Will Sheets: Your newest book of poetry, the 2023 Donald Hall Prize-winning Absent Here, is a collection haunted by the frigid winters and harsh landscapes of Alaska, but also by the people, yourself included, who have managed to carve from these extreme conditions a life, a childhood, and a home. You wrote about your poem “Here But Elsewhere” in an essay published by Poetry Daily, stating that “How we express for ourselves the magnitude of moments and places might be directly related to our encounters with nature in childhood.” This statement feels like a driving force behind not only this poem but the collection as a whole. From “Here But Elsewhere”:

Sedge edges the village, spreads. Dominant

brings to mind curved landscapes—a city
against the foothills, ocean to shore—even

tundra where tussocks seek enough height

to flower. 

​

How do you think the Alaska of your childhood has led you to the poems of Absent Here?

Bret Shepard: The Alaska of my childhood started to become much louder when I became a father. I started to get pulled into that imagery these last few years. It was something that didn’t enter my writing very explicitly before that. I wrote some bad poems about Alaska during my MFA, and then I sort of stopped. At some point, I knew I wanted to write about where I am from, or at least let it enter the work in a more renewable way. One week a few years ago, I opened a Word document and just started writing anything that came to mind about Alaska, but especially where I am from, on the North Slope. I did that for like a month or three. Then, I sent a bunch of pages to a couple of friends. They read and said, “keep going.” So I did. 

Of the landscape itself, I think it influences how I see and hear. When I lived in Los Angeles, I once had a teacher comment that I sound like Alaska. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, though I think it is one. 

 

​

WS: In addition to the landscapes of your home that inspire parts of your work, it’s clear that the home itself is a point of inspiration for you. “A Wave” is a poem set amidst a domestic electrical crisis, “Skin Interims” contains lines like, “The neighborhood consumed something / of our house. Then our house // consumed everything itself”, “Eco” finds the speaker creating a “house-garden”, and “Physical Retail” uses the home, and the selling of the home as its central metaphor: 

How to sell your home: forget everything
you know about the violence of strangers and replace
that violence with upgraded appliances. Do we not
replace our hearts with other images? We do
……..
The violence with upgraded appliances
shimmers under the recessed lighting of a ceiling
pushing more toward the floor everyday. Do we
replicate the heart to eventually live without it?

​

What does the home mean to you, and how has it influenced your poetry?

BS: Yes, that is a big part of this book. I appreciate how closely you read those poems. “Physical Retail” and “A Wave” were written before the lid on Alaska came off and took over my poems. They fit in the sense that I am always thinking about home in some way, both the domestic and the ecological. Leaving what was home, building a new home, learning to be more comfortable in certain homes—all of that is part of it for me. 

I suppose I don’t really know what home means. I keep writing to it in some way. I might one day be certain that it is something that can be easily lost if not cared for. Writing about something is a form of caretaking. 

 

 

WS: You use form very carefully in your poetry to create moments of intensity and startling impact. I love the way you employ one-line stanzas in your work. Lines from “Coast” (“Everything wedges you.”), “Radiation Hotel” (“Part climax. Part end.”), “Skin Interims” (“It's all they ever whisper to us.”), and “Here But Elsewhere” (“The absence is enormous in the Arctic.”) come to mind. Could you speak on how you use this technique so effectively and how, if at all, it plays into your writing process?

BS: Thanks for noticing those one-line stanzas. Looking at it now, I do see them as a recurrent choice. I wasn’t always super aware of making that choice while writing. I suppose it’s a little bit like stopping for gas on a road trip. I know at some point that I must do it. Sometimes, it’s the first station, and other times, I am anxiously trying to go a little further before I turn off the road to the next one. Then it’s a quick stop, and I feel a renewed energy. 

 

​

WS: In the same vein of form and technique, your poems are frequently arranged in multiple parts: Skin Interims, On Ice, Arctic Circle, Eco, and, in a way, Play At Being People, for example. Absent Here is itself arranged in three parts. Why does this form speak to you, and what leads you to use it for certain poems and not others?

BS: Sequence is how I have, at times, best been able to sustain thinking in a poem. I would often struggle to keep moving a poem, or if I did, it would veer into overwriting. At the end of my first book, there is a twenty-four-part sequence of broken sonnets. That was a breakthrough of sorts for me. I needed to combine things without explanation. Much of the best poetry, for me, comes without explanation. Sequences signal a connection between the parts. I like that. 

With Absent Here, the middle section had a thread of the domestic that connected the poems. The third part was more of something else, something else animal. I try to make those choices without controlling them too much, but ultimately, it is me forming some structure. 

 

​

WS: Alaska, and your time there, is one of the most important facets of your work. How do you see your work engaging with Alaska’s literary and poetic history? Are there any particular Alaskan poets you admire or take influence from?

BS: It’s such an interesting question, not just how my work fits into Alaska’s literary history, but also whether it speaks in conversation with the poets who write from and toward that place. Joan Naviyuk Kane, dg nanouk okpik, and Peggy Shumaker are poets whose work continues to bring me energy. John Haines’ prose has been a source, as well. I recently read and enjoyed Corvus and Crater by Erin Coughlin Hollowell and Open the Dark by Marie Tozier. There are writing programs, journals, and presses, all doing interesting work throughout the state. I think I work outside of those specific establishments and writers. My engagement with Alaska is rooted in very specific places and people that I care about. Still, I hope to find more connections to the literary and poetic paths being made there. 

I should say that the poet David Koehn, whose new book Sur is out with Omnidawn, was the athletic director at Hopson Middle School in Browerville and was my basketball coach for a bit. 
 

​

​

​