The Articulated Unknown

Tiff Dressen interviews Aaron Shurin about “Elixir: New and Selected Poems.”

By Tiff DressenAugust 8, 2025

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

ELIXIR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS is an expansive collection that captures 50 years of Aaron Shurin’s creative life—a presence and poetry that have deeply influenced generations of poets. It’s impossible to untangle Shurin’s poetry from the city of San Francisco, where his work is so frequently in communion with the city’s zeitgeist: from standing in protest against the Vietnam War to marching in support of gay liberation. His pioneering explorations of queerness and the collapsing of gender binaries and boundaries began long before such conversations entered the mainstream. But his poetry was never programmatic; his experiments with form, and with the prose poem especially, were equally dynamic. His poems expand our sense of human possibility and resilience while they bear witness to the devastation AIDS brought to both the city and the nation. Across the decades, the enduring thread in Shurin’s poetry has been an unwavering attention to beauty—and to the act of creating it. Through the poem, the world is made anew.

I first met Shurin in the early 2000s when I was an MFA student at the University of San Francisco, where he taught and co-directed the program for over 20 years. As a teacher, Shurin’s passion for poetry and poetics was irresistible, and his influence on students undeniable. For a newcomer, this collection of poems, a lifetime journey, is the perfect entry point to Shurin’s work.

This conversation emerged from a series of visits I had with Shurin in his home in San Francisco, and which then continued in written form online. Talking with Shurin deepened my sense of the “liberating energies” that poetry, writing, and the arts can awaken in all of us.

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TIFF DRESSEN: In his foreword to Elixir, Brian Teare praises your “commitment to eros,” a phrase he uses in reference to “Human Immune,” but which resonates throughout this collection. Many of your poems feel like invitations to join you, especially where the natural world often feels like a charged space, tender, aching, alive with eros—from your newest poems that begin Elixir to the transcendent The Blue Absolute [2020]: “I think our kisses are comets in the shivering sky […] and the violins of the tall cedars wail their ache and awe.” How does your relationship to nature shape this erotic sense of communion in your work? And do you see desire itself as a kind of ecology—one that links the human and more-than-human in shared longing and responsiveness?

AARON SHURIN: I think Brian is right that my commitment to eros is a kind of body logic. Grounding the poem in person (whether I, you, she, or they) is certainly an invitation for the reader to identify with the contents—we might call it an act of seduction. And the commitment is further engaged with the amped interplay of syllable, stress, and vowel tone, neurological accents driving the poem and lifting it off the page. They are the body of the poem, and they excite the reader as if by touch. The eros of prosody? In a similar way, trees and birds and flowers are accents of beyond-text, beyond-semantics. They are charge points awakening the human to the wider participatory world, the encompassing grammar of pelican, black rose, seagull, and leptospermum. They’re in the poem and they come out of the poem. It’s as if the textual world had nipples or genitals, spark points that deliver energy to the poem. They make three-dimensionality: if you’re standing there, it’s okay; if you notice the cedars, your worldview is enlarged; if you hear the music of the tree-branch violins, you’re not just there, you [also] feel the ache and awe of experience—you’re turned on.

The cedars are a poetic erogenous zone, an eros, as you suggest, of the natural world. It’s not a choice I make to be “erosy.” It’s the result of sensitizing oneself to all kinds of stimuli, of letting the world in. The poem is an instance of the polymorphous perverse, a total zone by which the reader finds meaning anywhere in the poem, or finds the poem anywhere in “external” experience. Whitman’s leaves of grass or Coleridge’s warbling breeze or Stein’s time-traveling rose or H. D.’s first pear: the poem is IN them. The poet doesn’t put meaning there; she derives it. These hot buttons simultaneously draw the reader out of the text to feel the tingling world and also entice the reader in, to enter more deeply [follow the blinking light] the supercharged complex of vectors that make poetic meaning. The “commitment to eros” is really just a sustained sensual apprehension of experience. The intercourse of person and prosodic play and animal presence and floral eruption and awakening wind we might call the eros of verse.

In your work, the lyric “I” often flickers between personal, collective, and mythic identities. What possibilities or freedoms does that fluid I offer you as a poet? And do you see the I as a point of origin in the poem, or more like a shifting vessel carried by the poem’s current?

I love the first person in my poetry—it’s so intimate and flexible—but it almost never means me. It’s a supple mask, a voice that can say or do what it wants, and sometimes what I never could, whether the position is ironic, romantic, or goofy. Once you liberate yourself from the veracity of the lyric I, the poem explodes with possibilities. For me this freedom came on the heels of my work with gender. I tried to fracture the iron control of pronouns over gender by interweaving male and female indicators—“he” and “she” occupying the same person, even in the same sentence. I hated the way pronouns inhibited poetic meaning by forcing this grammatical straitjacket on them. Gender was already suspicious just on the level of cultural identity, so I really wanted to kick out the jambs there. Very soon, this led to explorations of all positions of voice and even of tense—I just went wild in loosening the poem from these autocratic binds. I think a lot of people were confused by this (understandably), but I wasn’t. It was a joyride for me and ultimately gave me great flexibility, especially for narrative situations. Poems like “Into Distances” shift continually (though not much by gender), and I love the way the central person is augmented by this:

We went by covered wagon, reached a forest, and stopped. Under the sky I stood on the yielding earth, her eyes were black, transitoriness came and swept the hills into distances. She stood facing north and west and south. I must turn around again and carry down words. It has been years with ease and swiftness. They came soundlessly over the wheel of the sky.

We/I/her/she/I/they all refer to the same person. It’s as if one is seeing the same person from simultaneously different angles. I find that very exciting. The person is rotating. That is my expanded version of the lyric I.

Elixir begins not with the past but with your newest poems—a striking inversion of the usual arc in “New and Selected” collections, where the latest work often comes last, as a kind of arrival. How did you come to this ordering, and what does it signify for you—emotionally, spiritually, psychically?

This was a serious matter, and I’m thrilled with the form we arrived at. I had organized the book in the usual way, chronologically, but this collection had something unusual going on: the material spans 50 years. “Woman on Fire” was written in 1975! Literally 50 years ago. That’s a long time and a lot of development between. I think the poem is remarkable in its way, but I didn’t want the reader to encounter my old work first. The difference was emphatic.

Then, magically, I had a dream that suggested I organize the book in reverse chronology. Usually, such collections proceeded chronologically, showing how the writing developed over time. Reverse chronology would do that too, only by starting with the new and showing how you got there. I reset the book according to the dream and was excited with the result. But Stephen [Motika, publisher of Nightboat Books] wasn’t quite sure about the shift and its lack of precedent.

I wouldn’t disown my earlier work; I loved it, and I marveled at how it met its moment and continued to grow. But I had a fistful of new poems that I really was excited by and wanted to put out into the world. Stephen and I put our heads together, and came up with a unique solution: the book could start with this new work—the mature poetry I was writing now—and then follow it with the selected poems starting from 1975, showing how this writing the reader just read came to be. The reader could then see, if she so wished, the developmental poetic turns and trials across time—the selected of the “New and Selected.” It would end with the long poem “Shiver,” joining the new and the old like some colossus straddling time. So really, we would utilize both trajectories: the reader would encounter my current work first, and then make her way through the older work to another late poem that was also a full flowering.

Fifty years is a lifetime of work. I wanted to honor for myself the extravagant length of this effort. I spent a couple of years choosing and organizing the poems that would go into Elixir. There were so many poems involved; in the end, some 130 were included. The arrangement of new and old-becoming-new feels elegantly balanced, a dream-loaded elixir of sequence.

Here we are in the spring of 2025, bearing witness to the disintegration of our democracy, watching not only institutions but also people, principles, and shared dreams fracture before our eyes. In this climate of rupture and reckoning, Brian Teare has said that you “learned early to make poems that channel liberatory energies.” With that in mind, how does it feel to release Elixir into the world right now—into this moment? And what do you hope both new readers and longtime followers of your work will discover in this collection of poems?

Well, nobody could take on the enormity of the distress Trump and his isms have brought us to, but I don’t think the relation to that grief is really any different from the complicated conundrum it always is. I mean this book represents a life work so how could its “liberatory energies” be narrowed into one time? The book starts with investigations of gender and queerness; in fact, gender and queerness remain powerful investigative presences throughout the book, from “Woman on Fire” and “Into Distances” and “Material’s Daughter” to “City of Men” and “Human Immune.” These poems are cast widely into the social sphere. Their vectors of composition are equal to the concurrent and developing interests in prosody and semantics and representation.

I think the work doesn’t need to be explicitly about this or that. If it were, we’d be under the boot of Trump for the rest of our lives, with his endless machinations of ego and power. But I would suggest that a writer be aware of her time, and the powers at work pressing on her vision, her sense of the real, her ability to dream, her psychic well-being, and her control over the exclamation point! I’m also of the belief that everyone could use a flower, whether it’s a red geranium or a black rose.

As to what I hope a reader might find here—I hope my poems carry the quality of attention that I myself discover when I write: the incontestable rhythm of life, the tension of attention, the ability of words to open doors, the impossible lure of description, oneself in relation to one’s surroundings, the bathos and bliss streaming up from a dark reservoir, the balance of integrated syllable and stress, and the joy of surrendering to the articulated unknown. I hope the reader feels something of the open mystery I feel in composition.

I would be remiss not to ask you about San Francisco and its importance to you as a person and poet. If a place can be a holy ghost, I’d venture to say that San Francisco is one; even if it’s not directly invoked in your poems, its presence is tangible. Whether it’s a source of refuge, erotic possibility, or danger, it is there. In what ways has San Francisco shaped your poetics, your voice, your form, your devotions, even when it’s not named outright?

Well, first I should say it is named directly in Involuntary Lyrics, numbers III (“San Francisco, ah west of ascension”) and XLI (“San Francisco itself a perch or point of view”), and especially in “Shiver,” which is in, on, and about San Francisco, and to whom the poem is dedicated. And it’s very much attended in my prose books King of Shadows and Unbound: A Book of AIDS. Its presence and influence on my work is incalculable. I experienced the cultural revolution in San Francisco, I experienced gay liberation in San Francisco, and I found communities of poets in San Francisco who had similar dreams of poetic transformation.

I published my books for Gay Sunshine, Four Seasons, and City Lights. I had extraordinary mentor poets in Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima, who gave me traditions and a sense of fellow travelers. I had an education for the ages at New College and lived my life as a teacher in the named institutions City College of San Francisco and SF State and USF: the mark of San Francisco was everywhere.

But fundamentally, it was an ethical ground of inclusion and adventure, of community and neighborhoods, of psychedelic invention and spontaneous confraternity, of sexual experimentations and poetic nonconformity, of people’s opera made with spit and glitter, of spiritual congress without a church, of quality of life, and of laughter for the high jinks of human behavior that mattered.

Crucially, poetry stood in opposition to the big New York presses and journals, where the poems were seen to be unoriginal, lacking any connection to the historical developments of modernism and postmodernism, while the San Francisco poets were charting the explosive work of Pound and Williams and Stein, and creating their own new traditions of the naked Beat writing of Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, of the semantic revolutionaries of Language poetry and the true manipulations of New Narrative, of the dialectic critique of women’s experimental work and gay poets’ restless reclamations of body and ecstasy. In San Francisco, you were free to invent your form, encouraged to acknowledge and absorb social dynamics, and permitted to imagine the vision of a city on the hill: “Once, in the early years, he married the city, on a jagged outcrop on top of a hill with his eyes clear and the air clear and that blue-jewel horizon and his pledge of intent with his heart clear in his deep-breathing chest I take you, he said […] I do.”

As a citizen of the city for 50 years, I feel like I was allowed to co-create San Francisco, for which I am, in my way, maximally grateful.

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Aaron Shurin is the author of 14 books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat Books, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2016). His work has appeared in over 40 national and international anthologies, and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics program at New College of California. He lives in San Francisco.