In one sentence, "Who is Shane Allison?

I'm just a boy asking a boy to love him.

How old were you when you wrote your first poem?

Sweet 16. It came along just in time. Being a teenager was hard and I wouldn't want to turn back that time clock for nothing in this world. I needed an outlet for a lot of built up depression and poetry was my drug of choice. I wrote my first piece in a tenth grade English class. It was so bad, but good at the time because it was my first poem. I don't remember what it was about, but I remember reading it in class and no one believed I wrote it. I took that as a compliment. After that I kept a journal and have been writing ever since. I'm glad I stuck with it. It's taken me to all sorts of points in my life.

Why is poetry important to you?

Being that I've been writing poetry since I was 16, poetry has become a great many things for me. Therapeutic throughout many years of my teenage and twenty something years. I'm more interested in incorporating humor into my poetry these days. I think there is this huge misconception that poetry is or has to be abstract and melancholy to show up on the radar as being poetry. Poetry is important for me personally because of the power of it. Much like that of the written word in general. I like what it provokes in me and in other people. I know that I have written something cool and kick ass when I'm walking around with a smile on my face all day because I've written something cool and kick ass. I feel super human to have such a gift.

A great deal of your work deals with graphic sexual matter. Your work has been described as "wildly pornographic." Are you obsessed with sex?

Not really, no. Writing about sex was something that just gradually came out in me. I think Madonna was a big influence on me during her sex book "Erotica" album years. I know Allen Ginsberg was an influence later on when I started reading more gay literature. His poem "Please Master" introduced me to the "list" form. Before him, I was writing your typical sappy love poems. That poem along with other works by him, introduced sex to me on a completely wild and energetic level. Ginsberg, along with other queer poets, sexually liberated me as a gay man.

If people only get porn out of my work, that's fine, but they need to look much deeper than what they see on the surface. There's a lot of shit going on beneath the cock and balls metaphor. Consider me a gay 2Pac.

True. Much of my work is erotic in nature, but it's not all I write. I admit that writing about it is fun, but I like to switch it up much of the time and write a poem about Tonya Harding or something. And lets face it: We live in a very sexual society. We are all sexual beings . Some just repress it more often than not and when that happens, problems arise. I'll never apologize or be made to feel bad because I write about sex. Some may dislike what I'm writing, but they'll read it simply because it's sexual in nature and when it comes down to that, we are all curious cats.

One of your bio's states that you wish you were from any place but your home state of Florida. Why is that?

I hate Florida. The South, I feel, is no place for a gay black man. It's just way too conservative for someone of my tastes. I think it just stems from having a lot of bad experiences growing up. I don't think I hate the state so much as say...the awful things I have endured being gay. I often wish I was from New York or California. When I was in grad school in New York, I loved it there. For the first time in my life, I was happy. All things improved by leaps and bounds. It was a good place for me to be in emotionally and artistically. I didn't hate myself so much. Everyday was an adventure. I was this kid from the south, but no one gave a damn, and that was fine with me. I liked the idea of no one knowing me. In New York, no one is all in your business. I struggled much like a lot of people do in that city, but I would do it all again in a heart beat.

Do you ever do public readings? Why or why not?

Not so much these days because in Tallahassee, where I'm from, there aren't a lot of venues for it. The last reading I did was in New York to celebrate the birth of a new literary magazine out of Paris. I did a few readings around the city like at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and a few other places, but not too many. I can never turn down the chance to make a public spectacle of myself. I always get a good response from folks when I read. Then I beat myself up for reading certain poems. Like..."That poem was too long, you dumb ass."

You are widely published on the internet. Has this affected your writing in any way?

Not at all. I'm grateful to the people that have given my work a home on their sites. Online editors seem to be more taken by my work than those of the hard mags. There is a lot of crap being produced in both e-zines and hard copy magazines, but there's some really quality places out there that do good stuff and puts a great deal of passion into what they do. Because of e-zines and connecting with the right people, I've been able to publish chapbooks. I've been able to work with some cool people with insightful ideas and produce a larger body of work. Online magazines has given me a nice fan base for my poems. I'm grateful as hell for that.

Do you consider yourself political?

I believe there are all sorts of politics. Sexual politics, environmental politics, racial politics, gender politics and so on. I have issues about many of these things, so I guess so, yes. I'm not political by the standards and definitions of most, but I am political. There are certain types of politics I don't like to talk about like religion. None of it is really political as it is personal. I'm only political when I'm forced to be, when politics creeps into spaces of my life it has no damn business being.

Do you think poets have a responsibility to society?

Society has no responsibility to us, so why should we have one to it? I think telling the truth should be everybody's responsibility. My responsibility is paving the way for the black gay erotic writing poets to come after me.

Do you believe poetry is the voice of reason?

Yes, but that's just the power of words, the power of writing. Poetry is the voice for a lot of things. It's much too large of a force to be pigeon holed. You can't tuck it away in a cute little box. A lot of poets try to do that shit by having such narrow views about poetry. Poetry is different things for everyone, which is the exact reason it can never be just one thing or the other. It has the ability to influence and make us think much like all genres of art.