Alan Shapiro

The poet Alan Shapiro is interviewed in the January/February 2005 issue of Poets & Writers (interview not online). Shapiro wonderfully recounts the dizzyingly escalating curse of artistic accomplishment:

When I was starting out, when I hadn't published anything, I thought, "If only I could get a poem in a magazine, I'd feel validated and happy." And so then I got a poem in a magazine, and I thought, "Now if I could only get a poem in a magazine that paid." [Laughs.] Then, "I got to have a book," and then, "I got to have a book reviewed." Then, "Well, I have to win an award." At every step there's always something more. I didn't realize how out of hand that desire was until one day I heard my son and daughter having a fight over the remote control. My daughter had it and my son wanted it, and he said, "If you give me the controller, I'll give you a Pulitzer Prize. [Laughs.] Where do you think he got that from?

The Shapiro interview is the last installment in a very enjoyable series called "Poets on Place", conducted by W.T. Pfefferle, who traveled the U.S. for a year in a motorhome, interviewing and photographing American poets. Pfefferle's interviews will be collected in a book entitled Poets on Place: Tales and Adventures from the Road, to be published this spring by Utah State University Press.