Charif Shanahan
Photo by Justin Hoch
Bio
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, New Republic, New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry, among other journals.His work has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem Foundation, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program/IIE, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, La Maison Baldwin in St Paul, France, Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Originally from the Bronx, he holds an AB from Princeton University; an AM from Dartmouth College; and an MFA from New York University.He has taught poetry at the Collegio di Milano, California College of the Arts, Dartmouth College, New York University, and Stanford University, where he is currently a Jones Lecturer in Poetry.
Born into a mixed-race, bi-national family in the Bronx, I have from youth navigated complex questions of intersecting histories, geographies, and identities. In particular, the experience of not being seen, ethnoculturally and racially, and with it not being heard, marked my early life so constitutively as to become an existential echo: I did not—could not—exist in a social world whose terms did not exactly account for me. From that social position, I naturally sought any person, experience, book, painting, photograph—anything I could find—that reached beyond constructed social divisions to a sense of unity, or oneness, to a plane of human experience not only available to all but constituted by all. Over time I developed a passionate commitment to poetry—to language at its most distilled and activated—for its paradoxical ability to reach that plane and convey, touch, animate, or transmit the ineffable, and within that, a kind of “truth,” however fleeting, small, complex, or eternal. To the National Endowment for the Arts, I want to offer my deepest and most sincere thanks, for seeing and hearing me and my poems, for the welcomed financial relief provided by the fellowship, and for the powerful confirmation that I am in fact doing my work.
"SONG"
I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a conduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.
(From Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing SIUP, 2017)