‘The Kingdom of Ends’

Reginald Shepherd was very good at first lines. He knew how to thrust his reader immediately into a poem’s motivating dilemma. “The Difficult Music,” the first poem in his first book, Some Are Drowning (1994), begins: “I started to write a song about you, then I decided, No.” The urgency, the confident first person, the intimate address, and the drive to sing: these are all characteristic of Shepherd’s work. So is the abrupt swivel, the negation, the balked song.

Shepherd always stood a little apart. In the 1990s, when “postmodernism” was the name for a new period style, Shepherd was an unapologetic modernist. His idols were Eliot, Stevens, and Hart Crane. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he read for an assignment in ninth grade, gave him an exalted view of poetry as a vehicle for personal transformation, and he never let go of it. Eliot’s poem “took my mundane misery and loneliness and gave them back to me, transformed into words that made my feelings beautiful and important and not mine at all.”

Shepherd had more than ordinary teenage angst to escape from. His biographical note in Some Are Drowning explains that he “was born in New York City in 1963 and raised in housing projects and tenements in the Bronx.” He left this information out of later collections, but he was always clear about where he came from and about the fact that he was Black and gay, even while he mused on whether “gay” or “Black” should come first, since each term left him feeling marginal to the community the other located him in. “For me,” he reflects, “to be black and to be gay have been two radically different subject positions, which to a large extent have contradicted one another, except to increase my sense of the lack of any position called mine.”

He was in a similarly ambiguous position with respect to the modernist poets he took for models. “I owe my formation as a writer,” he observes, to a tradition that is “not ‘mine’ (as a black guy raised in Bronx housing projects).” The language of modernism, Shepherd continues, “both made me possible as a writer and made my being a writer an asymptote,” a role he could only ever aspire to. He was always “haunted by the questions, ‘Can I truly speak this language? Can this language speak through me?’”

Like Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Shepherd’s poems are mental spaces full of echoes, bits of song lyrics, literary allusions, sharp ironies, and uneasy self-commentary. Even when the poem sets forth a scene in the street, a park, or a dance club, it takes place in his head, and the people he writes about are half in his head too. In “The Difficult Music,” Shepherd recalls an incident when “a bum glanced up” and whispered “Nigger, laughing, when I walked by.” As if that verbal abuse amounted to a rape he had somehow been complicit in, he comments, “I’d passed the age of consent, I suppose;/my body was never clean again.” Another type of poet would have built a poem around that anecdote, but Shepherd never settles in one place for long. His rapid shifts of focus, diction, and tone, activated by stray verbal hints and associations, create a pulsing effect, somehow jagged and liquid at once.

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