My friendship with Matt Broaddus began the same place, throughout history, that all good stories have: at the Fonograf Editions booth at the Kansas City AWP. I’d gained a real appreciation for his work, and its imaginative rigor, the first time I cracked open his 2021 chapbook Two Bolts from Ugly Duckling, and my admiration for it had only grown with every poem I’d read since. At the booth, I told him I enjoyed his poem that had recently come out in the journal Copenhagen, we talked for a bit about Poetry Daily, and then parted ways into the hum-white light of the Kansas City Convention Center.
After our brief introduction, Matt would occasionally send me encouraging words about my poems, I’d react with glee to his, and that was mostly it until his book launch, with Kelly Hoffer, for his latest collection Deeper the Tropics. I’d just written a long essay about Kelly’s work a few months prior, and, being such a fan of Matt’s poems, I decided to make the drive up to never-never land—Ann Arbor, Michigan—where he read with, and was interviewed by, Kelly on the second floor of Literati Bookstore downtown.
And I was glad that I did. You can see some fuller thoughts in my review of the book for the Cleveland Review of Books, but for now I will say that the poems in it are flavorful, surprising, and enriched by a keen sense of the way that human time repeats itself. Or: his poems inhale history and exhale orange juice. They are great, the reading in Ann Arbor was great, and we have kept in contact since.
Matt was kind enough to agree, at a later date, to hop on a phone call for a quick interview. Our conversation lasted roughly 45-minutes and covered everything from ancient Mayan beer to Robert Frost. The version below has been edited down for clarity and concision.
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I might have told you this already, but pretty soon after going to your book launch in Michigan, where you mentioned Matt Rohrer was your thesis advisor at NYU, I happened to run into him at a reading in Pittsburgh. When talking to him about your work, which poets I felt like you most resemble etc, he let me know that you have quite an interest in Tomaž Šalamun.
I’m always, for better or for worse, interested in asking poets about their favorite poets. So that kind of seems like a reasonable place to start, at least as a gateway into your own poetics… what did Tomaž Šalamun teach you? There is, of course, a poem addressed to him in the book. What influence has he had on your poetics, both in this book and in general?
Surprise is a big part of what’s exciting reading his work; there’s a kind of manic energy to his poetry that’s very infectious. And it’s interesting, too—you know, I don’t speak Slovenian, but it’s fascinating how many American poets have translated Šalamun and how many different versions are available.
There’s something about the way he’s translated that’s interesting, too… there’s interesting syntactical stuff that happens in his poems that can make you come to the task of putting sentences together or putting fragments together with a new perspective, so you see that you can start sentences or start fragments of sentences very differently than you might have approached them before you encountered Šalamun.
As someone who’s really interested in language as a sort of universal thing rather than a nationalistic thing where we have English language poetry or we even have American poetry, I like to read in translation all the time. I find it really generative. I think it just does something to one’s brain, in terms of how you interact with your own day-to-day language, and how you want to get down what you’re trying to do in your poems. So, does that answer your question? *Laughs*
*Laughs* Totally, man. 100%. And to use your own term, from your poem “Morning Meditation / Meditation #1,” what you’re describing affects your “pedestrian language,” the way you walk around the world and down the page. I totally know what you mean. And I can see where the poetics of surprise leaches into your work… that is certainly one of the things I like most about your poems. It makes sense, too, that you mention reading outside the American present or even the English language, because so much of your work deals with historical materials both near and far: Oppenheimer, Ashurnasirpal II, megalodon fossils—
Ha!
And even ancient Mayan beer! *Both laugh* And it gives the poems, funnily enough, a kind of wisdom, I think, a way of de-prioritizing the present that both feels true and gives the poems a kind of general humility, which plays well with all the humor that appears throughout the poems. So I guess what I really want to ask is: why do you reach back in your poems like this so often? What does history do for you/your poems?
That’s a good question… I think that history is present in the present. That kind of sounds dumb when I say it like that, but I think that it is very easy to get wrapped up in the immediacy of, like, the personal moment that you’re in? For me, it feels like the poem is more in conversation with other voices if it’s incorporating history.
But honestly, a major interest of mine, in terms of bringing in historical reference, is just trying to acknowledge that where I am is not the be-all-end-all and won’t be the be-all-end-all. What I mean by that is that where I’m writing from is just a blip, you know, and my writing and my literary self on the page is in many ways an outgrowth of historical forces that are beyond my control. I think that one way I can feel like my art is engaging with these forces is to write about them and to move the past into the present…that allows me to wrap my head around where I am in this moment and maybe appreciate in some ways more how I am where I am. By appreciate I don’t always mean celebrate, because many of the historical forces that have led to the world that we’re living in have been exploitative, have been deeply unfair, even genocidal, to native peoples, and have caused global migrations that have often been forced… these are all things that I want to acknowledge in my art. And in order to acknowledge them I have to acknowledge history.
I think you do quite a good job of balancing all that throughout the book. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with your book lately because—ready the trumpets—I just finished a review of it last night.
Yay, that’s so cool! I can’t thank you enough for spending time with the book.
I just couldn’t get the book out of my head. It’s funny—so much of what you just said about history’s presence in the present sounds a lot like what I wrote in the review, so that’s good for me. I’m glad it’s true…
*Laughs* Yeah, you’re on the right track.
But one other thing that’s interesting too, which I also talk about in the review, is that I do think you have a very grounded poetics… When you’re not working with persona in the book, a lot of the poems do take place on kind of a literal ground-level. I’m thinking of some of the more walk-y, New York poems…
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, there’s so many of them.
And it works well! But one thing that’s funny is, though I meant the word humility, and I do think you have a very grounded poetics, in both a punny and a more emotional sense, what’s funny is that your speakers tend to have a lot of self-confidence. Even when a speaker is doomed, which many of them probably are—I think first of your besieged pizza delivery guy—they still tend to meet that doom with a lot of good humor.
And I think the collection in general does some very interesting things with that corrosive material called optimism, in fact—though I wouldn’t call any of the poems flat-out optimistic. My question, though, is: how much time do you spend crafting the personalities of these individual speakers? Are you really just, when you compose, following the language/the image, or are you on one level thinking of crafting them as characters?
That’s a really good question. In the Oppenheimer poems there was more thought put into, like, how does Oppenheimer perceive himself, how might he speak in these fantastical scenarios. But for a lot of those poems I think it’s just that as you live you read different things, you internalize different things, and eventually that language comes out in the poem. Like, I think about the “Monkey King Gets Introspective for a Minute” poem, where it’s in the voice of this mythic character from a Chinese tradition. That was one where, if you read Journey to the West in its many different translations, you get a really strong sense of this character, and so that’s a scenario where it’s not necessarily as intentional.
But yeah, there’s many poems in the book that have this persona quality where there’s this self-confident speaker, and I don’t really know where that comes from… because I wouldn’t necessarily call myself extremely self-confident. Maybe it’s just a situation of writing allowing me to play with that sort of voice.
It’s funny when you say things like “I don’t know where that came from,” because that is kind of a theme, a dynamic, that pops up a lot in your poems: the language of building or the language of creation, as well as de-creation, you know: “There is a non-existent island. I have to make it every night.” There’s that elevator poem where you have to make the suit. There’s more examples, I promise. Making breakfast for the FBI in the morning, stuff like that. And I guess we could dive into that as a theme, but it also made me curious about your own relationship to your own poetry. I’m just always curious about this too: where do you land on the spectrum of ‘active craftsman’ vs. ‘divine receptacle’ view of poetry? Do you feel like you build the poems yourself or do you feel like they’re handed to you—from a muse, or from history, or from what-have-you?
I think it’s a mix. I do think that you sometimes get those poems that just come out of the blue and they just like come through you. That is a totally alchemical force that I feel like I have little control over. Very often, I tend to write whatever is going to end up the core of the poem in one sitting. And then I sort of fiddle with it, and I may add more later… Revision is a complicated question for me because I am very much a perfectionist, so I can really get trapped by revision and start to feel the energy and the happiness of the composition leach out of the poem by revising it too much. So I also think that, for me, it is really important to have some play and to think of writing in a playful way. That may not be for everyone, but for me it’s a generative way of getting words down on the page.
And usually, we’ve talked about this in the past, those poems start with a scrap of language overheard. For me now, I would say that it’s almost always that situation. Like there’s some quirky thing that I hear, something that my wife says that is really interesting to me, and then I have to explore that more in language and that becomes a poem.
Yeah, as Robert Frost would say, a poem can’t be “worried into being.” I’ve been trying to do that less lately, and I think our processes don’t sound that far apart. Actually, while we’re on the topic of process, I know you’ve been getting more into painting/visual art lately. So I did want to ask: what kind of itch does painting scratch for you? When doing it, compared to writing poems, do you feel like you’re trekking through a different part of your soul?
I think that both are interested in images. For me, I know my poems are very interested in images. But painting, for me, is really just a fun practice. I think it’s important for all of us to find what we can in our lives that is fun and that makes it worth living, and painting for me is just… fun. I often really like being a beginner at something—I often feel like a beginner at poetry still, but with painting I almost always feel like I don’t even know what’s going to happen. And I don’t always know how to do what I’m in the process of doing! It’s, again, the element of surprise; I often feel very surprised with what I end up with. And yeah, that’s just exciting. I think with the world that we’re currently living in, these feelings are things I want to honor and sit with and appreciate as much as I can.
For sure. And I’m actually glad you brought up images, because one of the prepared questions I have has to do with the fact that a lot of your speakers do display an interest in minutia: small objects, specific images, vast particularities, etc. And I guess there are two ways of approaching this question… I was going to ask, on one hand, why do you think naming, pointing to, and focusing in on things, and very particular particularities, is such a big part of your poetics? What draws you to these particular images?
But, on the other hand, if you would rather move away from the self-psychoanalyzing angle, if you wanted to talk about—this is actually a huge pet concern of mine—what images do for poetry in general, I would love to hear your thoughts on that… because that’s a question I ask myself every day.
Yeah, that’s a great question. I find that I am more interested in writing that is specific on the image, and it’s because I can imagine it. It’s more sensorial; it feels more embodied. And it feels less intellectual. There’s plenty of intellectualizing in my poems, but I want there to be anchors that people can draw on as they’re moving through my work. Images are very often those anchors.
I think when many people start writing poetry, it’s very common for them to think that they need to gesture toward big ideas, big philosophies, big feelings. But very often the words that they might use to stand in for those big feelings, like if you’re talking about love and you use the word love, that has so many potential meanings…that has a personal meaning to everyone. I would rather speak to those things using images. Instead of directly stating that I have this feeling of isolation and separation from others in a capitalist society, I talk about billboards that I see, I talk about getting my teeth cleaned, and I talk about being in an elevator. An image can pull you into a particular experience, even if it may not be clear to the reader in every instance what exactly that experience is, you know? Like when I read Šalamun, he uses lots of names in poems—he often makes a direct address to politicians that we may or may not know—but he also uses images. And those images do stand for emotional states, but they also represent a way of attention that he has in how he’s interacting with his everyday life.
I’ll say first that I totally agree that images are more eloquent than people—*laughs*— and speak with much cleaner mouths. I think one actually great example of what you’re talking about is that famous Catullus poem, and this is talking about images being able to crystallize things that statements might not be able to capture, but there’s that poem “Odi et amo…”—“I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.” When Frank Bidart re-figured it, he didn’t go emotional statement by emotional statement, ‘I’ statement by ‘I’ statement, but instead put it down as “I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.”
And I think that’s one thing that images are able to do. Like what you said, it’s how the world gets into the poem. It’s an opening in the page. It’s, forgive me, how the light gets in. It just allows you to do so much… it allows you to speak beyond words. Or at least speak in a voice that’s louder than the one you can conjure up yourself if you’re not relying on those pieces of the world that images are. I think you’re dead-on there.
While I think we have a good interview here, I’d like to ask one last question…
Sure!
So, I want to talk about the title really quickly. I know the phrase “deeper the tropics” is in one of the poems near the end of the book, but in that poem it doesn’t really stand out as, like, a denouement or a real grand moment or anything. I wanted to ask, then, what made you title the book with that phrase. What echoes did it call up for you that made you make it the title?
The book is very interested in poetry as a sort of self-creation and a sort of self-mythologizing. That poem that the title comes from was a poem that I wrote early in my time at NYU as a grad student, and I think it blended different things together—it’s a New York poem, it’s a museum poem, it’s sort of a Tao poem, so it grabs those strands that happen in this book. A lot of this book is happening in New York. And obviously, in the book there’s a series of Tao poems that are these false translations.
The idea of the tropics became more urgent to me as I got older, I guess. Just learning more about the history of the world that we’re living in, and the paths of migration and the paths of commerce that lead to the building of the world we inhabit currently. A lot of it seemed connected, to me, to the tropics. As I was looking for what to call this book, I think that was an acknowledgement of the different forces of history that have played a role in the world that we live in now. I also think that “the tropics” is such a loaded term in terms of it being a mythologized space… it is a space that is both very real, and then there is the popular imagining of what that means. The tropics as a paradise, the tropics as a sort of unspoiled, untamed wilderness, the tropics as a site of extreme labor exploitation, a site of economic devastation, the site of a political order that tends to think in terms of core and periphery… all of these ideas, I hope, are wrapped up in that title.
Sure! I think that’s a great answer, and I think you succeeded, for what that’s worth. *Both laugh*. Before we close, since I know this is on your mind, why don’t we take a second to talk about what the role of the poet is. What do you think your position is in this moment?
For me, the role of the poet is being bound to the particular. It involves an intake of sadder details and emotional states, histories, what I’m reading at the moment, what I’m listening to, what I’m viewing, you know, the art that I’m engaging with. There’s an intake, and then there’s an output that is filtered through the particular poet. And for me, I very often operate in a way where I think of poems as places where I can build worlds and I can create my own mythologies. I can engage with a cosmology of my creation. And I do think that is a political act. It’s a way of entering into the public record who I am in this moment, at this time, in this place.
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
