who attended several private primary and sec-
ondary schools in the Bronx and Manhattan as a
gifted student before being sent to Macon, received
his B.A. degree from Bennington College in 1988
and M.F.A. degrees from Brown University (1991)
and the University of Iowa (1993). He described
his youth and young adulthood as a time when
he “wandered from place to place, from school to
school, a deeply unheroic Odysseus less in search
of a home... than fleeing a place... in which he
feared being trapped” (“This Place/Displace”).
To escape his world of alienation, Shepherd
found sanctuary in literature, at first Greek my-
thology and then poetry, particularly T. S. Eliot’s
“The Waste Land.” In an interview with Charles
Rowell, the editor of CALLALOO, Shepherd ex-
plained, “I had a sense from a very early age that
literature was a world to which I aspired, some-
thing preferable to the circumstance in which I
grew up. I believed that language would save me
from the housing projects and tenements of the
Bronx, would save me from myself, even, if only
I could get to it” (290). Through poetry, Shepherd
continues to inhabit and find legitimacy in the
world of language that attracts and eludes him, si-
multaneously allowing him to define himself as an
artist rather than as a black or gay artist. He told
Rowell, “I’ve never had an interest in being a ’black
writer... in speaking ‘for’ or ‘as’ a black person”
(291). “I prefer to call myself a writer who is gay
and black or a writer who is black and gay than
to call myself a gay black writer” (294), Shepherd
said, distinguishing himself from ESSEX HEMPHILL
and ASSOTTO SAINT.
As a writer whose primary interest is in litera-
ture, language, and art, Shepherd unabashedly
proclaims and embraces his subscription to an
aesthetic that is fundamentally Western, in the tra-
dition of Plato, Francis Bacon, T. S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and Harold Bloom. In his work he reveals
his obsession with desire and beauty. In his essay
“Notes Toward Beauty” he explains:
I decided I wanted to be a poet (an asymp-
tote, approached but never truly reached, in
that regard like beauty itself ) because I was so
overwhelmed by the ambivalent, contradic-tory beauty of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” (the first poem I ever read: I was
fourteen) that it seemed not simply to speak
to and of my life but to replace it, if only fleet-
ingly, with something better because more
meaningful and patterned. Amorphous misery
had been made form, suffering transformed to
shape. I hated the poem for eluding me, for not
surrendering itself immediately to my under-
standing; I loved it for the enthrallment it in-
duced, the power of its fascination. I sought by
becoming a poet a share in that power, to be, if
not a thing of beauty in myself, then perhaps at
least a source of beauty.Ultimately, for Shepherd this “source of beauty”
is rooted in whiteness and, in respect to his sex-
ual orientation, white men, a fact that has caused
some black critics to level charges of black self-hate
against him. Shepherd has candidly written about
this desire in his essay “On Not Being White,” in
which he asks: “Is my desire for a beautiful man a
desire to possess that ultimately validating prize,
the white man; or is my desire for white men a de-
sire to possess that ultimate validating prize, the
beautiful man? How can I separate them when
whiteness and beauty are equated in my society
and in my mind, when my definition of one inevi-
tably encompasses that of the other?” In attempt-
ing to explain his perspective to Rowell, Shepherd
stated, “obviously to be a black person who desires
white people is to desire something one is not. A
lot has to do with a completeness I imagine the
other to have which I lack” (298).
Shepherd’s use and exploration of form, lan-
guage, and themes related to race and sexuality
dominate his four published collections of poems:
Some Are Drowning (1994) Angel, Interrupted
(1996), Wrong (1999), and Otherhood (2003).
All point to his continued quest for a better un-
derstanding of the muddled difference between
beauty and desire. His speaker in “Paradise” ad-
mits, “I don’t trust beauty anymore / when will
I stop believing it” (Some Are Drowning, 10). As
if to address his dilemma, his speaker in “Popu-
lar Beauty” candidly admits: “In Plato’s cave I still
can’t come / to a decision.”Shepherd, Reginald 461