Matt Mauch is the author of five books of lyrical prose and poetry, including A Northern Spring, We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., Bird~Brain, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, as well as the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the journal Poetry City, and has organized and hosted many other poetry readings and events. Mauch’s work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board and as a finalist for National Poetry Series and other national and international contests. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Journal, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert/ El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.
Matt Mauch’s A Northern Spring is set and shaped by the international lockdown brought by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the unfamiliarity created by social distancing, Mauch follows the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but instead of levity he feels the burden of what it means to search for meaning: “I wonder what the equivalent/ of washing the dishes to pay / for my meal is when the meal/ is the collection of observations/ gathered by the wandering self,/ my ever-changing routes,/ enveloping the neighborhood/ like a web.” This in turn colors what happens when the “nightmare / scenario is that we wake up/ still dog sniffing/ and all they say is / down boy, down” and the nightmare becomes reality.
Tiffany Troy’s Dominus makes its verbal headway at the vanguard of stream-of-consciousness, its poems accumulating into portraiture, throwing their legs over the boundary of the already-spoken out of dire necessity to make meaning with what we’ve fucking got. The scenery and characters change as the speaker-being-painted-in-words navigates work, family, expectations, deadlines, daily drudgery, daily euphoria, as well as all the trappings of popular American culture. “I specialize in disappointing people I love” opens the poems “This,” which closes with “as I lay like a ragged doll / on white linen I hate for being washable / and hence salvageable,” the oil and water of the self failing to mix, Troy’s brutal honesty morphing for the reader into a mirror.
Tiffany Troy: How does beginning A Northern Spring with “The Announcement, Excerpted from the Washington Post” set up the collection that is to follow?
To me, A Northern Spring is set during the pandemic, and very much is about the speaker (MM) as he thinks through and lives through the pandemic and all its attendant social distancing, changes in behavior in public spaces, while in Ireland.
Matt Mauch: I’m not sure how much anymore that communal images do or even can rise to the level of iconic, as in historically so, and this saddens me, as I’m more of a focuser on what unites us than what divides us. I’m not sure what’s left anymore of the communal experience with the internet and social media, with the many and varied silos we make our nests in. It seems to me that the photos from the weekend chronicled in the WaPo excerpt, the kneejerk policy that was cause to the effect they document, the unintended but easily foreseeable consequences regarding the spread of Covid, and the way in which that policy decision and all of its ramifications are emblematic of the bully-cum-US-president who said go to it all: if that’s not communally iconic, nothing fucking is anymore.
The Covid pandemic. Being in the North of Ireland when Trump announced a travel ban for all of Europe. Not knowing if we’d make it home. Not at all sure if the US was where we wanted to be during a pandemic. I felt literally compelled to document, document, document, like a journalist who finds themselves in the middle of shit blowing up. It proved as well to be a fertile field in which to unleash a lot of long-simmering social commentary, but then again that’s probably just my modus operandi as a writer, talker, thinker.
Motifishly, the WaPo excerpt also announces the fact that in the pages ahead I’ll be engaging and interacting with quite a few texts. I do this overtly as well as via more subtle allusion—sometimes the allusions are easter-egg opaque—the texts running the gamut from contemporaneous to old as the hills.
A Northern Spring covers that first spring of the Covid pandemic. The murder of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, where I live, and what followed in the immediate wake of that, demarcated the first phase of the pandemic for me. So A Northern Spring begins with an iconic image and ends with a set of iconic images in the CODA that covers the week here following Floyd’s murder at the hands of the MPD. I don’t expect to find myself between iconic images like that, trying to live life in a new reality that requires one to take pains to also stay alive, ever again. Sign from the universe?
I also take on and try to subvert a bit my least favorite construct of them all: time. The “Northern” of the title is actually two norths: Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota, tippy top and center on your US map, and Northern Ireland. The prose poems in the four preludes are set in Ireland’s Six Counties. The lineated poems in each of the sections that follow the preludes are set primarily in Minneapolis during the lockdown. One or two are set in the North of Ireland. It’s kind of like Back to the Future minus me lowest-common-denominator telegraphing the time travel from prelude to part, prelude to part, prelude to part, prelude to part.
So getting to your new book, Tiffany—and congrats, it’s gorgeous—there’s this essay I teach and rather love and talk about whenever I find an opportunity to called “Heart of Sand” by Anne-Marie Ommen. In a sentence, it’s an essay that seeks answers to human sufferings of the now, to griefs of the present, in ancient mythology (I’d argue in ancient mythologies—all of them), and finds in the end not answers but instead mystery, mystery Oomen comes to embrace more so than the answers she hoped for but never finds.
Mythology, then, for Oomen, represents an end point of what can be known, a place where one leaps, as if off of a high diving board, from the known into mystery.
Standard and I’d argue nonstandard mythologies feature like essential spices throughout Dominus. Their role is not at all like the role of mythology in “Heart of Sand.” They may, in fact, provide for the speaker of these poems something akin to answers if not exactly answers themselves.
Can you speak to the overarching role or purpose of mythologies, standard and not, for the speaker of the Dominus poems?
TT: Wow, thank you for your kind words about Dominus. Your book cover is gorgeous as well! I love thinking about community in the aftereffects of the beginning of the pandemic, where social distancing, mask-wearing, and isolation are accentuated with digital media becoming the only way to stay connected. In thinking about iconography, it feels like The Northern Spring is bookended by tragedy and death, the iconic photographs/ announcements which forge community, so to me the “Prelude” and the poetry sections felt more like the tableau that attempts to speak of a narrative in between the iconography.
I definitely agree with you that through the lens or layer of mythology, the characters in Domnius arrive at, through their repeated failures, a kind of truth or resolution, as opposed to more questions. In music, you might call that the “return home,” a chord in the same key, whether or not it’s the same octave. That “home” is less a location than the change in perception of the self’s position within a community or situation, which allows the self to forge forward in some way. This is necessary–even if it sometimes comes in the form of the rejection of the system, as in “A Thank You Card.”
Why mythology? I feel I included mythology for the same reasons the speaker in Northern Spring might draw parallels between Covid and the Spanish plague or the Irish famine. It contextualizes our suffering and the recurrence of history gives one hope in the perceived inevitability of the corruption of a system, because different people have been in the exact same shoes before. I think to myself, This too shall come to pass. So mythology to me is a space of imagination, and a space to create parallels.
In thinking about standard and non-standard features of an epic: an epic in the Western tradition generally speaking features a male protagonist who goes on one escapade after another in “foreign” places and encounters exotic monsters that they defeat. This episodic quality culminates in the fight against the “final boss.” There’s the muse or some kind of guide, usually with more knowledge than the speaker.
In Dominus the speaker is “foreign” at “home” and must gain acceptance in a system that rejects her with the error message, “System error.” The female protagonists (in the various guises–similar to the way Odysseus disguises himself in various forms) have interludes with bureaucracy as represented by our legal or medical systems and patriarchy as represented by the Master. But the “final boss” here is not the Master but the speaker herself. If we continue with the Odyssey parallel, I would say it’s a bildungsroman where Telemachus is centered, as opposed to the father, Odysseus, or even the mother Penelope.
Can you tell me about the process of writing and putting together A Northern Spring? I am especially curious about the differences between the “Prelude”/ “Coda” versus the poetry sections.
MM: Imagine a spectrum running from “found form” (first cousin of the found poem) on one end to “vision of angels in a tree a la William Blake” on the opposite end. Somewhere between those two poles is the story of me finding the form for A Northern Spring.
I was writing—writing a lot—but didn’t know I was writing a book, not until George Floyd was murdered near where I live and became the focus of the whole wide world. The pandemic. The lockdown. The isolation. The lack of knowledge about so much of what was changing our lives seemingly irrevocably. I’m convinced that all of that created the context in which the murder of Floyd could go globally viral in a way that the killings of so many other Black men at the hands of police in the US have not. I also think that Floyd’s murder and the response to it ended a phase of the pandemic. There was BGF and AGF.
I didn’t know that what I was writing was a book until the Floyd murder, until the week of uprising and unrest, the protesting and rioting that followed here in its wake. I thought I was working on what would be two separate things—the prose poems in the preludes and the lineated poems in the sections between the preludes. The Floyd murder and reaction added a third thing—a missing piece—and once I had that I saw the form of the book: the four prose preludes detailing our time trying to get home from Northern Ireland after the travel ban announcement, the early, lockdown-stage pandemic poems between them, and the closing prose CODA covering that last week in May. I just saw it and followed it like a plan handed over by who the fuck knows.
The book is a snapshot, then, of the spring of 2020, which is one of those kinds of times that I’ve lived long enough to have experienced a few times, when the world is united after tragedy or disaster, its individuals for the most part focusing on the things that unite us rather than on that which divides us. Philosophically, I lean toward that kind of cosmopolitanism, at least as the concept is espoused by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Another time that felt ripe with that kind of possibility was right after 9-11, but the 9-11 window into our common humanity didn’t last nearly as long as it did with COVID, which persisted through that entire spring.
So that was my vision: A Northern Spring as a snapshot of a kind of rare suspended animation with all of humanity at a crossroads when hope isn’t just silly idealism but feels rather like a seed we can make bloom. It’s a portrait of that, the book. An attempt to capture what I may never experience again.
Back to you: Reading Dominus, I’m finding that the speaker is not an unreliable narrator per se but is, rather, a narrator telling the story from a POV that seldom gets seen or known to exist by others in her orbit. We’re getting the inside scoop, the story the narrator keeps from the rest of the world as she navigates it. I think that if the speaker’s story were told by an observer not privy to her thoughts, we would see a portrait of an objectively successful person navigating the world as she has found it during the time that she is alive.
Is what we see, then, in Dominus, the part of the story that for so many of us goes untold? If so, does the disparity between the outer story and the inner one, if my reading of things is correct, make this speaker a kind of everyperson of this not-so-young-anymore century, a new kind of confessional poet giving expression to the struggles of so many of the young American masses?
TT: Your reading is spot on, because I would say that there is a major disconnect between the way the speaker/ character presents herself versus what she truly believes. This major disparity drives the plot for a speaker that for the most part outwardly conforms to the system and thus thrives within it, and creates tension because the speaker knows she is somehow wrong to feel but at the same time the system is wrong for teaching her so. I agree with you that the problem lies less with the unreliability of the narrator than this common feeling we all share, sometimes, that the self we present is quite different from our thinking self. In Dominus, the reader is oftentimes as the you, or the addressee, and gains an inside scoop of what is going down inside the shithole, as a means of releasing that tension.
I would love it if in fact readers see in Dominus the part of the stories that for them are untold! The speaker to me very much fits the millennial type, in thinking about the never-ending list of specific ingredients, obsession over food (as opposed to building a family), and anxiety to be a people pleaser, etc. Within that cacophony we make time for what we love and admire, and for me Dominus is the culmination of that journey.
Speaking of a deep dive into the psyche of the speaker/ writer, I am wondering a lot about the epistolary “Prelude” sections and in particular why you excluded the responses to MM’s various texts to the addressee, until the “Coda,” and why you consistently signed off as yourself, “MM.” Did you have to tweak the texts at all for The Northern Spring, or did the nerve-wrecking of the pandemic in the North of Ireland (and various airports) lend itself to its writing?
MM: The texts aren’t real texts but imitations of texts. They’re hermit crab prose poems. I’m appropriating the hermit crab essay—an essay that, like a real-ass hermit crab, wriggles and wiggles itself into the form of something else, in this case another type of writing instead of a shell. So the texts aren’t tweaked from real-time texts but were written after the fact, starting the day after we landed, the experience fresh, the expression of it intentional, a la prose poetry.
The lack of response to MM’s (my) texts-cum-hermit-crab-prose-poems is not a MacGuffin. I didn’t have an international travel plan for my old-ass phone because I was traveling on a budget—I’m a public school teacher. So I could only connect to things when I was both in range of free Wi-Fi and privy to its password, which was infrequently. It’s how I’ve tried to save money every time I’ve traveled overseas—kind of old school, I guess, going away and not being connected to shit. One result of all that is I don’t receive many if any text messages and am not sure people are receiving mine. Then, when I land back in the States, my phone lights up with all the messages that have been, I don’t know, hanging out in the ether, waiting for my phone to invite them in? So the lack of responses is a mirror of how things went down IRL. And why I sign them all with my initials, MM? That tends to be how I sign off on texts (and I know most people don’t sign off on texts, that doing so makes me an anachronism), so it’s the prose poem as hermit crab adhering to the shape of the shell it’s decided to call home—some verisimilitude.
Do you remember when Robert Hass was the U.S. Poet Laureate? One of the things he did with that station was to write a weekly article introducing a poem to America via its newspapers, which at the time were still printed things and not online things and were the primary source of news for most folks, supplemented by the nightly news on the three major networks plus The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS (recently, at the time, renamed from the The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, after MacNeil retired). Hass’s syndicated column ran in twenty-five US newspapers for two years. All of the columns had intros and many of them had outros in which Hass prepared the reader for what was coming (the intros) and then explained how to savor what they’d just experienced (the outros).
Would you pretend that “SEA FLOOR” is going to be in one of these columns—which would be online now, not in print, and so has the potential to go viral—and that you are both the poet who wrote it, which you are, and the replacement for Bob Hass, and in that two-in-one capacity write an intro and outro for “SEA FLOOR,” your audience being America?
TT: I am fascinated by the idea of the hermit crab essay, which is in line with what I’m learning this week, actually, in thinking about the way in which constructed forms can be utilized to “trick” the reader into the stylized and constructed world that shares parallels with real life experiences but synthesizes it such that the “noise” of the cacophony of life is cut out in some way.
Here’s my intro and outro for the “Sea Floor”:
Intro: In the film Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett asks near the end of the film, “What do you call a hundred lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea?” “A beginning.” Extending that metaphor, “Sea Floor” is a poem by Tiffany Troy about death, fear, and despair, building from an eclectic mix of real-life observations (the makeshift altar of Heineken and cigarettes and the train doors closing) with the occult (what does it mean to be relegated as an archetype, and the designated fate is tragic?)
[Poem is shown.]
Outro: “Sea Floor” builds its resonances through sound, ending with the “thread named surrender.”
I am going to steal your idea, and create a variation of it. I want you to imagine you’re stuck in an airport with no WiFi and you’re writing an email (to be) to one of your students (say in Beginning Poetry) about how your poems work. Why the super long and detailed titles? How do indentations work in tandem with line breaks to create emotional resonance for the reader? Then how does the bullet point function as a section break of sorts? For beginning poets who want to try this style out, what are your tips and do-not-do’s?
MM:
Dear [student’s name]:
There’s this poet, dead now but larger than life when alive and holding court, named Bill Holm (the Brits would say called Bill Holm), who wrote this great fucking book called Boxelder Bug Variations. Do you know boxelder bugs? They’re pretty as all get-out and also are motherfucking magical. They get into your house no matter what. Seal the fucker with a foot-thick coating of something impermeable, such that even air won’t get through, meaning people can’t live there, and boxelder bugs will penetrate it—open fucking sesame—and set up camp. Pretty, pretty pests that get into everything, are everywhere, that Holm decided to love and hold the door open wide for as an alternative to losing his fucking mind trying to keep them out.
A kind of “lesson in veneer” that Boxelder Bug Variations can teach you is that long titles are really cool, that a title can be longer than a poem, indeed can be a mountain to the poem’s anthill (I’d say boxelder bug hill but they don’t make those). But beyond the veneer, when you really live in that book like one of the boxelder bugs Holm has inviting to do the same, then—in the same way that you can re-set your worldview with a good psilocybin trip—what happens is you stop asking why? and replace that default POV with why not?
Good jazz works that way, too. Why the fuck not? Ornette Coleman asks again and again and again. Of course, yes, you have to know the rules before you can break the rules to any effect beyond the random, the accidental, the lucky, have to ask why over and over and have to come up with good answers before you can ask why not with any gravitas, to, as I said, any real motherfucking effect.
Anything that looks like a kind of freedom you want to partake of yourself is a hard-earned thing, a thing you earn over time. And maybe it looks new or novel, but it’s not. Every freedom you eventually partake of has been earned by somebody else long—loooooonnng—before you. Maybe you’ll come across prior partakers of it and maybe you won’t. Maybe their freedom was published in the sense of made public and maybe it wasn’t. Doesn’t matter—it’s out there many times over. Many times over. Which doesn’t make your earning of it any less fucking special. It’s always special. It always matters. If you’ve really earned it and aren’t just trying it on like the latest fashion, you’ll know all of that. Intimately. And it won’t matter what anybody says. Not a fucking lick.
The titles, the line breaks, the white space, the bullet points: from those you can take lessons in veneer. And take those lessons. There are lots of lessons in veneer to learn, to reject, to embrace after previously discarding, to dance with, to refuse the hand of, to sheepishly walk up to and say you were wrong, that you’ve changed your mind . . . does the offer still stand?
Why not? will come. Not all at once necessarily but maybe all at once. Write every day. Read good stuff every day. Or do at least one of the two every day, and do that at least six days a week. Take a day a week off. Use why after why to court the big why not?
If anybody asks you what you learned at school today, you’ll say, if you’re feeling kind, “My poetry professor knows how to not answer a question really fucking well in 861 words.” But I’ve got a colleague who says nobody reads long emails anymore, not even professors, so maybe you didn’t get this far. If you did—if you have—here’s a prompt with legs: Pick one thing that you have been told by an authority or authorities you trust not to do in a poem, not to do in poetry. Now go fucking do that thing in a poem and make the poem rock. Do it in enough poems that rock until you master it. Repeat with a new verboten thing in a new poem, in new poems, till that’s old hat, too. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you start putting together books, do it on a larger scale, across the poems, from poem to poem, instead of across the lines (if there are lines), from stanza to stanza (if there are stanzas). When one of those books comes out, come visit again if I’m still teaching—I’ll be in the same goddamned office—with a signed copy. If I’m not teaching anymore, contact me via my socials or my website and we can meet for coffee and you can give your signed book over miniature coconut pastry puffs, my treat. If I’m dead, sign a book for me and burn it. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but it would be great if I’m wrong, as long the afterlife isn’t shit. The smoke will know. The smoke will know what to do. What message to carry. Where to carry it to. Whether to carry it all. Trust the smoke, my friend.
Take care,
MM
Tiffany, I have one last question for you. Since the advent of the Mac (oh, the glorious Mac) and desktop publishing technology in the late 1980s, plus the later development of mass-market print-on-demand technology, plus the dissemination and marketing revolution spurred by the World Wide Web (what a great and fucking oh-so-appropriate name for a thing, almost like a miniature poem, naming things well being something we get wrong more than we get right), which could be a quasi-mathematical formula—[Mac + desktop publishing] x [mass-market POD technology] ^ WWW = books galore]—we have a lot more books by a lot more poets, a democratization of publishing that I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say is Gutenbergish.
This democratization has proliferated, not unlike an invasive species, in many facets of life if not in every motherfucking facet of life, the result being that we no longer have a town square real or virtual where everybody partakes of the same X, Y, or Z (save for the occasional airborne coronavirus), but have, rather, as many silos as there are humans, each one tailored via actual or behavioral algorithm to one’s individual tastes, preferences, biases, etcetera. It’s easy to lament what seems like a loss of things held in common, but as with any societal change propelled by technological advancement, we ain’t going back, save for nostalgically.
So while there are more poetry books and presses and published poets than ever before, their reach is limited to the silos where they can gain purchase, and almost every published poet now also has to be their own publicity and marketing department.
When we gain something, we also lose something, and vice versa. Plato lamented the new-to-him technology of writing because it would erode the muscle that is our memory, which for him was great loss. I have a foot in the old and a foot in the new. I’ve heard plenty of Plato-esque laments of our current state of democratization in poetry publishing. Your ethos, though, as a poet, is an ethos arisen from and of these times of great proliferation. Tell me like a prophet, Tiffany—kind of like teaching an old dog new tricks—what are the positive aspects of the poetry publishing world as technology has transformed it into what it is today? Why, Tiffany, is the state of things a good thing? A grand thing. A thing to be celebrated and embraced. To marvel at. To champion. A thing we’ll look back at and call a golden age.
TT: Haha, I am going to admit that I was a huge Plato fan through high school and college but now I also think that he is full of bull. Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking but hear me out on this:
For a long time, because of what Plato had to say about the visual arts, which is that it is a baser form of occupation because it merely imitates reality, and thus does not touch upon the form of the thing, I felt down about not only realism in visual arts but also in writing. Of course I know now that even realism is bent on showing you something beyond reality. Classical paintings like Raphael’s School of Athens utilizes iconography with Plato and Aristotle, etc., the way I might use myth in Dominus to build a story. The JPEG image of the School of Athens features Plato (a DaVinci looking bald man with a long beard) pointing to the sky with his index finger. His sky-pointing finger shows how above all, he is insistent on the form of things. His world is one of hierarchy.
Plato-esque laments probably go to the utter deterioration of quality as publishing houses basically print whatever that looks like poetry, without really reading what is being said and more importantly how. What they forget, of course, is that within this cacophony of new voices, there are voices that teach us about the variegatedness of modern (and here being the American, I’ll say: American) existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that it is super exhilarating, to have the opportunity to read poets from all over the United States and poets (whether in English or in translation) all over the world with the click of a mouse or a push on my phone. It’s a tradeoff of a night writing for an evening of the Late Night Show with [insert your favorite host here]. Or in lieu of texting, writing on the Note App. I feel incredibly lucky as a critic to be able to read these poets’ work from after their third shift or before their morning shift as a paramedic or teacher, and for me to exclaim (in my head) I want to write just like this! Or I’ll never write like this, but this inspires me into this or that spiral. True heart-to-heart conversations that take place over the construct of a Google doc, that I’ve always viewed as an inferior knockoff of Microsoft Word, and to be able to communicate with people in real time on Zoom with a fidelity that is unseen of.
Now as prophet Tiffania, I must also issue a word of warning, because there is no utopia without the snake. And to me that snake of Eden is the predatory nature of the publishing world, which can be dangerous if you don’t set clear boundaries, and learn how to say, No, from time to time. With the influx of demands placed on you, it’s okay to remember that There are no emergencies in the Creative Writing Department, as my dear mentor always tells me.
Then also stay away from creeps and predators. By this I mean there are publishers that try to make you pay in order to publish you and these publishers tend to publish crap. Don’t associate yourself with people that you don’t feel genuinely comfortable with. Don’t feel like you have to do something in order to be a writer, but do make time for yourself. I made time for myself by taking pictures of the sky because there is a vastness and freedom that I do not have.
In thinking about what imposter syndrome even means, I would liken it to a dress shoe that is a size below your actual foot size. There is nothing wrong with working hard, and reading broadly, and making connections, just as there’s nothing wrong with appearing spiffy in front of a judge. What is wrong is the idea that you must do x, or y, or z to reach there. It’s okay to get the shoe that fits your foot, or to make a mental note to get one as soon as you have the wherewithal (money/ time, what have you) to get there. So I would encourage you to read deeply, think courageously, and write freely, knowing that writing and publishing are two different processes and you can always winnow down the trash talk or the poem that is a scaffold when you get there.
Matt, turning over to you, let’s say we are on a panel together and I just did the above spiel. What would you say either in response or maybe in addition to the idea of writing & publishing, publishing today, and/or the imposter syndrome? Keep in mind that there are lots of students and educators in the audience so your words can make a real impact to many budding writers (with current readers or readers in another afterlife, haha).
MM: Tiffany, I hope you get to Rome to see School of Athens. I think you will. I just consulted my Magic 8 Ball and it says, Yes, yes you will, but urged me on the second shake to correct myself: I hope you get to Vatican City, that egg yolk surrounded by the albumen of Rome.
I drop the anachronistic Magic 8 Ball here intentionally. I’ve been involved in publishing pretty consistently since the dawn of the desktop revolution of the late 1980s. I’ve worked in alternative journalism with its healthy dose of arts and entertainment (think children of the Village Voice), in school-library, children’s, and middle-grade book publishing, and also with poetry journals and poetry and literary presses. I’ve done it as entrepreneur, as salaried employee, as consultant, as activist, as faculty advisor, as side gig, as volunteer. I’ve seen and worked with people dedicated to pleasing advertisers and investors, people dedicated to understanding and meeting the demands of the marketplace. I’ve also seen and worked with people dedicated to the truth, dedicated to the art and the word, to some concept of justice and doing the right thing. I’ve seen people conflate, intentionally and unintentionally, the former list of things with the latter. I’ve seen people in the latter camp quit before they’ll allow the former set of concerns, as they see it, to compromise them.
People. They like to dig their heels in over stupid-ass shit. I’ve seen that a lot. I’ve done that myself. Publishing and books and the word tend to be fertile grounds for that sort of thing.
In the BIG big picture, none of it fucking matters. Nobody reads anymore. Our personal libraries get tossed into a dumpster when we die.
We fucking die.
In the littler picture, which is the picture of the poet or writer hard at work reading or writing because they have important things to say, or because things out there are knocking and need to be said through them, poets and writers in conversation with all that they can get their hands and eyes on that’s been said before them: to them it matters more than anything else in the whole wide world.
We haven’t fucking died yet.
The odds are VERY high that more people have read my letters to the editor in the Sunday Minneapolis Star Tribune (the Twin Cities metro population is 3.69 million) than have read my five books of poetry combined. Nobody would bet against those odds unless they hated money and wanted to part with all that they had.
I saw today this quotation on Instagram today and had to re-post it and add it to my disappears-in-twenty-four-hours story:
“You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.”
– Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
That’s how I feel. I’m not a very good capitalist. A lot of the people in publishing who focus on things other than the truth and the word and concepts of justice and the right thing, or who conflate those things with money, money, money, are good capitalists, or are striving to be good capitalists, and we wouldn’t have the books we have on our shelves without them.
One of the smartest humans I’ve ever met, a poet leading a summer poetry workshop, introduced me and my fellow apprentices to something Ezra Pound said: “It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it.”
My mind was blown. YES! I thought. YES! YES! YES! YES! MOTHERFUCKING YES!
I haven’t wavered since. If I had a magic wand to wave, all poetry would be published anonymously. It would have no monetary value, would be free from the bondage of capitalism, free from money, money, money.
I was even going to start a journal that published poems only anonymously, and was going to call it Anon., after the famous writer, but a friend did some internetting and found that a journal with that name already existed. They still do. They read submissions anonymously but add the poets’ names to the works they publish. That takes it a step too far for my ideal.
When I ran the journal Poetry City, we read submissions anonymously, and I tried to recruit some folks for an AWP panel to argue the pros and cons of reading submissions anonymously versus reading them with names attached. I couldn’t find anybody who shared my point of view. In fact, the people I reached out to told me pretty clearly that they publish the poet as much as they publish the poem. Maybe I didn’t reach out to enough people. Anyway, I dropped the idea.
I tell my students to fall in love with the process—the process of writing, of doing it every day, of making it a habit, a job that doesn’t pay you but matters more than the jobs that do—and that the product will come. I try to teach them to take the long view. Saying “the product will come” is my assent to our economic system, to capitalism, to ego. Every time I say it a voice (one of mine) chastises me for not cutting it short, for not just saying, “Fall in love with the process, with the act of writing, with that magic, finis.” That would be the perfect advice, but students pay for classes and have goals. That’s the system and I say what I say acknowledging the capitalism, the urge to publish. My job at school is at least in part to give my students what they’re paying for.
I oftentimes feel like an outlier among outliers, a freakish subset of one. I also know that one person’s outlier is another’s full of shit. And maybe that’s all that I am, full of shit. Maybe that’s all that any of us are, full of beautiful, beautiful shit.
Have you heard, Tiffany, will they be arriving soon with the hemlock? Maybe there’s still time for us to make a run for it.