Matthew Rohrer
Interviewed by Andrew Kenower

Matthew Rohrer is the author of four books of poems: A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the 1994 National Poetry Series and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book of the Year" for 1995; Satellite; A Green Light (which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Prize); and Nice Hat. Thanks, which was written collaboratively with Joshua Beckman. An audio CD, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, collects some of their live, improvised collaborative poems from their extensive tour to support the book. Matthew Rohrer's poems have appeared in many journals here and overseas, and have been widely anthologized.

AK: Plain speech. Thoughts?

MR: Well, plain speech can be a virtue, especially in a realm, let's call it the realm of poetry, where many people think profundity means writing obscurely. Perhaps you could trace this to the French influence (I feel like Coleridge now, trashing the French influence). Philosophical diction is pretty much unnecessary in poetry. That's what I think. But on the other hand, plain speech isn't great just because it's plain speech—it has to be used well, and for a real reason.

AK: Is it that philosophical diction does not deserve poetry? That poetry is a non-cold space?

"and if no one believes you/then what is the point/of telling them wonderful things?". As a majority, do Americans lack wonderful things or the ability (time?) to believe in them?

MR: Oh, yeah, I think that's it: philosophical diction doesn't deserve to get to moonlight as poetry...it shouldn't get to, because it's such miserable writing, for the most part. Of course I know people will disagree with this because of Nietzsche and even some of Wittgenstein...but for the most part you're right, it's a cold space. And it doesn't want to be poetry anyways, and doesn't respect poetry for what it can do. It doesn't respect associative logic.

It's not about Americans—it's about people. They don't want to recognize the "wonderful things". Those things are everywhere around us—things and occurrences. They won't stop and look at them, and experience them. Or they are dismissive of them for various religious or moral reasons.

AK: What is the special power of associative logic? Why is this logic privileged moreso in poetry?

I will try to avoid further questions about Americans.

MR: Well, I think associative logic's special power lies its underlying, undeniable rightness. I mean, it seems loose and wild and such, and there are many types of minds out there who can't or won't see that it is in fact a kind of logic. But it works, there's no denying that—the fact that people can "get it" proves that. And there are all sorts of alternative traditions that use associative logic just as readily as we do our regular logic. I'm thinking of shamans here, because they're so cute, and also magical traditions—Sympathetic Magic (things like hair of the dog, voodoo dolls, using someone's clothing to ensorcel them, etc.) is basically associative logic brought into the physical realm. But this is all just to say that associative logic is real and it works and poetry has traditionally trafficked in these kinds of a-temporal, a-causational (I've been listening to Synchronicity a lot recently, for some reason, sorry) experiences. Ghosts. Mystery. Love.

AK: I find that people are more repelled by associative logic in literature than in other mediums. Is this true?

MR: Well, yes, I think you're right, because our medium—writing—has a much more readily-available, much more common set of cards to play with: straight logic. So people read writing and they expect it to be made up of the types of arguments they are familiar with—it's as if they think the atoms of writing are made of little electrons and protons of straight logic. So when they read writing that ISN'T, well, god help them. This is why, at least as I understand it, the prose poem was such a shock and was so revolutionary: small digestible and recognizable forms of text that were packed with extremely unexpected and unusual writing. At the time this was actually even a political act, to do this. Or at least they tell us that.

But think about painting or sculpture or the other plastic arts—there's no inherent kind of logic associated with the medium automatically in the way that straight logic is associated with writing. So people forgive what's his name for painting those things—you know, Chagall with people flying around and green horses.

AK: Will that forgiveness eventually be granted to poetry? Is it just a matter of time?

A friend said that poetry asks us to slow down (in contrast to the general thrust of our other lives).

MR: Sure, it's probably already happening to some degree...every so often there's a poem in the New Yorker that isn't 100% boring. And sometimes even seems a little, I don't know, weird. So I figure that means lawyers and pedants and nonfiction enthusiasts who read the New Yorker must put up with it, to some degree.

But I agree with your friend, poetry to me seems to be all about slowing down. And most people, even most readers, don't want that. It's fine. I don't care at all. I don't want to watch TV so it's all fair. Poetry is for those who have some time to spend. My teacher at Michigan used to always say "poetry demands unemployment", and I have come to agree with him, in many ways I think this is the case, not just as it relates to jobs, but as it relates to a way of being and reading. Even something that reads fast like O'Hara's poem "Lana Turner Has Collapsed!" works on you because you go back to it again and again to see HOW it works like that. So it still slows you down.

AK: A poem that sets out to do something canšt be confused about anything. Does this a bad poem make?

I'm trying to get to the states of confusion I find many of your speakers in. The delays and mishaps in recognition, "a hawk or something" etc. Is it an attempt to debunk something and replace it with exciting language?

MR: I want to say yes, that a poem that sets out to do something is almost always doomed to fail. I believe that almost completely, but of course as I'm saying this I can think of exceptions. I think poems that set out to do things that are structural, formal, or that have to do with having a certain affect on the reader don't actually fall into this category. But I think poems that set out to do something moral or to say something in particular are going to be hobbled.

In my own writing, the best stuff happens unexpectedly—unexpected juxtapositions of words or sounds or even letters will lead me in a new direction. Also I'm a huge devotee of Chance. I think Chance is very underrated and misunderstood as a guiding force. I revise a lot, and I work really hard on my poems, but I always respect what Chance has given me, and I try to always be true to those moments in a poem and not edit them out unless I really have to. Anyway, that's how it works in my own writing, and frankly that's what I'm looking for in others' work too: a poem that takes a sudden turn, that does something exciting and unexpected, something you wouldn't have guessed when you started reading it.

As for the confusion you mention in many of the speakers in my poems, it just seems fairly accurate—accurate about myself, and about the whole process of writing. I do like to play with the colloquial as well, to some degree. I was talking with someone the other day and remembered a very important event that has influenced my writing in a lot of ways, and I think in this way you're speaking of: I interviewed Ron Padgett when I first moved to NYC, and in listening to the tape to transcribe it, I was shocked that neither of us spoke a single complete, formal sentence. We sounded, frankly, like rubes. Rubes discussing poetry. Which perhaps we are. But I became very fascinated then by the lax diction, the incomplete sentences, the phrases that we all use to describe things, and I love trying to replicate it. And yes, sure, I like to think that I'm debunking the absolute certainty that's implicit in so many kinds of poems. Absolute certainty is a pretty dangerous feeling. People with absolute certainty should not operate heavy machinery.

AK: So how exactly does Chance manifest in your work? Does your sense of chance correlate with early conceptions of chance in other art (those folks from the 20s who played with wind, dust and dropping things)? How does one come to language by accident, or how does the poet preserve the accident?

I agree with your assertion about absolute certainty. Do you hope to spread this fear of certainty? Or do your poems? Are we past intentionality?

MR: Well, I guess my way of using Chance changes, and probably alternates between actual Chance and something closer to expediency. But right now I'm engaged in a thoroughly all-encompassing project with [Joshua] Beckman and [Anthony] McCann: we're doing erasures of the Romantics. I like the Chance implicit in that project because even though it is limited in the sense that I can only use the words they use, there is still the fact that I could find dozens or hundreds of different poems within the same text. That might be actually closer to my conception of Chance—trusting an intuitive decision. From what I understand of the unconscious or subconscious mind (you know, I've read lots of science books) that is indistinguishable from Chance to us. Other times I've let other voices, literally overhearing other people talking, creep into my writing. There's kind of a blurry-eyed brain dead trance that I go into when I write—that doesn't make it sound very elevated, but that's how it feels—and that trance feels very open to whatever strikes it, either from within or without. Whatever is more insistent. I like to trust that stuff right away and go with it, because I know that later on, weeks or months later, there will be a very Germanic process of interrogation, revision and expulsion. I guess I want the energy of that Chance and freedom to be there, but in the end, I want the poem to sound good and be tight. Like a 3 minute pop song.

About your other question: I won't be able to spread the fear of certainty; nobody will be able to do that. That's what people love best. Because we are all afraid and uncertain. But most people, to feel better about that, grasp onto absolute certainty. It makes them feel better. Mystery and curiosity makes me feel better. That's fine. I also don't think we can ever be "past intentionality" either, because it's in the human character to assign intentionality to works of art. Even if the artist expressly tried NOT to put it in, readers will sift for it and find it, or create it out of circumstantial evidence. Just think back on your high school English courses—that's basically what they're all about.

And also, I think fundamentally, I don't even want to get involved in the attempt. I don't know about other writers, but I wanted to be a writer because of other things I'd read that connected me to something bigger, something, I don't know, Human in a larger sense. Even if that was just one other person's experience. Beckman and McCann and I have been discussing this a lot recently, as it relates to our readings of the Romantics. Beckman reminded me of this passage from Shelley's Defense of Poetry which I'll transcribe for you here—I think it says a lot more clearly and sensibly something that poets have been trying to work out ever since about politics and poetry and Human community:

"The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another
and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his
own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination...."

If I wanted just to work fancy surfaces and get cool effects, I'd be a graphic designer or sculptor. But, you know, I want to be a writer.

AK: What are the catalysts and blocks to your trance state? Does location factor greatly in either direction? That is, your poems seem to thrive both in nature and on Bleecker.

MR: Well, exhaustion is a catalyst, luckily, since I have a 3 year old boy and I'm the stay at home dad. But mostly just concentration and location—so yes, location is very important. I have to be lying down. I don't really know why, but that's how it is now...I write either in bed or lying on the couch, and I have the Space Pen, which writes upside down. I think of Breton saying "poetry should be made in bed, like love" though from stories I've heard or read, it sounds to me like he wrote at a desk. But I think you might have been asking about location in a different sense—location as setting for the poem maybe? That isn't so important, except that I am usually not able to write while traveling. I can take notes, or write in a journal, or scribble down half-baked theories about Taoism and negative capability, but not write poems. I have to be more settled I think. I have to have the 'strong emotion recollected in tranquility' I think, despite Wordsworth's being a dreary a-hole. I think in a reductionist sense you could say that I am interested in Nature: which would explain my poems in the woods, but also poems about the city, because I don't like to distinguish between nature in the, you know, natural setting versus nature in general, which takes place everywhere, in the sky, the wind, the city, the cracks in the sidewalks. The other day it occurred to me that in fact I might even be a nature poet.

AK: Further, how has the NY changed you? First, your experience of the city before living there, then your existence inside. Had you felt drawn there for some time?

MR: New York was always scary to me and I never wanted to come here. When I was in high school I even wrote a short story called Fear of New York, which I think is the general feeling where I grew up in Oklahoma, fear and insecurity of the unknown and seemingly sophisticated. I remember reading (oddly!) a Frank O'Hara poem in high school that mentioned some intersection in Manhattan, and having an intensely visceral reaction to it: a negative one, and I complained that it was the pretentious equivalent of using a foreign word in a poem. Which is funny because now I think that's one of O'Hara's most endearing techniques—using incredibly specific references, and it's one I like to borrow from him—using names like Jack or Anthony in a poem without bothering to explain who it is.

But after visiting during spring break and drinking a lot of Zima (this was in 1993) my wife convinced me that I had no marketable skills anyways and might as well move to New York. I'm not sure I can even say how it has changed me except made me more aggressive. But perhaps poetically it has clarified my thinking about Nature: the idea that it is even bigger than it seems to the traditional nature poet who sees it only in traditional natural settings. It seems to me to be identical with existence. But I really really hate having to leave the house to do the laundry.

AK: In your interview with Matthew Zapruder you speak of a classmate who told you, "anthropomorphism is totally out, nobody does that anymore". In your (art) life, have you been drawn more to the opposite of your instructions? And who is the "The Man That Taught Me [You] To Write"?

MR: I always responded pretty well to teachers (literal and figurative) who possessed knowledge that I did not, and lectured to me, while I sat back passively and took it all in. To me, that isn't a corrupted form of learning at all, but a perfectly legitimate way to learn something one doesn't know. A wishy-washy group discussion isn't appropriate for some things. But yes, I do bristle when people tell me that things CAN'T BE DONE. That seems almost always to be an exaggeration. Or a lie. And it seems like that's our job as writers—to at least TRY the things we aren't supposed to do. What could be the harm if you try it and it doesn't work? I think people are so worried about their writing as a product-oriented endeavor that the notion of trying something or engaging in a process that might not turn out right is terrifying or just inexplicable—a waste of time. Which is the exact opposite of what I think. I'm almost solely interested in the process of writing. Maybe because I've been doing it for awhile now, and I'm not worried that, you know, I'm going to forget how or something. I'm pretty confident that the poems are going to keep coming. But focusing on making a poem is stultifying to me and I think to most people. Focusing on just writing, on the process of writing, and on finding new processes, is what excites me, because I know everything will fall into place as long as that continues.

The Man Who Taught Matt Rohrer How to Write comes from the title of a William Blake painting I saw at the Met show a few years ago—The Man Who Taught William Blake How to Paint. It was a sort of luminous angelic face, a vision I think he had of a man who appeared to him at night and taught him how to be an artist. The rest is a private image (!) (I heard Anthony McCann say that to an admirer at his KGB reading this week, and I wasn't aware that we got to use that line until then. So I'm using it now. On you.)

AK: I'm interested in the process of your erasures. You say they are with Beckman and McCann; collaborative? Howso? Do you work the text by turns?

What other erasures have you looked to?

The erasures we're doing aren't collaborative in the sense that we're working together on one thing. But the whole project feels entirely collaborative in the best sense—often we're doing erasures of the same texts and then calling each other up to read them. Even when we're doing different texts, there's a really palpable sense that we are all engaged in the process together and learning from each other, and inspiring one another. Anthony for instance read a biography of the philosopher William Godwin which led him to Mary Wollstonecraft's letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which he erased; and then Beckman and I read it and erased it; Joshua and I each did half of Keats' letters and both did all of Frankenstein; Anthony did Shelley's Julian and Maddallo, and it was so good that Joshua and I did it too; I did all five acts of Shelley's The Cenci, and came back to report that it was no good; etc. But underneath all of the erasing (which is fun and inspiring and productive to our own work) is the pleasure of reading and engaging with these Romantic texts together—studying them, but not in school.

Joshua is definitely the ringleader in the erasure project—he's the one who was most engaged with the process before. But we'd all read Radios and A Humument, which I guess are the big ones. The poet Jen Bervin has a beautiful erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets called Nets—Ugly Duckling Presse did an amazing job on it. And Wave Books just published a facsimile erasure of Mary Ruefle's. It seems like one can get interested in the visual aspect or the textual aspect, and right now we're definitely more interested in the textual (because, you know, we want poems).

AK: Was it discouraging to cut away through so much to find little on the other side? Or was the process and practice rewarding in itself (for the close engagement with the text?)

MR: No it wasn't discouraging at all, it was incredible. We only did it with texts we were familiar with, in some cases, like Frankenstein or Keats' letters or some of the Shelley poems, were actually very familiar with and felt strongly about. We've done it with other unrelated things, and those work too, but part of this project was to take our involvement with these texts and writers further by, well, ripping them off I suppose, taking the role of active reader a little more seriously than most would.