Lori Shine

Writer & Editor

Fidelity to complexity is something I find in much of the poetry I love, and it draws me to visual art and music as well. Experiments in writing that undermine the normal way we hear language (often employing painterly or musical techniques) can refresh and enlarge the realm of what it is possible to say. I like that these kinds of techniques take the nuances and subtle expectations of patterning which underlie language (especially speech) and use them to disrupt a transparent giving of information with a more opaque language object, which is then less paraphrasable, less capable of being separated from itself as an object. This gives the poem an irreducible quality. I believe that a kind of shared privacy might be possible between the poem and the reader. But there’s a balance to strike. When we push too hard to separate language from its communicative everyday powers, we really weaken it as an artistic medium. One doesn’t have to be decorative to be beautiful; clarity and richness can come together. Isn’t one of the most fascinating things about having language be your medium as an artist the fact that people use language every day? It’s like making art with keys or dirt or air or bread, but with such tremendous capabilities—on the one hand, its plastic, abstract, musical opacity, and on the other hand, its communicative, corresponding, social transparency. For this same reason I am interested in working with idiomatic speech and the domestic sphere, in poems that wear everyday clothes and talk like we talk, but take us somewhere none of us unexpected.

Lori Shine has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was a Jacob Javits fellow and received the Academy of American Poets award. Her poems have appeared in 6×6, APR, Boston Review, Conduit, New American Writing, Tin House and other magazines. With Kathranne Knight she heads Correspondence Publishing. She works with nonprofits, writes essays and articles, and blogs from her home in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Coming Down in White, limited edition chapbook with artwork by Kathranne Knight. Pilot Books, 2007. Anthologies: Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House (Tin House Books, 2008). Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press, 2004) Publishing: Co-publisher, Correspondence Publishing (2015-present): http://correspondencepub.wordpress.com Managing Editor, Catapult/Black Balloon Publishing (2010-2015) Managing Editor, Wave Books/Verse Press (2001-2007)