Poet Christopher Shipman on Absence and Poetry as Medicine
Anthony Calzia, Jr., a first-year MFA student in poetry and editorial assistant for Pinch, had the opportunity to interview Christopher Shipman. The interview took place in October 2025 across email. Mortar, Shipman’s latest poetry collection and winner of the 2024 Brick Road Poetry Prize will be published in fall of 2025.
Shipman’s work appears in journals such as Fence, Poetry, Sixth Finch, and The Southern Review, among many others. He is the author or coauthor of six books and four chapbooks. His poem “The Three-Year Crossing” was a winner of the 2015 Big Bridges Prize, judged by Alice Quinn, and he has twice won the Editor’s Choice for Rattle’s ekphrastic challenge. With his partner, artist and all-around badass Dr. Sarah K. Jackson, and his spellbinding daughter Finn, he lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he teaches literature and creative writing at New Garden Friends School and plays drums in The Goodbye Horses. Find him online at cshipmanwriting.com.
My first question is what kind of a unicorn are you? You have your newest collection of poetry Mortar coming out, but you are a musician and write and work closely with an artist spouse and teach. How do you understand your identity as a creator and how has that influenced Mortar?
When I think about my identity as a creator, I’m quickly transported back to senior year of high school, when the incomparable Jo Ann Steed introduced the first creative writing assignment I can remember—to write a parody of a horror story. Without going into detail, my life at the time, for various reasons, was something like a horror story—defined by fear and depression. This simple assignment, however, allowed me to look at not only my life but life itself with different eyes. Every experience I have had from that moment forward has been tinged with fascination and ripe for exploration. It is no surprise that I ended up a teacher of English and creative writing. I know very well what life can feel like without art. I don’t want that absence for myself, and I don’t want it for my students or anyone else.
Around the time of the pivotal assignment in my senior English class I began (very badly) playing music with a small group of friends just as lost and depressed as I was. We had no idea what we were doing. But, like writing, it allowed me to find the joy I desperately needed to find, and I have been in bands ever since. I have been writing ever since.
My work as a poet has always been informed by personal experience. More than anything, my poems tend to be about my family and relationships (romantic and plutonic) in one way or another. Unfortunately, that has also meant that my poems often explore trauma and grief. It is clear to me now that Mortar is what that fateful assignment in my senior English class was always leading me to write. In this way, Mortar feels like my debut collection. I have always written for both myself and others. Mortar is as much for a grandmother I was never able to meet as it is for my father and his siblings navigating life after the tragic event of her murder.
But it is also for me—my attempt to come to terms with a childhood/relationship with a father that was defined in many ways by the trauma left in the wake of my grandmother’s murder. Ultimately though, at least for me, at the heart of the book is my daughter. Amid so much attention to the past, I write about my daughter to ground myself in the lived experience of the present and to reach toward a future for her that is not defined by the past that haunts the majority of the book’s pages. Overall, like anything I have produced as a poet or musician—anything I have managed to offer my students as a teacher—I hope Mortar is for anyone who might in some way benefit from spending time with it.
I especially love the very brick-like poems. I am tempted to call them prose poems, but the importance of lines and enjambment and all the other poetic devices that separate prose from poetry are in operation in ways that feel unique. Do you think of the poems(“Missing Headline” “Ulteriority” “Education” “A Traditional Story of Exaggerated Consumption” “My Father’s Grief” “Missing Story”) as formally different from “Here Comes the Rain”? What about these ‘brick-thick’ poems makes them feel so fit for the content? What is going on for them/you in the poems?
I’m so glad you asked about these poems specifically as they are by far my favorite in the collection. The best teacher I’ve ever had, Rodger Kamenetz, often talks about the power of the image to purge afflictive emotions. He would also say that poems come from the same place dreams come from—what Coleridge might call the primary imagination. These poems are my favorite because they are absent of the kind of analytical thought that unfortunately weasels its way into many of my poems.
A poem can be essayistic, and I would describe the bulk of my poems over the years as exactly that. But to me a poem seems more authentic when thought is absent. I do believe that for me the initial impulse to write a poem always begins with the image. More often than not, however, the connection to the image becomes, maybe not severed entirely, but more confused and deformed by too much thinking. Rodger once said, in the first class I was lucky to have with him in grad school at LSU, that to analyze a dream (or poem) by adhering to the rules of the waking world is to do it a grave disservice. I didn’t understand at the time what he meant by the statement. Maybe I still don’t. But I felt its truth—I felt it like the image of a flame in what Yeats would call “the deep heart’s core” of the imagination.
Many of the poems in the collection come from a place of knowing—a place of intellect. I know the facts of my grandmother’s murder—names and dates and actions and consequences—and many of the poems sprung from that knowledge. But the poems you reference here are informed by images that carry with them the emotions that led me to write this collection in the first place; images that I did not understand but felt; images that rose up inside me. In these poems I managed to let the image go where it wanted, and the poems came quickly and with very little revision needed. In many ways for me they function like dreams. They are speaking from a place of imagination that managed to allow me to purge afflictive emotions, and the brick-like structure is simply the result of not concerning myself with thinking, as much as possible, about line breaks.
Your other poetry collection, very different, Getting Away with Everything, displays a playfulness and sensitivity to form AND a willingness to stretch (maybe near tearing?) formal constraints. What do you think of the form overall? Its role in our poetic venture, its constraints and ways formal experiments might help poetry as an art?
I have found, more often than not, form takes shape as the writing unfolds. The collection you mention, Getting Away with Everything, coauthored with my dear friend Vincent Cellucci, is the second in a trilogy of collaborations. The third of which is now in the beginning stages. Among other things, for GAWE we wanted the title to suggest that we would exhaust our abilities in terms of both form and content. My poems have always looked very different from one to the next.
Other than the image, formal constraint (or their absence) is what allows poetry to exist. Without formal experiments poetry would cease to be what it is—its possibilities would cease to present themselves. I think poets should experiment with form as much as possible. My poems look very different from one to the next because I am willing to let the content and the craft of that content take shape along the way. I would write very few poems otherwise.
A popular form and one that seems to lend itself to displacement and grief, especially hidden grief, is the erasure poem. It strikes me that while you do not use the erasure, your poems deal with absence. Can you talk about the central theme of absence in Mortar (the word itself in anaphoric throughout Mortar), and how the writing of Mortar was a response, but also (maybe?) an attempt to heal or overcome absence? Is poetry a healing venture and how are some of the ways it functions as such for you?
Poetry is very much a healing venture for me. Like dreams, poetry—and music and all art—is medicine. Without it I would be lost. For this collection specifically, there is no question that absence and the ache to address that absence is a driving force.
There is the absence of my grandmother, who was murdered before I was even born. But my father was also absent the first six years of my life. That absence defined our relationship in many ways, but it was also informed by the absence that defined his own childhood.
Looking back at the process of writing, it’s clear to me that the absence that pushed the book to become what it became in the end is the absence of knowing what to do with the emotions and images swirling inside me along the way. I recognized that there was a connection between my father’s childhood and my own—a kind of generational trauma that erupted with my grandmother’s murder. But there was also the ache to be present for my daughter—to ensure that the absence that led me to the page would not haunt her as well. A desire to heal insisted that the final poem would be the final poem in the collection well before I finished writing it.
I am very into the so-called poetry of witness, Carolyn Forche, etc., and several of your poems seem to speak into what Forche calls the space of the social, which she defines as “place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.” In “Making a Sound,” you mention Bertolt Brecht and some lines about police. While the line ‘a dead body is hidden’ seems to be what the poems circle around, I am curious about your thoughts on how we name our stories within a crumbling social landscape or wood? How, for instance, can we write poems about oceans, when they are full of deadly plastic islands? Or about family life when so many families are being decimated by poverty and unjust policy? Does the poet have a voice here? What might that voice sound like?
I feel that it has always been and always will be important to write about oceans and trees—about love and family and beauty. It’s not only important—it’s an obligation we have to ourselves and each other. It is important to name the injustices and atrocities that wreck our planet and our lives, but it is also important to write about the beauty of what those injustices threaten. In doing so we remind ourselves what we are fighting for in that act of naming. We keep what matters alive both by celebrating it and by condemning what might come to take it from us. “Making a Sound” is my attempt to hold onto beauty amid the trauma at the heart of the collection—to remind myself that it will always be important to write about the trees. Maybe even more so if their leaves are hiding a dead body.
So many features of the collection deserve exploration, the 12 repeating brick poems set as a kind of marker, the narrative italics that follow “Larry, 27, bricklayer”, and the numerous ways brick as metaphor are deployed in dozens of unique ways. I’d like to know about those elements individually, but because that would take a book, my question is, what do you hope these elements combined with individual poems accomplish for the reader?
Yes, that would take a book, and I fear I’ve already rambled on too long. I guess the short answer is that I wanted these poems to work for the reader as a kind of thread that is both metaphorical and narrative. They are just one poem (published in Denver Quarterly as “Brick”) that have been broken up throughout the collection. About midway through writing the book I decided to write an experimental performative piece that allowed the process of a brick’s creation to in some ways mimic the decision of my great uncle to murder his sister-in-law. Other than speaking with family members, this poem reflects the only research I conducted. In the end, the scattered pieces function like bricks in the sense that they are meant to hold together the story of my grandmother’s murder as well as the process of clay becoming something else. The clay becomes a brick. My uncle becomes a murderer, his chosen weapon: a brick.
Pivoting from Mortar, I am interested in your poetic influences. I mentioned Brecht and I believe you mention Robert Hass in a poem. What book of Hass, green hued, were you alluding to? Your other collection, Getting Away with Everything, shows the possible influence of the Beatnik poets. Who are your poetic influences? What advice would you give to other aspiring poets about their reading lives and how what they read and listen to will affect what they might write?
The book by Hass I allude to in “Summer Reading” is Summer Snow, which is what I was reading before setting it aside to write the poem that mentions it. I would not necessarily count the Beats among my main influences. The evidence of that influence you see in Getting Away with Everything more than likely comes from poems written by my dear friend and collaborator Vincent Cellucci. I am quite fond of the Beats, but I don’t really think too much about schools of poetry.
I read voraciously as many poets as I can, and that is certainly what I’d suggest to anyone, poet or not. For what it’s worth, here is a list of some favorites (in no particular order), many of which I was reading while writing Mortar: Stephen Dunn, Diane Seuss, John Berryman, Ada Limon, Charles Simic, Natalie Diaz, Natasha Trethewey, Frank O’Hara, and Traci K. Smith. I feel compelled to add here, however, that my biggest influence during the writing of this book was listening to the music of Nick Cave, particularly his albums Ghosteen and Carnage, both which explore grief by dwelling deeply with images. My advice to aspiring poets is to read as much poetry as possible (there is so much good work out there!) and to listen to music that is born from the same emotional plane from which their poetry springs.
Lastly, is there anything related to your work as a musician, poet or teacher, or related to any of your past or (hopefully) future work that you’d like readers to know about?
I’m not sure how to answer this exactly. I guess I hope readers will check out the new book, and if they find that it benefits their life in some way to maybe explore what’s out there that I’ve done in the past and to be on the lookout for what might come down the line. I try to ensure that everything I do in life comes from a desire to connect as much as possible to what it means to be human.
As Nick Cave said, “if we love, we grieve.” To not lean into what both can teach us would be to me like contemplating life without contemplating death. If we make it a point to connect to the wilderness of our inner lives—to explore and celebrate the aspects of ourselves that define our common humanity—we are made better by the effort. Writing, reading, humanities education, and playing music are the best ways that I know how to do this. Thank you so much for giving me a space here. So much gratitude for the time and energy you have devoted to my work. This experience has been a true gift.
