October 11, 2024

Tribute to Reginald Shepherd ’88 
by Jonathan Lethem ’86 

In the past weeks, as this date approached, I’ve had to accept how this occasion remains disconcerting to me, that of being called here to somehow represent and offer up some fragment of knowledge about Reginald Shepherd in the company of those who’ve studied his work and have a measured and enduring sense of him as among their poetic companions. I mean, of course, Jericho and Camille, but perhaps also those like your Professor Benjamin Anastas and Alexander Chee, who entered into a relation with him as a peer writer in graduate school, or perhaps unknown others who sit among us here quietly, who located Shepherd as a poetic companion of their own, perhaps as their teacher or mentor or colleague, perhaps only on the page, that relation which can be—as Shepherd often testified—among the most intimate. 

I come to you in another relation entirely, as dictated by circumstance. In what has become a series of glamorous humiliations, I’ve spent my life as a walking witness to “Bennington in the eighties.” That’s how I knew Reggie, and in a sense, that’s still how I know him. I find that I need to call him Reggie, and it may also be useful for me to do so, since it not only honors my memories of him but testifies to my limitations as a witness. In his beautiful essay “What’s In A Name?” one of the last things he wrote, Shepherd says, “A few months before my twenty-fifth birthday, I decided I was too old to be called ‘Reggie.’ That was a child’s name.” Well, essentially, Reggie and I knew one another as children. Our friendship ended well before his twenty-fifth birthday; we knew each other when I was eighteen and he was nineteen and then twenty. In that short time we shared an intense friendship, one which ended in a cipher-like form of incompleteness, which was typical, in some ways, of my relation to this place, at that moment—only more so. Reggie and I never spoke again. I read his poems, sometimes, and I looked at his blog, but I lost the chance to intervene in our incomplete story, to risk making an adult friendship with him, when he died. 

In the past few months, I’ve tried to make sense of tonight’s invitation by pursuing a concerted study of Reginald Shepherd’s remarkable poetry and prose; by reading his blog from back to front and seeing how it served as a proving ground for his two books of essays; and by reading his book of letters with Alan Contreras. In doing so, I’ve heard his voice both again and for the first time. I’ve absorbed the incredible accomplishment of the poetic and public voice as it is formulated in his work, how it connects to the precise and formal and sardonic voice of his more conversational interludes in the blog and in the letters, and felt how these voices are rooted in and continuous with the voice of Reggie, the friend I briefly knew. Reggie seemed to me to possess such a total and encompassing and assured writer’s voice at the time, even if every form of knowledge I now possess—and Shepherd’s own testimony in his essays—suggests how much it was embattled and tenuous and under construction, how much it was, in that moment, apprenticed. 

This process—of making a synthesis between my private version of eighties Bennington, which exists beyond the caricatures and marketing, and the commanding poet who has called this gathering into being—is bittersweet for me. I’m forced to realize that by never before writing about Reggie, I’ve been trying to keep these memories suspended in a realm of pure experience. Before I could even put these few words down, I spent the morning on Spotify, putting together a playlist of songs I associated with Reggie; I wanted not to be commemorating him, but to be back in the living room of Canfield or Booth, dancing. Reggie himself considers this paradox in his essay: “Why I Write”: 

I have a strong sense of the fragility of the things we shore up against the ruin which is life: the fragility of natural beauty but also of artistic beauty, which is meant to arrest death but embodies death in that very arrest. Goethe’s Faust is damned when he says, ‘Oh moment, stay.’ At last he finds a moment he longs to preserve, but the moment dissipates when it’s halted. The moment is defined by its transience; to fix it is to kill it […] Art is a simulacrum of life that embodies and operates by means of death. The aesthetic impulse is the enemy of the lived moment: it attempts both to preserve and to transcend that moment, to be as deeply in the moment as possible and also to rise beyond it. ‘Wanting to immortalize the transitory—life—art in fact kills it.’ This is the inescapable aporia of art, that its creation is a form of destruction.

The public Reginald Shepherd, who accomplished so much, against such odds, and then succumbed to illness and died, has despite my every tactical delaying maneuver, finally arrived to overwrite and supersede Reggie, my friend who was still alive to me in a handful of incommensurable afternoons on the Commons lawn, who danced with me ecstatically to the jukebox at The Cafe, who gave me his copy of Samuel Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which I still own, who stayed up with me in VAPA playing a Psychedelic Furs cassette on repeat while I worked with a glue gun and lumber scraps on an all-nighter sculpture assignment. Because we knew one another under a spell of radically premature artistic and social self-assertiveness, a situation totally embarrassing to recall on the behalf of every person for miles around at the time, and because our friendship ended abruptly and jaggedly, this has been until now among the least plundered treasure of my memory. Thank you for inviting me to come join some stories of Reggie to the life of the poet Reginald Shepherd. I feel blessed to be here with you all. 

Listen to the Spotify playlist Lethem made for Shepherd.