[5] Shurin has taught extensively in the fields of American poetry and poetics, contemporary and classical prosody, improvisational techniques in composition, and the personal essay.
According to his biography at the University of San Francisco, his own work is framed by the innovative traditions in lyric poetry as they extend the central purpose of the Romantic Imagination: to attend the world in its particularities, body and soul.
Writes Shurin: An American inheritance might include Whitman's polyglot impetus toward people speaking in their own voices, bringing poetic diction down from England's on high and into the streets (but that's an impulse already at least as old as Dante.)...
An American inheritance might include Dickinson's fierce commitment to individual volition and despair, to her reworking of traditional forms to accept interruption and levels of psychic intuition.
[7]Following upon Whitman and Dickinson, Shurin acknowledges a multiplicity of influences on his sense of a poetics: I certainly take the informing spirits of these two creative workers as my Americanist guide, but they stand alongside myriad figures from simultaneous myriad traditions poetic and other: Rimbaud, Chaucer, Flaubert, Lorca, Stein, O'Hara, Proust, Rembrandt, Colette, Homer, Cocteau, Pasolini, Duncan, Shakespeare, H.D., Monet, Kurosawa, Bette Davis, Williams, di Prima, Genet, Callas, Notley, Ionesco, Scalapino, Cabbalé, Chopin, or Robert Glück.