– Shane Chase

Much of your work appears to revolve around bridging or contrasting the intimately personal and the very large and impersonal. The sense of an “I”, or rather the speaker’s “I” is magnified in the poems, although one tends to forget this often over the course of reading. How do you approach the problem of the speaker as a subject in your poetry, or in the larger sense of poetry being written today?

I suppose much of how the first person dilates and contracts in this book, or maybe even more broadly or generally in my work, is that I feel these processes happen in my day-to-day, and do my best to translate and map those processes into the page. It might not be totally evident from the writing, I guess. But I’m not that interested or invested in the “lyric I” because I’m not really interested or invested in the world that constructs it. I don’t care much about Cartesianism, anthropocentrism, rationalism, etc. I think the lyric is largely effective at honing affect and sharpening potential for open, generative, future-forward thought. To begin to name, render, and describe what Fred Moten refers to “an illicit alternative capacity to desire.” But I’m wary of how quickly the perspective and the interiority of the lyric colludes with capital, enclosure, and further immiseration of public life.

That’s interesting considering how expansive the poems are in National Lube, though, they’re never vague. Could you talk a bit about the role form plays in the book, and to what degree certain poems or sections were rewritten, or reorganized according to formal considerations, if at all?

When I first started writing this book, I was reading tons and tons of sonnets: John Donne, Wanda Coleman, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Nikki Wallschlaeger, sections from Tyrone Williams’ incredible book c.c., to name a few. I was also in the thick of teaching the form to a poetry workshop at the University of Kansas. I was reading lots of student work in addition to working through and discussing mechanics and theory of the form as well. In particular, we spent significant time as a class thinking with the cultural and emotional conceits of the sonnet, namely guided by Sean Bonney and Rosie Stockton. I think I turn to the sonnet form the way many other poets do: I’m interested in the structure as a vessel to initially hold the work, but often find through the process of writing that, if I am lucky, the content holistically leaves the form and demands something else.
      I am drawn to the sonnet’s dialectic--finding the strict bounds of the form and what it calls for (traditionally, an idea of courtly and/or unrequited love) generative, but abandoning the scaffolding and framework of the form once within a state of composition. I enjoy a few rules, but I love breaking rules more...in this way, I am sort of a crappy Oulipian, tho constantly tempted by constraint. There’s a specific charged density, a big block of potential, say, with a sonnet. It’s like a jewel or a gem. Defined by the limits and the constraints of its beauty, but perhaps the more interesting quality to the gem is its radiance, its aura, the space surrounding it, the space it affects. Like electroacoustic, minimal, and assorted ambient/avant-garde musical genres, the negative, inaudible, “unplayed” air in the composition defines the composition just as much or as more as the notes, melody, etc.
     The first section, Nourishing Residuals, was written in one long scroll-like fashion, then arranged as a traditional sonnet crown, edited in that way, put back into its original scroll form, checked for sound, and then split and settled back into individual sonnets. The poems sample themselves and each other as a way of conveying a sort of anxious psychosis (psychosis of self, of the couple form, of decaying empire) and as a way of demonstrating, accreting, and constructing a form of “desiring-listening,” mimicking the haptic acts of traveling, journeying, RSS feeds, thumbscrolling on screens, news tickers, etc.
     The titular poem, National Lube, is broken into two sections. Originally, these sections were all written in a sort of sculptural free verse, but I began to realize the poem alternated between inner and outer voice, and that these vocal parts called for different forms. Continuing with this experiment in the relationship between sound, form, and content--hinting at what Lyn Hejinian refers to as “the conjunction of form with radical openness” in her essay The Rejection of Closure--I settled on this sequence of “expanded open couplets” and these more sculptural poems. The couplets utilize a more circadian/bodily cadence and meter and syntactic leap. Music is super central and important to my writing process. More often that not, I’m putting something on at a rather grotesque volume for the first half hour of my writing as an attempt to sort of obliterate my brain and wash the canvas of the mindspace. Then, I’ll turn the volume down, but keep the music on for the duration of my writing. I write in the middle of the day, usually, and read in the mornings and evenings.
      Writing this book, I was helping my mother with my father who’d just suffered a major stroke. We’d take turns sitting with him in the hospital or in the rehab facility, and when I wasn’t in the building, I’d drive aimlessly around Albany and Schenectady, NY playing Milford Graves’ Babi, Mengelberg & Bennink’s Midwoud ‘77, David S Ware’s Godspelized, and Rashied Ali & Frank Lowe’s Duo Exchange--to name a few albums--at obscene volumes. To clear my own air a bit. This music eventually gave me the rhythm that I was after; seemingly chaotic and entropic on the outside, but possessing a deep, circadian, embodied rhythm at its core--an energy of “randomness” that, instead of disrupting a more conventional or orthodox rhythm, further enables and enacts its own rhythm through the insistence of its entropy. Composer Iannis Xenaxis refers to something akin to this in his 1992 book Formalized Music, using political protest and demonstration as a metaphor for the exploration of possible autonomous territory: “Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it spreads towards the tail, replacing the first...The statistical laws of these events, separated from their political or moral context, are the same as those of the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive manner.” I’m not as concerned about imposing rhythm upon a reader as I am concerned with presenting a variety of waypoints and opportunities of metrical guesswork for the reader to ignore or participate in at their will.

I’m curious, when you consider your own “tradition,” what poets come to mind?

Leslie Scalapino, Cedar Sigo, Steve Carey, Bernadette Mayer, kari edwards, and Steve Benson. J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Keston Sutherland. Tan Lin, Renee Gladman, and Ted Berrigan. Keats. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Barbara Guest, Akilah Oliver. Frank Lima and Alice Notley. A whole bunch of music and musicians, too, including the aforementioned albums. While writing this book, I also listened to significant amounts of Karen Carpenter solo tracks (mostly unreleased songs that never made it to her posthumous debut solo record), Songs: Ohia, the Brian Eno album Neroli, the two self-titled Gal Costa albums, Grateful Dead shows from 1971 through 1973, Taj Mahal Travellers, and Pauline Oliveros.

You’re also a really talented landscape poet. Often letting open signifiers of small town America bleed into the poems. In the chapbook Universal Cop Avoidance (Tree Jumps Rainbow) you depict: “A sturgeon moon, there in corn sweat / Against the flood lights of the / SUNOCO” and earlier let the voice of locals drift in and color the poem with that heartbreaking moment when a woman pulls the speaker aside “near the service well” to say “I love when you write about our home.” How does the place of the speaker in time and space affect the writing? Or, what significance does the ‘small town’ possess in your sense of American poetry?

Thanks! Yeah, place is really important to me. The “setting” is as much of a “character” as the beings that populate it--it has its own speech, vocabulary, thought patterns, etc. I think about how derelict zones and broken sites can overlap or exist liminally with zones of indeterminacy or zones in and out of immanence to create useful or revolutionary gestures of openness and possibility. How do those places sound? What would a habit sound like, what does a rupture in habit sound like? I spent a lot of time going back and forth between “Upstate New York” and “Eastern Kansas” on Interstate 70 and 80--this sort of imprisoned pastoral, a landscape ran out of fuel, a place just barely clinging to the world. I often refer to it as the most “spiritually bankrupt road” in “America.” And I also feel bad about saying that, because it sort of feels like I’m putting a person down, you know, the character of the road. It’s a brutal place, but comes with its own set of utopias, always opening and closing, making themselves both hidden and violently visible to its inhabitants. Which, of course, are mostly people on the move east or west, into the sun or out of it. It’s important to acknowledge that people live there, too, though...they work the truck stops, diners, gas stations, sex arcades, rest areas...it’s a totally gorgeous and also merciless microcosm.  Places like this made me. I see myself interpellated in them and vice versa.
     I spend a lot of time thinking about how the middle states in this so-called country are often treated in poetic tradition. How the Beats treated it, as they did with many things, I suppose, with a certain coastal metropolitan disdain. A, like, updated Manifest Destiny thesis for the postwar time. How the genre and adjective “folk” gets used in describing or categorizing poems and poets that come from a place outside the metropole, outside the cultural reaches of the seaboards. 

I overheard someone mention at your reading that you travel around doing readings all across the country— what is the experience of a kinda modern “folk-poet” these days? —if you can excuse/agree with that characterization.

The experience is...draining! But endlessly invigorating. It’s hard to do--transport is expensive…I dunno. I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, hitching, couch surfing, park sleeping, general punk shit...”the milk of human kindness” is very much real and nourishing...and it’s there...just hidden behind and beneath more layers, madly whipped and increasingly tighter coils of individualistic and competitive interpersonal reflexes and paradigms.
    There is a certain savviness to traveling frugally, touring frugally. It’s still the case, but you gotta be even keener now...the money just doesn’t go as far. But I find that if you make a run of 25 or 50 or 75 freaky little books, read from them like your life depended on it, and be kind and open to what the world presents you...you’re bound to sell enough for a bus ticket or gas money and a gas station burrito somewhere. It works. Game recognizes game out there in the world. 
    I think that poets in general need to get more “punk” about a lot of shit--publishing writ large, conceptualization of audience, treatment of language...it’s a genre that doesn’t need to be defined and driven by enclosure and bullshit coastal cosmopolitan-ism if we don’t let it. Guard the mysteries and constantly reveal them, right? That’s a Lew Welch quote I think. Everyone get more DIY now, or whatever. Or, actually, maybe not everyone...it might harsh the mellow.

Ryan Skrabalak most recently wrote National Lube (speCt!, 2024) and The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue (Ursus Americanus Press, 2024). He’s written a number of chapbooks; one called ASSEMBLED CLIMATE is forthcoming from Oxeye Press in early 2026. He lives in “Kingston, NY” where he hosts a reading and performance series, DOGPARK, and edits a small press and occasional tape label, Spiral Editions.