"Embiggening", What Is Less, and the Human Soul Writ Large: Matt Muth on His Poem "Learning a Foreign Language"
Yep. That's Matt Muth. And a scimitar.
My encounter with Matt Muth at AWP in Los Angeles consisted mostly of sitting across from him at the book fair and watching him repeatedly throw a ball in the air while hawking his Seattle-based publication Pacifica Literary Review. In what would eventually turn into an amusing experiment in meta-conversation, the raw transcript of my Google chat interview with him is shot through with bracketed wisecracks that belie a dead-seriousness over big ideas. Incidentally this would be my first contact with his expression “embiggening”: a word that sounds a lot like “beginning”, and a place I sense this poet returns to often when he’s not running a publication or headed to his next hockey game. “I am a monument,” he writes in a recent Facebook post, and not without irony, “to failing upward.” – HLJ
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Your poem "Learning a Foreign Language", recently out in RHINO, dances at the edges of everyday vocabulary. On the surface it would seem intimidating to a reader who doesn’t know what a postulate or onanism is, yet the poem as a thing is shockingly unpretentious. What triggered the writing of it?
It basically grew out of a feeling of not being good enough for a significant other, but more specifically the feeling that when this person looked at me they were speaking a completely different language than I was when I looked at me, if that makes sense. And the poem is about that odd disconnect between who you thought you were and what you thought you were made of, compared to what an observer looks at you and sees. That was the generative emotional place of the poem.
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LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
I needed to associate like with like, object
with suggestion. I needed to be trained. I taped
index cards to my possessions: the nightstand
said onanist, the toilet said equivocator; my desk
was narcissist, and the venetian blinds
were all cowards. I had some nouns, but soon
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped
on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —
I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —
you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.
The poem clearly wasn't written from the sense of that "other" being a non-speaker of English, but the idea of understanding at a deeper level. But your poetry does seem to wrestle with this theme, the imprecision and inadequacy of language to express the utterances we want to map onto the world. I was just reading two other poems of yours, “Lesbians or Exchange Students” from about a year ago in Rattle, about the paradox of personal and life fulfillment…and then “What Farm Girls Know” in The Adirondack Review. Two very different poems, but which end in a way that feels familiar: with those haunting words, "...what less." Did you feel that "less-ness" at work in this poem also? What does the word "less" signify in your world?
I think the less-ness is definitely at work here as well. A lot of my work and my ideas about the world seem to be tied in some way to representations of size or scale. I feel like the soul is large and should be written large, and when I'm at my best I'm expansive and gracious and contain multitudes, in that Whitmanian way. And so often when "less" or a lessening appears in my work, I think it's right to say that it’s trying to express a sort of defilement of man/woman's rightful place, position, and orientation in the universe. A lot of my poems just want desperately for everyone to get back to being big.
And that largeness, as opposed to the “less-ness,” is certainly not showing up here in the form of long lines or expressions of ecstasy or praise, or any other elements that could be described as Whitmanic. But tell me a little more about the defilement. Are you saying a poem for you functions to tear down walls, eradicate some kind of barrier?
It's not necessarily any one thing or any particular action, I guess, but anything that makes a human soul smaller seems kind of awful to me. Of course, those diminishing things are going to differ person to person, and that's as it should be. The tension around this idea comes in, I think, because we live in a world that demands so many compromises of ourselves and our ideas of ourselves that it becomes slightly heroic to even acknowledge that internally we can be expansive and powerful. In that sense, the barriers are internalized even if they've been imposed by the world, and they probably look different for every individual. Looking at it in terms of my life, I think there is this huge and diverse number of things and ideas fighting to make their way in the world from inside of me – and (at the risk of sounding like a narcissist), are threatened by a shrinking or lessening away from that fundamental grandeur we're all born with, that sense of the self.
I hear you. It seems this kind of diminishment is the obsession that drives your work, or a lot of it. I've only known you a short while but you strike me as a guy who doesn’t take much of anything too seriously. Still your poems have a heft to them that shows a struggle, a thing I think poets should never shy from – a hidden well of searching, in some sense. How do you tap that? What’s your writing practice like?
I'm not sure that I do anything particularly special or noteworthy in terms of struggle or searching or anything like that. I'm actually terrible at keeping a regimen and producing day after day after day, but I have a notebook my brother got me in Venice that I've been trying to get better at filling up. One very good piece of advice someone gave me is that it's important to write without a purpose sometimes; it's easy for me to get caught up in writing POEMS rather than just writing. When I sit down with the intention of writing a POEM (in all caps, denoting a thing of great form and beauty that’ll undoubtedly bring me many accolades and huge sums of money), I have a tendency to get caught up in the ideas and structures of what a poem is, should do, and should be. And this tends to squash a lot of what makes poetry, at its best, inimitable: the sense that a poem can do anything, can realize itself in any way or shape it wants, as long as it serves the unique necessity of itself rather than an idea of what it should be. I think that getting bogged down by the histories and ideas of what a POEM should be or do often kills the very thing that makes poems so great, which is the infinite possibility of creation. And so I always try to remind myself to create for the purposes of creation alone, rather than trying to shoehorn the whole process into a set of formal constraints, or a specific idea, or an end result.
So currently the last thing I have in my notebook is the phrase "I'll make a lash of spiders/and scourge the world." Is that ever going to find its way into a poem? Probably not, but I find it amusing to imagine a whip made of spiders holding hands, and me whirling it around like some tiny lunatic, and there's value for me in writing something that is kinda stupid and makes you laugh, even if The Iowa Review would probably look down on you for doing so if they ever found out.
It does seem like a lot of material is useful even if it doesn't get used up. Those spiders bring us to this topic of truth in poetry – writing from reality versus what we might describe as “making shit up to tell the truth". How much of "Learning a Foreign Language" was based on metaphor/imagery as opposed to reality – did you actually tape index cards to your stuff (or write on “hockey skates in lip gloss," a line I love)? At what point did the facts of the poem begin to peel away from your lived experience?
I think this gets at that weird intersection of truth and metaphor that doesn't have a name as far as I know. I didn't tape index cards to my stuff or shave my head, and the truth is that I will block shots because I desperately want to be a credit to my team. But these things felt true; they reinforced that sterling ringing “yes” of the way I felt in that moment. And again, the truth was that poverty of spirit and action that was playing itself out with this person, in the way they regarded me and the totems that constitute my life. As writers I think we all understand to some degree that the objects with which we surround ourselves fulfill an important emotional function. It connotes and reflects us – both to ourselves and to those around us. And there’s a particularly destabilizing thing that happens when someone, whose esteem and favor you desperately want, looks upon the symbolic pile of things that constitutes your idea of yourself and gives it the thumbs-down. It’s a rejection of the self, but it’s also a rejection of the symbols of the self, which is particularly devastating to a writer or anyone who trades in symbols and metaphor, since writing is probably the most powerful mode of expression known to our human tribe. Which means it also insinuates that the process by which you’ve created the self is flawed, like the tools you’ve been creating yourself with are defective. And that's when you get an image in your mind of these weird ugly burrs sticking out from all over you, and all the angles are wrong, and you’re leaking, and it’s all fundamentally true: that this is exactly the way you have made yourself, when this whole time you thought you were on to something good.
There's probably a word for this phenomenon that's classy and intellectual and that all astute readers know, but I'm really none of those things and so I can't tell you what it is.
I think what I try to do is to bend the imagination to reflect the truth of the heart/soul/feeling in the physical world somehow, so that my verbal rendering of objects or the environment begin to reflect “the order of the self” at any given time. All this seems just as true and “real” to me as, say, relating a true-to-life, Kafka-style account of waking up one morning and having my underwear insult me.
Emblematic of Matt's process: "Poetry is a torch to light the world, a manifestation of freedom, and a huge bronze lady with a spiky hat."
Love it. Looking at the levels at which a poem operates – I think we talked about the emotional vs. the intellectual already – let's go through some of the others. At the level of sound and rhythm (and as a reader I do hear them in this poem), how do you create music? Do you read aloud; do you try on words, do you break up sentences, etc? Also, how it's said that a poem should not forget the body – as in that stunning line, "each new term a wine grape in my mouth"? How do you bake such elements into the writing?
I grew up listening to Motown and soul and got really into Tupac and West Coast rap in the 1990s (dating myself here), so I think my concerns with the rhythm and sound qualities of words derive from some of that. They're sort of my default way of ordering and recognizing the world around me, and I feel that sounds and rhythm can create pleasure and meaning (for both the reader and myself), out beyond the prescriptive definitions or ideas of the words. I don't really read aloud or have any other special technique I use other than a thesaurus; it's something that has always come naturally to me. The challenge in having that natural inclination, I think, is that at times it's very difficult for me to remember that the body has to be in there, as you've noted.
It's easy for me to invest all the thrust and power of a poem in the words themselves, and not ground it firmly in the physicality of the place it comes from. You know those people who say they're in touch with their bodies? I'm not one of them, and it's a struggle for me to remember that the body is absolutely necessary (and even desirable) for the construction of words and emotions to begin with. And formally I tend to default to tercets or quatrains, but I'm pretty good about letting the poem find the symmetry it needs on its own.
I'm looking now at your last line..."and I'll thrill with understanding." Could you tell us about what you think makes for a slam-dunk ending to a poem or at least try, since maybe with the ice hockey you have this down?
I think hockey is the least likely sport in the world to produce someone with a flair for the a slam-dunk ending, but that would lead into a lecture about the ethos of hockey and that’s not what we’re here for, obviously...but for me, a good ending expands the world of the poem beyond the boundaries of the page or the screen, even the boundaries of the thoughts one happens to be accessing. I think it goes back to the idea of embiggening the poem and the poet in some ways: a good ending honors and expands the idea or emotion of the poem out beyond what it formerly was up to those final lines. In the end, those final lines must succeed in annexing or transforming that old emotional territory.
The particularity of this poem is its yearning for intimacy as its prime emotional core. In theory, the poem's ending creates that intimacy the speaker longs for with the other person by becoming fluent in this new hyper-critical language, so that he’s assessing himself in concert with the beloved's vision. Both speaker and the other have thrown themselves into it in this poem, and the ending line creates the payoff for doing so (something shared, an intimacy of language and thought, closeness, a bond). And in doing so it turns all the negative assessment towards a positive desire, while (I hope) complicating both simultaneously. So I guess a good ending both expands and hones the central concern of the poem, and, if it can flip or confuse the dynamics and logic which the poem has established for itself up to that point, all the better.
Paradox, an insanely tall order, but necessary in poetry and achievable with some awareness and practice. So, you have a MFA from the University of Washington, and you’re an editor. From where you’re sitting, any advice you can offer to the poets who are non-MFAers?
Fundamentally, I'm not convinced that the distinction between MFA and non-MFA writers is really all that important. What an MFA basically teaches you is how to craft writing in (and often, for) a specific environment consisting of other MFA people. Non-MFA poets can be at a disadvantage when it comes to publishing in journals and such, which are primarily governed/run by MFA-type people, but only because they haven't had long-term exposure to what that particular community looks for. So if you're a non-MFA poet looking to publish, I'd suggest reading as many small and mid-tier print and online journals as possible to get a feel for what they’re looking to run. One of the keys to getting your work published is sending it to the right place, and the more knowledge you have about who's printing what styles and authors, the more success you're likely to have. The other thing I'd suggest is not giving a shit if you don't have an MFA: it doesn't make you any better or worse of a writer than someone who has one. It’s your approach to the craft that makes you better or worse. Keep working on that, and keep reading -- the only way you lose at writing is if you quit.
Zang. Lastly, tell us a poem you love. Any poem at all, and why.
My favorite poem of all time is C.P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony". It's the best poem on ambition, loss, and embiggening that I've ever read, and that I probably ever will read. For someone like me whose writing tends to intersect with those three themes a lot, there's no better example of how a poem could incorporate all those things seamlessly. I feel like I could talk about it for days without ever actually approaching what makes it so great, but one of the things that moves me every time is the generous, affirmational humanity that sits at the heart of the poem. Eventually we lose everything that's precious to us, whatever the scale is; we might as well ennoble that loss as much as we can, and that strikes me as so warm and sad at the same time, that I lose it. It's amazing, and you all should go read it.
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MATT MUTH is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pacifica Literary Review. He received his MFA from the University of Washington and his undergrad degree from Eastern Michigan University. He teaches English at a technical college for video game designers in Redmond WA, lives in Seattle, and will totally block shots most of the time.