Interview with Matt Hart

Risky Business
Interview by David Sewell

If the title of Matt Hart’s first book, Who’s Who Vivid, were to be rearranged (which would be a fitting exercise given Hart’s affinity for Apollinaire and Ted Berrigan), we would get a different question altogether, and one that’s more easily answerable: Who’s Vivid? Who? Well, Matt Hart, that’s who. Proof’s not hard to come by: his consistently fantastic journal, Forklift, Ohio; his auspicious Who’s Who Vivid; his chapbooks, Revelated and Sonnet; his punk rock band Squirtgun’s beguiling-yet-catchy tunes (“Well my hair is cryin’ / In wild mist of liar’s corner / Tearin’ fruit apart with my bare hands / the pears are fallin’ / they’re on fire in this liar’s corner / burning up Egyptian daughter / tearing fruit apart with my bare hands / my hands are cryin’ lately”). In this far-ranging interview, Hart spills the magic beans, touching on everything from what’s inside a giraffe to the exfoliating properties of the Dead Kennedys’ music to the role of style in the 21st century.

David Sewell: In Dean Young’s most recent book, Embryoyo, he makes the point that the rapid movement in his poems from idea to idea is based on feeling—that is, he’s feeling his way around…his mind, the poem. How do you see the movements in your poems functioning?

Matt Hart: I don’t really see myself feeling around in poems much, because at least initially in my writing process, I try very consciously not to think about poems at all. I can’t stand having a plan, so I give myself limits as a way to generate the material I need to actually work. My hope is always that the walls I’ve put up are elastic enough to hold the wildflower meteor shower grocery list KA-BLAM!, and also strong enough to contain the pterodactyls-dactyls, rhinoceros-hearse.

As the material starts to accumulate, I begin trying to attend to where it wants to go, what it wants to look like, and who it wants to talk to about the weather at the party. In a sense, I guess I feel my way through a process to try and get to a poem, but initially the process is all-important—the visceral engine that gets me on the road to something I’d never think of without it. I write every day, but most days I fail to write poems. In my process, I feel like one of those little wind-up godzillas that bobbles mechanically across the floor, shooting sparks out of its mouth. Then I throw everything into the blender and see what it tastes like.

The trick, of course, is to come up with something that amounts to more than the sum of its parts—something more than experiment (procedure), technique (craft), and all that one knows and can articulate about poetry. The proof of good craft is that nobody mentions it when they talk about your poems, and a good procedure is often one that almost disappears—it informs without essentially defining the art. For me, lines, words, stanzas all have to function to point the poem (in some sense, on some level) out beyond itself and its poemness. Dean Young once said to me that “after a hundred years of experimentation, experimentation is no longer enough—now we have to amount to something.” And I think one could say the same thing about craft (or what have you) as well. To be wildly experimental, or technical, or associatively high-flying isn’t enough. Which is why, to get back to your question, I’m trying to get it all in somehow—to include everything and the kitchen (not merely its sink)—and to do it by whatever means I can muster.

DS: Young also says, in a sort of “Ars Poetica” moment, that he’s trying to make birds, not birdhouses, a wonderfully fitting metaphor. Are you making birds, or something else? (I’m thinking of some lines of yours from “In Fifteen Minutes,” and I know I’m really taking them out of context: “But what do birds know? At best they sing / only one or two songs.”)

MH: A friend called me up one night and said, “Here’s the assignment: write a poem in fifteen minutes, and include at least five things that happened during the day. Call it ‘In Fifteen Minutes.’ I’ll do the same and then call you back, and we’ll read them to each other over the phone.” Now, the poem that’s in the book isn’t exactly the poem I wrote in fifteen minutes, but it’s pretty close. What’s important in the lines that you mention is that what birds “know” is what’s being devalued, not the birds themselves, and not their songs, either. The skepticism is about knowledge itself.

I love that poem of Dean’s (“Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool”), and those lines in particular are ones that I’ve thought about a lot. This issue of making birds or jumbo jets or stem cells is why on some fundamental level (open mouth insert foot) capital-P Poetry (the writing of it) cannot be taught. A teacher can provide atmosphere, energy, enthusiasm, technique, but marvelous poetry always contains something inexplicable—an impossible ingredient that’s there in spite of the person who wrote it. A poem isn’t simply the best words in the best order, it’s a series of transformative gestures, a demonstration of consciousness that reaches out into the world or the Vast and Void and smacks things around a little bit (including the person who wrote it). So at the same time that a poem has to be more than the sum of its parts, it can’t be reducible to them either. As Breton and Eluard wrote somewhere, “A poem must be a debacle of the intellect.”

On the other hand, it’s probably not quite as bizarre as I want to make it out to be, either. In many ways, against the backdrop of ordinary language, a poem is always a sort of extraordinary monstrosity of/in language—i.e., it’s the language we already know without the necessary legislation of meaning provided by ordinary aims, syntax, punctuation, etc. We recognize the words, but their use is very specialized. Taking the monster idea a bit further, Frankenstein’s monster, for instance, was made out of a variety of recognizable body parts, but it was nobody recognizable—it was in fact a malformation, extraordinary and terrifying and imaginatively (in)human. That’s poetry. As Wittgenstein said, “Even though a poem is composed in the language of information, it isn’t a part of the language-game of giving information.” What’s important is to make one’s monsters more bird than birdhouse, more pterodactyl than carburetor, more human than Argghhh! I don’t want to make a poem that’s so disproportionate and inappropriate to its context (as a poem) that no one recognizes it for what it is—i.e., I don’t want its surface deformities/enhancements to entirely obscure and obliterate its depths.

As artists, we’re responsible for (and to) the things we make, but if we do our job, they also take on a life of their own that has little to do with us. My poems are my problem, and while that doesn’t mean I can necessarily control or understand or explain them (cause I can’t), it does mean that I have to try.

DS: Animals—elephants, rhinoceroses, dogs, giraffes—make up a large percentage of your poetic image bank. I think it’s relevant to mention that animal imagery plays an important and large role in childhood, serving as a vehicle for that blooming sense of wonderment and imagination in children. Why do you think animals are so prevalent in your poems?

MH: Animals are who/what we’d like to be but aren’t, and, conversely, they’re what we fear most in ourselves. Also—and this is, I think, really important to me as a poet—they don’t use language—at least not in the way we think of it—and thus they exist differently than we do. How differently? I have no idea. That’s the allure and the mystery, the interface between the animals in my poems and what I can and can’t imagine about them.

Beyond that, many of the specifically animal-focused poems in my book—“Address to the Rhinoceros,” “Great White Shark,” Wildebeest,” etc.—came out of an assignment a friend gave me to help me ground and focus myself. He said, “Write a poem of at least ten lines ABOUT a rhinoceros, and make every line refer to the rhinoceros.” Easy enough, except that I didn’t know the first thing about rhinoceroses (not that knowing anything really mattered, but I needed base material). So I went to the dictionary and copied out exactly the definition for “rhinoceros.” Then I looked up and copied out the definitions of all the words in the definition of “rhinoceros” that I didn’t know, and from there I did the same for this second tier of words. Pretty soon I had pages and pages of meticulously copied definitions. It was very boring work. The next day, without looking back at the definitions, I sat down and wrote the poem, which turned out to be a sort of ode to the rhinoceros, but, more than that, to the word “rhinoceros.” The poem is essentially: fallout from the word exploded in conjunction with my imagined sense of the animal represented by the word. All the other animal poems followed in the same way. Not all of them worked, of course—the lion, the crocodile, and the ostrich didn’t make it. The dictionary process, however, has stuck with me, and I use it quite a bit to get myself spinning in every direction at once.

DS: In “Shag Carpet Gala” you say, “I don’t believe in authority figures. They’re like symbols, / and symbols I don’t believe in either.” Ideally, one would think you wouldn’t have to state your disbelief in symbols. But do you find, with your students (or with anyone, really), that there’s still the idea that images or ideas in poems are symbols for something else? Have you found that people try to read your poems symbolically or metaphorically?

MH: From writing reviews myself, I’m convinced that most of what the vast majority of people get out of poetry has more to do with what they bring to it than with the poetry itself—which is fine with me. Also, I think that even here in the 21st century it’s pretty difficult for a lot of people to get the idea that a poem might not be about something in the strict sense, but that it demonstrates something or points somewhere outside itself. I like the idea of letting a poem wash over you when you read it, paying close attention to the after-grit that sticks in your head or your heart.

For me, “Shag Carpet Gala” is a poem about the love of spectacle and the spectacle of love—images upon images upon images, where (in the Baudrillardian sense) the “map has replaced the territory” in almost every aspect of our cultural lives. The speaker in the poem is bombarded with the objects of his own imagination and also a string of real ones (physical, linguistic, musical) at the same time, and he blenders them—which is his want and love to do, but all the while he’s reminding himself that what’s important is the process. The process—the walk down the carpet—is the part of the event that shines (the life, the poem), not the carpet itself (it’s ’70s shag, after all) and not the speaker’s judgment or experience of it. Good or bad, true or false, left brain right brain, oompah oompah, the meaning of life and its requisite party is in maintaining one’s footing until the very end.

DS: You have a background in philosophy. The question of whether or to what extent philosophy informs your process or your poetic product does not seem all that interesting to me. I do wonder, though, assuming that philosophy does play a part in your poetry, what might the poetry reader be fairly asked to bring to the table? Should the reader of contemporary poetry, of your poetry, know his Wittgenstein and his Heidegger?

MH: Philosophy is a backdrop to some of my poems; it was a pretty formative part of my early academic life. But while I sometimes reference it (as I have above) to talk about where I come from, what I’m doing, or how I’m thinking about the work, ultimately the poems have to have their effects and be affective (on some significant visceral level) without a reader’s having any knowledge of theory or philosophy. I quit grad school in philosophy to focus on poetry and music, because I got to a point where I was doing the latter (writing poetry and music) to get at the very things that philosophy purports to deal with but can’t ever really touch—the how and why of human existence. In my experience, life’s not very logical; “uncertainties Mysteries and doubts,” not to mention contradictions, are the order of the day. What’s philosophy (which is, after all, based in the scientific method) gonna do with that, other than stroke its white beard and look baffled on the mountaintop? The fact is that philosophers argue endlessly and in minute detail about things that have absolutely nothing to do with human life or knowledge or truth or anything else, because what they’re really arguing about—what they’re confused by (Wittgenstein would say “bewitched by”)—is language.

I love Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the Philosophical Investigations. In spite of the way philosophers and literary theorists abuse it, it really goes a long way toward demystifying and dissolving (rather than solving) philosophical problems. Without going too much into it, he actually thought of philosophy as a sort of mental illness for which his own philosophy was the cure. The idea is that if you need the cure (and not everyone does) and you understand him, you stop doing Philosophy (that is, neurotically questioning and arguing about things, which have clear enough, ordinary answers to begin with. “Reasons end somewhere,” Wittgenstein reminds us). Interestingly, he also wrote that “all philosophy ought really be done as a form of poetry,” by which I think he meant: unsystematically, exploratively, with coherence, association, and comparison in mind, rather than certainty and scientific rigor. There are no universally acceptable, essential answers to questions like “What is knowledge” or “What is the nature of art”—though there are numerous solutions to be had in the relationships to be found via sifting through and comparing the nonessential answers. And these “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein’s term) offer us myriad ways of both thinking about and making our work and the world.

DS: You also have a background in punk music. Beyond the DIY ethic that’s clear in the production of your journal, Forklift, Ohio, does the punk-rock mentality play a part in your life as a poet, or in your poetry?

MH: I don’t know that there’s all that much that’s specifically punk rock in my poems, but I do feel that I want them to have some similar characteristics and effects—the noise, the energy, the sense that everything could fall apart at any second. Sloppiness. Elasticity. Negation. The very first punk rock record I ever listened to was the Dead Kennedys’ Plastic Surgery Disasters, which I put on the turntable one day after school and then sat in the floor of my room in disbelief watching my own face melt. The first track on that record, “Advice from Christmas Past,” is a wild stretch of cacophonous, atonal, a-rhythmic racket—a song in complete negation, on the run from itself and music. It doesn’t have a lead vocal, but there is a voiceover done by a woman, which begins, “Why are you such a stupid asshole? Would you really like to know?” The track lasts a minute and some seconds, then immediately one hears the Kennedys’ drummer, D.H. Peligro, click his sticks and count off “Government Flu,” the record’s first real song. “1-2-3-4” BLAM! The first chord destroys everything. It’s like you’re being hit in the mouth with a skyscraper. And after a short midtempo intro, the song kicks into hyperdrive, and Jello Biafra begins his warble: “We gotta drug, we’re gonna try it out on you / It won’t make you die / It’ll getcha just a little sick.” From there, the whole record is rabid—speed-demon-intense, politically radical and dangerous.

What’s weird is that I remember having a similar experience as a listener the first time I heard Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up,” and I actually thought of the Dead Kennedys the first time I read John Clare’s “Lines: I Am”—specifically with regard to the bit about feeling “like vapours tossed into the nothingness of scorn and noise.” That’s about as good a poetic summary of what punk rock was all about as I can imagine, but, of course, punk used/expressed what Clare expresses differently—with a different kind of force and in different terms, more on par with Dada—into the scorn and noise of nothingness.

In addition to the annihilation/exhilaration of punk rock, there was also a communal aspect to it that I really responded to—and which I think is also present in poetry, and in my relationship to it. This seems especially true in the small-press world, which is largely a DIY adventure, and, as a result, also a subversion of the standard values of fame and fortune (values that are as prevalent in poetry as anywhere else).

DS: I’ve heard you read, not that long ago, your delightful sonnet sequence, which seems to share an engine, of collage and cut-up, with Ted Berrigan’s American Sonnets. How much of a role, if any, did such techniques play in your previous book and chapbook, Who’s Who Vivid and Revelated, respectively? And what, to borrow a phrase from the Chairman of the American Iron Chef television program, was your inspiration for doing so with the sonnet sequence?

MH: Berrigan is definitely a huge inspiration to me. In grad school I wrote my critical essay on his The Sonnets, and I think ever since then I’ve been trying to find a way to pay homage to them in my own work. That poem of mine that you refer to, Sonnet, I wrote really fast, the first 5 or 6 parts in one afternoon. I had been listening to the recordings of Berrigan reading his sonnets on Penn Sound, and my head was full of his music. I literally just sat down and wrote them. It was like they were already written—and, in a way, I guess they were, but without me and mine in them—my sky, my loves, my neuroses and life, the hawks swooping down down and down. I keep saying in Sonnet that “these are my poems,” but more than anything, saying that—writing it—was a way to keep going in the face of so much that was done for me/before me by Berrigan, Corso, Dean Young, etc.—all that is not my poems.

I feel the tradition of poetry looming over me every time I sit down to write, and, as a result, there’s a lot at stake for me personally, something to try and live up to (and fail at)—by which I mean with and against—which is a big part of why I often begin (as I mentioned before) procedurally—to take my mind off of writing and to give myself something in which to momentarily bury the hatchet. I’d say 60 or 70 percent of the poems in Who’s Who and Revelated began this way. For example, I’ve already noted the processes involved in writing “In Fifteen Minutes” and the animal poems… “Giant Traumatism” is both a structural translation of Apollinaire’s poem “Windows” and also (like his poem) a collage. Every line of “What’s Inside a Giraffe?” tried to answer the title’s question—a question which my friend’s two-year-old asked her in the middle of the night—“Mommy, what’s inside a giraffe?” “I Being Born of Skin and Undressed” is a refashioning of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I Being Born a Woman and Distressed.” I could go on listing various strategies and parameters used in making the poems for a long time, but hopefully, in the end, they sort of disappear from the scene—that using them initially gives way to something unanticipated and resonant and charged, which isn’t the parameters themselves.

DS: You’re from Indiana, and you live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I mention this because location and setting do not appear to be very important in your poems, by which I mean that there’s often a rather general—that is, undefined—location where the poems are happening. One might say that the poems are happening chiefly in your head, or in the speaker’s head, but that seems too easy. To the extent that you’re conscious of it, how important is location/setting—and, related to that, temporality—in your poems?

MH: The straight answer here is that you’re right on the money: setting and location are not that important in Who’s Who Vivid and Revelated, though I wish I could say that it was more of a conscious choice than it probably actually was. I call it the “speaker in a room with objects syndrome.” It’s something I’ve been trying to contend with a bit in my more recent work—literally paying attention to everything around me as a strategy for writing, which has forced me to consider a lot more just where and when the hell I am. One of my new poems, in fact, is called “Cincinnati Poem” (after Lew Welch’s “Chicago Poem”). So perhaps the tide of dis-/un-locatedness is turning. But it’s definitely easier for me to reinvent the world than to face up to it as it is. In some sense, the poems I really like (and try to write) are ones that transcend their time and place—that escape the hullabaloo of living in a tar pit of particulars. Besides, for me, the hardest part is to stop reading or talking and start writing. The circumstances I have to work with (and in) are always less important (and problematic) than doing the work, which is largely a solitary adventure in a room with objects.

DS: In “Beautiful Burns” you say, “Nowadays / in everything the emphasis is on hipsterish / tragedy, but it’s all so fake my head hurts.” From a certain vantage point, I can’t really see any way to disagree with that. Would you care to play the philosopher and speculate why, nowadays, in everything the emphasis is on hipsterish tragedy?

MH: The phrase “hipsterish tragedy” implies something not tragic at all—a surface tragedy we move through and put on (along with hipsterish vision and joy and fabulousness). It’s the noise of culture and its thousand subcultures—its majors and minors. This noise is always sort of interesting on the surface, but one shouldn’t take it too seriously (nor wear it like a badge of honor or difference). Doing so means we wind up with too much too much: coolness and meanness and my own worst enemy, sentimentality—all of which amount to not much more than fireworks.

“Beautiful Burns” is, of course, a self-indictment more than anything else. I don’t want to drift or be slack, I want to live and exist actively. But I’m as guilty as anyone of buying into and participating in the manufacture and (yikes!) marketing of hipsterish self-consciousness—tragic and otherwise. You should see my nose ring, my Storm & Stress records, my reality TV. You should read my nowhere poems. The problem is cultural and systemic. I often get the feeling in talking with people of my own generation that responding to something imaginatively, creatively, expressively—in art or in life—isn’t allowed, because the perception (and theory) is that it isn’t any longer possible—that a real emotional reaction always looks fake, but emotional displays (which are fake) seem real—or at least they’re the only sort of emotional content that anyone will buy. The usual avenues of engagement—love, beauty, the common good, truth—have been blocked with a series of checkpoints—that were necessary in their day to combat the flow of pieties and pretense—but which now in this new day need to be o’erturned. Yes, “o’er.” Thus, one can only hope to stutter sincerely—send oneself out as a pulse, a broken signal, a set of squawks and beeps in hopes of making real contact and having real communion with others in the world and in the Vast.

To be an artist (that anyone cares about), one must have style. And in the 21st century, style is always a put-on: a function of the tools one employs and deploys in his or her work. In other words, one does not express oneself (the theories go), because there is no self to express, and yet things like Truth and Beauty are wholly subjective…? And while we can make the tools that generate style “new and improved,” we can’t really make ’em new, because everything is permitted. In the words of Jane’s Addiction, “Nothing’s shocking.” I don’t mean to sound pessimistic here. On the contrary, I think we owe it to ourselves to TRY both to “express ourselves” and to “make it new” in the face of its seeming almost impossible to do so. We have to emphasize the art over the artist, i.e., over the cult of personality—which is image, and brings us ever more strangely back to poetry. It’s difficult not to be sucked into the set of values where the artist’s style is more important than the art, the product/process more important than the creative engagement with other people and the world. I am worried about all of this. And also that I’m thinking about any of this. One has to be on the lookout for the drift (and by “one” I mean chiefly “myself”—this is the self-indictment paragraph after all), the inevitable falling into habits (“bewitchment”) off the cliff. The question is no longer “Is it art,” but given that anything can be art, so what? How does one infuse one’s work with humanity—empathy, faith, belief, even contradiction—even at the risk of looking sloppy or goofy or naïve. What other risks are there really to take?