The Griefs We Hold: Poetry in an Era of Gun Violence

Poet Cyrus Cassells discusses his new collection The World That the Shooter Left Us

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing poet Cyrus Cassells about the development of his timely book, The World That the Shooter Left Us. 

Cyrus Cassells was the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. His most recent book, The World That the Shooter Left Us, was published in 2022, and his ninth book, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024. Among his honors: a Guggenheim fellowship, the 1981 National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His second volume of Catalan translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, will be published in 2023. He was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his cultural reviews in The Washington Spectator. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.

We discussed:

• The events that sparked a “Plath-like” outpouring of the poems in the book 

• The tension created by writing lyrically about tragic subject matters

•  How the couplet form puts silence and space—and order—around difficult topics

• The power of poetry in a time of great suffering

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text. To hear Cyrus read poems from The World That the Shooter Left Us, check out the video (I highly recommend it).

The Griefs We Hold: Poetry in an Era of Gun Violence

[Interview edited for clarity.]

Radha Marcum: It feels important to start by acknowledging that we're talking about The World That the Shooter Left Us just days after the deaths of 19 school children and two adults at the hands of a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, and mere weeks from the massacre of 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket. Your book is as relevant as ever. These tragedies truly seem never ending. They touch us all, and yet they also elicit a very personal response from each of us. So what prompted you to write this particular book?

Cyrus Cassells: It was a bit of a mystery. I actually completed three books at once in the summer of 2019 when I was in Spain and Italy for three months. The World That the Shooter Left Us poured through me in the space of eight weeks. There was no plan. There wasn't any agenda. I think there was something about being overseas for the first time [post-pandemic], one of the few times since the Trump election. My feelings about our country just poured out of me during this book. I didn't have an agenda beyond paying attention to the public voice of our time, as [the poet] Adrienne Rich suggests. 

The title poem I wrote in response to a “stand your ground” killing of my good friend’s father in Houston, in May of 2017. He was shot by another man who was arguing about the fact that my friend's father didn't have a handicap parking sign and was in a handicap space. It was at night at the post office. This man shot my friend's father and, because of the Stand Your Ground defense, he claimed it was self defense. Later on, he was convicted of murder based on forensic evidence that proved that there was no struggle. He just simply shot my friend's father as my friend's father was holding his mail. 

I didn't speak about this incident to other people out of respect for my friend's family. All I could do was bring it to the attention of Houston journalists to say this upstanding, amazing Latino family was going through this terrible situation. There was no surveillance camera. They didn't know what had happened. 

A year later, a similar incident that people are pretty familiar with happened in Florida. There was an argument over a handicap space. A man shot a woman in the car. He was also convicted of murder. “Stand your ground” defenses—how they have been used, and how people who are committing serious crimes are just sort of let go—we’re all familiar with that from Trayvon [Martin]. 

I finished the title poem in the summer of 2018. And I asked myself, Do I really need to say these things in public? And the answer was yes. So I let my friend know I'd written the poem. I gave the poem to Ross Gay for Poem a Day. When the poem was published in October 2018, it happened to be close to the week of the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. So, unfortunately, the title poem has been consistently timely. 

What's true for those of us who who've directly experienced gun violence, like my friends have, or even been in the vicinity of that, is that you're never on the same shore as other people. You're never going to be apathetic about it again, once you've lived through someone you know being gunned down in this fashion. That's part of what the testimony is—it’s a kind of translation process for for people who've gone through this, losing somebody to violence, to those who have not, helping them to understand that we have to find a way to stem the tide of relentless violence and the justification for it. I tried to do my best to do justice to my friend's situation. 

At the time I wrote the poem, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” I had a discussion with a rabbi in Austin about open carry laws. For instance, at Texas State, students are able to carry concealed weapons. That's the law. So, in the poem, I talk about the “open carry era.” A friend of mine, a close reader for the books, told me “I think for the first time Cyrus your manuscript is like a historical document.” And there are times I was more deliberate about that. In the title poem and the poem “Election,” about what happened at my university the day of the Trump election, I wanted people to know this actually happened. 

[Reads “Ready! Aim! Fire!”]

Radha: The poem gives me chills. It’s devastating.

Cyrus: Right? That poem ripped through me. So, you asked a question about what we're doing writing about [these tragedies]. I don't think it's catharsis. It's trying to make meaning of our grief and what we're living through, trying to find spiritual and emotional access to events that we’ve become quite deadened to at this point. There’s a deadening about this level of violence. To write about it, to find images and language to reactivate our sense of grief and outrage even further—even just for the length of reading the poem—I think is an important task. For me, healing is the aim with the [poem’s] language, as well as investigating our feelings and grief. 

I want there to be a healing dimension in the power of a particular poem—or the project. And I think I was able to do that with this book. I wrote about 40 poems in total—not all of them went into the book. I wish I had a better explanation [of how the book came to be] except that I was ready. It came in a Plath-like blaze in the summer of 2019. Sometimes I worked on two or three poems a day and even completed some within a day or so. Almost 40 years of writing and training allowed me to improvise and pull off this book that approaches the various nefarious things going on in our culture the past few years.

Radha: Yes. Of course, there’s a long tradition of poets, as you said, making sense of grief and holding space for grieving, allowing for it in a public way. To me, the book fulfills that promise.

Cyrus: We’re a young culture, in many ways, and we're taught to whisk past grief. It's a lifetime of work dealing with some of the gruesome traumas that we're all dealing with. A million people have died in our country, and it's not registering strongly somehow. There's a lot of denial. It's a grief that we're going to be dealing with for quite a long time to come. It requires patience with ourselves and patience with other people. 

It'll be interesting to see the art and the poetry that comes out of this sort of surreal juxtaposition of the survivors, who seem in some ways, almost blind about the fact that all these other people died. It's not that they have to be wearing widows weights or black or something, but it's got to register somewhere. That's our work as artists—it will come, but it's like the way we ended up grieving the Vietnam War. That was a very delayed kind of process for our culture, I believe.

Radha: The book starts with a poem, “And Now,” by Adrienne Rich. Why that poem?

Cyrus: It’s to help people understand I was trying to find language for what happened to me. Adrienne Rich was one of the first poets I read. This poem is from later in her career, from a book called The Dark Fields of the Republic. It seemed to be the perfect description of what this book was meant to be, how it is agenda-less. I look at it now, and think, Now I know what I really feel about what's been happening in my country. It was a revelation to me to write [the book]. 

After 2019, I added two poems: the pandemic poem in April 2020, and the George Floyd poem in the spring of 2020. So there is a coda beyond what happened between 2016 and 2019, which seemed bad enough, and a whole other level of catastrophe.

Radha: Yeah, it doesn't seem like we're going in the right direction.

Cyrus: It’s hard to know what the right direction is. The world is shifting, I think, into a new paradigm. We have to remember it’s not just our culture, it's the whole world that's been suffering through this. How it's going to affect our lives or future lives is yet to be determined. We’re in a chaotic flux. It's really a wild period—the wildest period of my life.

Radha: Well, one thing that's really consistent in your work is your attention to the beauty of language. When I read this book, I was struck again by how each line is so graceful and measured, full of gorgeous resonance and word sound. Do you consider yourself a lyric poet? And, in relation to these brutal subject matters, is there a conflict there? 

Cyrus: In this particular book, I have a tendency to write beautifully about traumatic or difficult things because I grew up being a musician, playing the clarinet. I was in love with music in a family of musicians. My brothers are both singers. [As a writer] I’m more sound oriented than I am visually oriented. But I did get a degree in film. And I lived in Italy, which expanded my visual life. 

I speak the poems out loud as much as I can. I try to be as precise as I can and true to the language that comes to me. My next book is more conversational than my work has ever been. I try to go out on a different branch every time I write a book. I'm going to be bored if I'm doing something that I've done before. So Horse Ranch is funnier and sexier and more conversational than the other books. I'm excited that my most high spirited book is coming after this very difficult book. 

May 8th marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of my first book. It’s good to feel that I'm more prolific and productive, flowing, now. There was a 12-year gap after that first book. I had writer's block. I got chosen for the National Poetry Series before I considered myself to be a poet or a writer. I had to grow into that identity, I think.

You have to decide whether poetry is really going to be your vocation or not—not for recognition, but to put your life's blood into something that's not highly regarded by your culture. Right? It's a real pledge—not going to the nunnery or the monastery, but it's a little bit like that. You can't be holy about the acquisition of materials and money and all that if your work is poetry or a particular type of art. It's just never going to be that.

Radha: Yes. Would you like to read “Quid Pro Quo”?

Cyrus: [Reads “Quid Pro Quo”]

Radha: It's such a treat to hear these poems read aloud by you. Of course, there's the voice that we hear in the poem when we're reading it on the page, but it's wonderful to hear you perform it. 

I’m curious about the couplet form that goes through most of the book. How do you think about form? Why couplets? Do you think about form when you're writing or does that come later?

Cyrus: I started using couplets with The Gospel According to Wild Indigo while it was still in process. When I wrote about children in World War II, I found that I needed a lot of space and silence. What I like about couplets is that they allow you to unfold the world of the poem in a measured way.

My editor, John, suggested that it would be better if most of it was in couplets, so there is a consistency throughout the project. It does lead to an elegance or order. In this book, it works against the chaos and the shadow behavior. It creates that friction that you're talking about, between lyricism and violence. In between those, something that feels a little bit refined. I have this refined quality, but I'm also a very stoic person. I didn't know this about myself until I became a grown person, 

Growing up, people told me I was sensitive. And, it turns out, I've survived almost everyone that I grew up with, including my parents and the people who thought I was so fragile. Last week I turned 65. I was a young person in the middle of the AIDS pandemic. My closest friend died at 28, my roommate died at 36, my first love died at 32. So there wasn't a guarantee that I was going to make it to this age. When I celebrated my birthday, I had to remind people that no one expected me to be this age, including myself. So this quality of being sort of refined or sensitive, whatever. 

What I discovered was the stoic self that was able to travel around the world and absorb other people's stories and situations. They trusted me, they brought things to me, literally brought stories and things to me from the Holocaust and other situations. I thought, Well, I'm just a young person, why is this happening? But there are those of us like myself who did not live through these things directly, but are artistic repositories. There has to be continuity, so we work in service of that. We provide continuity between generations, the trauma and suffering, whether it's in the black community or Jewish community (I am also partly Jewish, which was part of the reason I think I was drawn to when I was living in Europe, of the lives of young people during the Holocaust). 

My father was a very bright person who desegregated West Point. I have a lot of super brave people in my life, including my former partners. One worked in Afghanistan when the Taliban took over, so there were some moments when I thought he'd been killed. I have very strong, powerful people around me. So I take a lot of inspiration from that. I may not be literally in the wars, but I can respond in a poem or in a play.

Radha: Certainly I think the poems in your new book help us all have a little bit more courage.

Cyrus: I hope so. Poetry provides great emotional and spiritual access for all of us. Poetry has amazing power. It's not enough to have the facts of a tragedy, what happened this week. We have to be able to dig our way to deeper, more empathetic levels. One way of doing that is through language—putting ourselves in the place of somebody, giving people access through language. 

That's a new important emphasis that we need to consider. Let the people who experience things themselves have access to language, encouraging them to speak. We're in fraught times, and it's going to continue to be that way as long as inaction prevails. Things are so out of whack I want to, at least, say clearly to myself what I felt and think and believe, for future generations to know that we did not accept this behavior or support it. 

It’s important that future generations know we said no to this, we provided other testimony, Someone said, Oh, you're you're bringing out a sword this time instead of a bouquet. And I said, Exactly.

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Purchase The World That the Shooter Left Us from Four Way Books. Follow Cyrus Cassells on Facebook and Instagram.