work was very, very important to me as a young poet and still is. But there’s a wonderful interview with Alice from around the time when Mysteries of Small Houses came out, which was sort of a strange interruption in her trajectory—so personal, and so autobiographical, after the great epic The Descent of Alette and some of the stranger books of the early 90s (I’m thinking of Close to Me & Closer in particular). I think it was at the Kelly Writer’s House, I know you can find it on PennSound because I remember downloading it and listening to it on a long drive through southern Mississippi. Anyway—someone asks her about the decision to write such a personal book, and she says something to the effect of “Well, I looked at what all the other poets were doing and I decided to do the opposite.”—*Laughs*—which, of course—I tell my students you should never listen to what someone says in an interview. They’re not actually telling the truth of what’s happening; they’re performing. And maybe I shouldn’t say that in an interview myself, but regardless, as much as her poems themselves shaped me, that brief summation of what we could not unfairly call her aesthetic philosophy really stuck with me. In some ways, it explains her entire career: she’s always trying to do something else, something that she hasn’t done before. And so when we talk about the question of influence, that was, somewhat indirectly, but nonetheless importantly, a significant influence on this collection. I had been writing prose poems for so long—it was time to do something else.
But as I said above, the book also emerged in dialogue with Matt Henriksen’s passing, and that drove me back to his work, which I hadn’t read in years. Matt wrote poems that are quite different from the kinds of poems that I tend to write, and as much as this collection comes from the experience of grappling with the kind of person I was in my early 20s, it also comes from engaging with the kinds of poetic thinking that appears in Matt’s work. That’s not to say that these poems are like Matt Henriksen poems—they’re not at all, really—but just to underscore how that question of influence is so fluid, and for me it often comes from the desire to try something different, to have some sort of swerve in my poetic trajectory.
That said, I always find myself coming back to the work of Tim Earley, who was a very good friend when I was doing my MFA and whose work has had a lasting influence on me, particularly in terms of unmaking some of the received notions I had about poems as a very young person and opening up this wider world of poetics that ultimately made me receptive to what Alice was saying in that interview. Clark Coolidge continues to be a really big influence, particularly in the sense of that word “texture” (and Matt was the first person to turn me on to Coolidge’s work). Nathaniel Mackey has also been a really important poet for me. And I’m a translator as well and for me, the experience of translation really culminates in this sense of letting someone else’s work move through you. I had a book of translations come out just last month by an Argentine poet—Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream—and that has had an enormous influence on my own poetics. Translation is, in some ways, the most intimate act of reading, and recreating my understanding of her language in English has opened me up to other ways of thinking, both within the poem and otherwise. And you know, I’m speaking generally here, but maybe subconsciously that was playing a very specific role in this collection we’ve been talking about as well, because To Hell With Good Intentions was written in the spring of 2022 and I had just finished a revised draft of Liliana’s book in January of that year. So I’m consciously thinking about Matt’s death and about Philadelphia and about the pandemic and things like that, but I’m really realizing just now that I also had Liliana’s voice in my head.
Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. And I loved those Augusto Lunel poems you translated, the ones Poetry Daily pulled from the Action Books blog.
Yeah! And that’s been so interesting, too, because Liliana’s poems were the first that I’d ever translated, and that book that just came out was the first collection that I ever put together—I worked on that project for about ten years—and it was sort of an education in translation. And then when I shifted to Augusto Lunel’s work—he’s a very different poet coming from a different country, different time, not such a dissimilar literary history, but a very different voice. So I found myself having to reorient everything. I honestly don’t remember, because it has been ten years, but I think that before I became a translator, I had a rather standard conception of translation as, if not a kind of machinic substitution, at least being rather limited in terms of the options that presented themselves to you for each word, and I certainly thought of it as an agential activity, that you make these clear, logical decisions about what would be the most appropriate translation. And it’s really not like that at all. At least, it isn’t for me. It feels so intimate, so spiritual, to be so in touch with how this person sees the world and sees language and uses language. So, getting the voice that (at least I think) is correct for the Lunel poems is so different from getting the voice right for Liliana’s work. It’s a different way of experiencing language.
That’s great. Speaking of seeing the world, I wanted to ask one last question about To Hell With Good Intentions before I asked a final one about your upcoming collection, recently put on pre-order. (Congratulations, by the way).
I wanted to ask about the lack of titles in To Hell With Good Intentions… it’s actually pretty funny: in one of the earlier interviews I did for this series, with Kai Ihns, we talked for a while about how important titles are to her and how much thought she’s put into titling over the course of her career. So, it’s kind of funny to move to a collection or a chapbook where titling is not at all a priority.
I just wanted to ask quickly about the decisions that lead to only using one titled poem in the book. Did you want those asterisk’d poems to kind of exist on equal terms? Because that gesture could be read in many ways, I’m curious what your thinking was.
Yeah, that’s also really funny—I read with Kai in Chicago last November and she’s an absolutely wonderful poet. I don’t know if you’ve seen her read; she’s generally reading from memory!
Oh yeah, for sure.
It’s phenomenal—it’s so cool. Yeah, I love Kai’s work.
I have struggled to title poems for a long time. In part because titling is difficult—I just think it’s really hard—and it does take a lot of work to do it well. But also because I do tend to work in sequence. I wouldn’t call the poems in this collection serial poems, in the sense that they didn’t all come out of me in this order, they’re not numbered, they have a different relationship to each other than something like Jack Spicer’s serial poems, but they are part of what felt to me at the time and continues to feel like a larger project that I’m exploring across different poems (but also across different collections, projects, chapbooks, things like that—like Ted Berrigan says, everything turns into writing). And so in some ways giving them individual titles would feel to me like purposefully hiding that continuity. It would make their collection in the form of the chapbook, for example, seem somewhat arbitrary. Or that’s the fear, in any case. To me, it would suggest a greater degree of remove between the poems than there actually is.
At the same time, this isn’t a long poem, there are very purposeful breaks between individual poems. So the thing about the asterisks and that sort of untitled title quality that they’re bringing to the poems is that it’s an attempt to play it both ways: to designate that they are part of the same project while standing somewhat apart. They are moments in the evolution of a project rather than a collection of poems crammed together. But of course there’s a section in the middle with the title “New Auguries” that interrupts that minimalist titling conceit. I really did imagine that as an interruption in some ways—it was a sort of separate thread that I was working on at the same time that I didn’t know what to do with, and it suddenly seemed like a sort of musical interlude in the middle of the book would make sense and would try to space out some of that affective complexity that runs through the collection. In some ways they’re much simpler poems, they’re trying to be funnier than some of the other poems, and so having a little bit of breathing room was good for this sequence. So I was able to use the title to designate that, yes, this is a rest, this is a break, this is a sort of intermission. It’s not like you can leave the theater with your popcorn necessarily, but it’s still moving in a slightly different mode for a second before diving back in.
But the chapbook that’s coming out later this summer with Essay Press is all untitled—*laughs*—and the project I’m working on now is two titled sequences with untitled poems. That’s just been my comfort zone for a while, and so in the spirit of Alice it’s probably time to abandon that mode. But I think it also speaks to the fact that I do tend to write with an eye towards the larger horizon of a project. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a standalone poem where I didn’t feel like, “Oo, this is the start of a new kind of form, a new way of thinking,” I’ll often go long stretches between periods of writing, so when it starts up again often they just spool out of me.
Very interesting. And it’s funny—I also find titling impossibly difficult, so…
It’s hard! There’s so much weight there. It was freeing to learn that you can just opt out of it.
Yes, for sure. I just numbered my poems for years when I first started writing—and then people started telling me not to do that. I’m titling them now, but only reluctantly…
Before we finish up, I just wanted to—I think plug is a strong word, but talk a little bit about I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault from Essay Press. I wanted to ask a general question: what changed for you between those projects? How differently do you see them?
Well, actually, I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault was written first.
Oh!
It was written primarily between the Summer of 2021 and early Winter of 2022. So, To Hell With Good Intentions is actually the subsequent project. When I’m talking about getting away from the prose poem, that forthcoming collection is the set of prose poems that I was trying to get away from.
So yeah, I’m very excited to have it come out with Essay Press, and Travis Sharp, the editor there, has just been wonderful. It’s a really good fit for Essay Press because they’re prose poems and so they’re working somewhat similarly in their erosion of the lyric I from within but are also more in dialogue with prose conventions. As in To Hell With Good Intentions, the poems are using a very flexible touch with that first-person speaker, but because of how they adapt to the form of the prose poem, in the sense that I really leaned in to having complete sentences, there are a lot more moments of quasi-narrative, and in some ways there’s a little more unification to the speaking voice in those poems. The way it makes associations sort of runs through the speaker a little bit more, and relies on some refrain lines, rather than running through the form of the line break. So that would be kind of the main difference. And then I’m working on a project now that kind of unifies those two modes. It’s a series of poems called Demons Are Real and it’s back in the prose poem form, kind of back in the saddle, but with a lot more fragmented sense of sentence structure, a looser relationship to association and metonymy. All searching for a different kind of music.
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
