SHANNAN

I want to open with an observation and hear your thoughts on anything you would like to expand. Your poetry is rooted in your reality as a father and a husband. At the same time, dreams abound alongside memory. There is a lot of looking back in your writing that appears to evoke a mix of repentance and self-love, healing, kindness, even a kind of transcendence beyond the liminal and the tangible. In “How to Love the Unfinished Dream”, for example, you write:

It is the purest heaven — 

& the only kind 

I believe in: brief 

& ending the very moment…

And then in “Cocoon”, you write: 

I stopped

pretending the world was to blame.

There is a lot of awareness in these words — they feel awake — and yet they are also wrapped in a dream-like flow — I want to say “logic”, but the word feels harsh against the gentle language you employ — the surrounding imagery, the shifts of perspective from deeply personal and individual to almost omniscient… 

MATTHEW

These poems come from my forthcoming book, If Nothing, which circles around addiction, sobriety, fatherhood, marriage, and masculinity. It is a book about shame, and longing, and transformation. Some of the poems live within the blurred world of active addiction, and others traverse the dreamscape of becoming sober. In truth, I didn’t write much for a couple of years during my lowest points before beginning the work of facing myself and becoming really honest about how I was moving through the world, wounding others, and wounding myself. My world became very small then. It took a long time to do the basic work of healing before I left the cocoon and could begin looking back. For a time, then, looking back was a necessary part of being accountable. Now, I look back as a way to know myself more clearly in the present. 

KARAN

I love the title If Nothing — it is so wonderfully ambiguous and complex — especially in relation to your themes of addiction and sobriety, marriage and masculinity. I immediately feel its incompleteness — and make phrases like “If nothing changes” or “If nothing is done”, or the larger, “What if I (and all I know) are reduced to nothing?” A book about self-discovery and introspection fits so well with a title that makes so much room for introspection. I love that. 

MATTHEW

I’m so glad to hear the way this title works in you. I feel all of those possibilities and more, too. As a title, I think If Nothing calls to sayings like “no ifs, and, or buts” — taking no excuses for transgressions. It is defeatist, denying all hope. And it honors sobriety, asking, “if nothing else enters my body or clouds my vision, who am I?” Though the title feels dark initially, hanging on a hypothetical emptiness, over the course of the book, it is rendered complex, loving, mercurial. And yes, it is ambiguous and incomplete in a way that I can’t fully explain, which is, I think, a lot of what drew me to the phrase when I felt it rise up through the poems. 

          It really matters to me to be engaged in the honest accounting of addiction. I don’t think we (at least in Western cultures) are very good at that. There is stigma and taboo on one hand, and a simultaneous encouragement/acceptance of patterns of addiction, whether it is in alcohol, food, sex, the internet, etc. Of course, there are very real systemic factors at play too, and though addiction may impact people across all socioeconomic groups, the access to resources that support long-term change and health is incredibly unequal. 

KARAN

How necessary was it for you to heal first (at least to some degree) before you could begin to write about the experience — the shame, in particular — because I am wondering how one writes shame while being in the pit of shame? Is it even possible? I imagine if it was something like this: you experienced some transformation (in your personal life) and then wrote about the experience and were in turn transformed by the writing? Or are the boundaries all blurred?

MATTHEW

Before I finally began the work of getting sober at the age of 34, I hit bottom and then dragged along there for some time. I was trying to run a small business built on dreams and the skill of my hands, and though on the outside it looked as if all was going well, I was not making much money and was really overwhelmed at trying to perform ten different job titles all on my own. Though I had been getting drunk each night for pretty much my entire adult life, I began to drink during the day. I would hide out in my shop with the lights off, hoping no one would come to the door. I was very unhealthy, and my marriage was in shambles. I was struggling with deep depression and anxiety, and I thought of ending my life every day. 

          I was not writing at all, though I was still drafting songs regularly (something I have done since I was 14). My initial move toward sobriety began with a commitment to stop drinking for six weeks. Once I was about a month in, I knew I could never go back if I wanted to live, and so I committed to never drinking again. I was tender and fragile and somehow willing to be open with people all around me who noticed big changes right away. For one, I lost nearly sixty pounds in a short amount of time, and many people who had met me in the late stages of my drinking life no longer recognized me. This isn’t an exaggeration. People I had known for years introduced themselves to me as though I were a stranger. 

           Two things really helped me to quit drinking. One was reasonably healthy, and the other was not. Instead of beer, I drank around a dozen cans of sparkling water each day. I also increased the amount of marijuana I had already been consuming so that I was stoned from dawn to dusk. Weed had been legalized in Washington, and it was not only easy to buy, but the quality and concentration of THC was staggering. I had an incredibly high tolerance, and I leaned hard into that substance to face the world. It was, of course, not a long-term solution. After a year of this, I was so fatigued and still deeply depressed and struggling with anxiety that I finally knew I had to quit for good. 

           Once I did, everything changed. 

         I had wild, intense dreams for around six weeks and began to write nearly every day. I felt like I was really starting all over again, and that it didn’t matter I already had a book and fellowships to my name. I began submitting work again, and it was slow going. A lot of rejection. I began to develop a new relationship with the work itself, learning to really appreciate my experience of writing and my lasting curiosity about my drafts, regardless of what happened to them beyond my desk. 

        My wife and I somehow forged a new relationship out of a nearly broken marriage. We were stubborn and worked very hard, and with the support of marriage counseling and relationship coaching we, quite remarkably, made it through. I began a journey toward healthy masculinity in community with other men and became even healthier. 

         All the while, I was still filled with shame and guilt. I really retreated from the world, and I lost most of my social connections and former writing community. But I kept writing, and this was a part of my healing work. 

SHANNAN

Poets have worked in a plethora of traditions forever and your work, for me, evokes a blend of the lyrical and the confessional as well as the aphoristic — the staccato lines, the measured couplets — music emerges from your poems just laid across the page. Is there a way in which you approach how to balance what goes inside a poem? Do you consciously try to keep the poems composed despite the very personal nature of your subject matter? Is there a reason for this?

MATTHEW

I was a musician before I was a poet, and I think I have always been drawn to the physical texture of language—the musicality and the muscularity, essential elements of the meaning-making process. My ear is often leading the way as I write and revise, no matter the topic, and this is likely why the poems feel “composed,” even when the subjects are messy. While I can think about form and formal constraints in a logical way, I often feel my way through the poems more intuitively. This includes lineation. As I revise, I’m asking the poem on the page to be congruent with the tone and cadence of the poem's energy and spirit. Is a couplet more like a psalm or prayer? A quatrain more narrative? Rather than trying to control the poem, I do my best to listen to the sound that is made through my particular instrument. Some of these songs I nod my head to in clear understanding. Others, I cock my head to the side, curious about a mystery I can’t or maybe don’t want to solve.

KARAN

I love that you think about the idea of a poem as prayer. As a believer of music, I think all music is a form of prayer, and the best poems embody the same affect — a reaching out (above?), a kind of surrender. I am delighted to know that you were a musician before a poet. I think I am a poet only because I can’t sing! I totally see what you mean by the ear leading the poem — the rhythm and the music (Virginia Woolf, in her letters to Vita, I think, says: “I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.”) My poems also feel “composed” to me. I wonder if we run a risk here, especially while writing about intense subjects like alcoholism. The word “composed” and “composure” share the same root — to construct a piece or one’s self — then how to represent the “overwrought”, the “wrecked”, or even “the wretched” — especially from the perspective of the transformed? Have you considered the narrative instance of your book? Are the poems looking at the past through the lens of the transformed? Or are there poems that are also within the moment of the illness?

MATTHEW

I love that Virginia Woolf quote! I wrote many poems that evoke and engage the messy, destructive, and blurred experience of active addiction, and a handful of these are included in the book. Though they are messier in many ways, the poems don’t really spill over the page, at least visually. They do, however, traverse the lived experiences from within addition, through recovery, and into a realm of transformation. As it isn’t a linear path in life, the poems often return to regret and grief, even amidst poems of gratitude, hope, and health. Though the book may be finished, the work is not, and I believe the book honors the sense of life as a perpetual work-in-progress. 

SHANNAN

I am haunted by “For What It’s Worth”. It made me tear up. I have a daughter as well and I kept going, at each line, “yes, I understand, yes, me too, yes, exactly”. I read it three or four times and each time was drawn to different aspects. The one thing that kept coming back, appropriately enough, is the repetition. The first line feels strange to read at first, “I’d repeat my sons…” but by the time I go to the second “I’d repeat / the night I met my wife” I’m totally there with you. This theme of repetition, of doubles, mirrors, reflection — it is pervasive in your work. I’m thinking of how children often repeat things over and over again because that’s how their brains can learn and grasp the essential object or subject behind the thing they’re repeating. I’m also thinking of how repetition can be a sign of deep grief or anger — accusatory, inflamed. At the same time, repetition can also be loving, looking back through photos and videos, hearing the same music you heard as a teenager. Poetry, in and of itself, is an act of repetition — we repeat the world we see onto the page, omitting some, embellishing some, but repeating nonetheless. And repetition also makes me think of reincarnation, a new life, a new beginning, healing…I’d love your thoughts on any of this.

MATTHEW

In these poems, at least, I think the repetition is both an indication of grief and often a representation of repentance. It has been very painful to go back again and again to the years when I was really lost, when I gave more of my energy to maintaining my addictions than I did to my family, when I didn’t take responsibility for the impact, no matter how hard I was trying, at the time, to be good. To grow my ability to be with that pain has been an important part of rising up into myself as a person mostly healed. I could not just offer a single apology and be done. And so, the poems have been a place to be in the practice of looking closely at difficult truths, at shame and uncertainty, and failure and grief. Perhaps living with such honesty has been the best way of moving forward and giving myself the chance to be new. 

KARAN

I am invested in repetition as a device and appreciate your experimentation with the form of the ghazal. Something about repetition really mirrors our lives. Our lives are full of repetition (sometimes monotonous, sometimes with slight changes) — especially grief, addiction, shame — how one feels their oppression constantly — and how one repents repeatedly — in prayer (chants), in songs (choruses), in apology (the phrase “forgive me” in poems is so full of affect). I am thinking how after all the repetition in the ghazal one is made afresh in the last couplet, and the formal constraint of using your name — referring to the self, in the third person — is kind of a reckoning with that new self. As a practitioner of the ghazal (and though we haven’t published any here, “The Return” was once a ghazal), what does the form allow you to do that a free-verse poem would not? What affect does the ghazal have on you when you’re reading one? (Feel free to mention a favorite ghazal! Agha Shahid Ali’s “After You” is mine.)

MATTHEW

Though I think many modern ghazals, from what I can tell, use the form differently than the historical origins, I am drawn to the idea that the repetition here acts as both a locus of mediation and a potential hinge through which transformation might occur. In one of the ghazals early in the forthcoming book, the repeated word is “toke” — the very act of getting high. The repetition mirrors the obsession and reliance on using to make it through the day. I also appreciate the chance to consider various elements of identity within the ghazal; rather than always using my given name in the final couplet, I often think of nicknames, archetypes, or other roles that might serve the self-utterance in a new way.

          I love many of the ghazals I read. A few that come to mind are Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Ghazal, After Ferguson,” Tarfia Faizullah’s “Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Red Ghazal” and Claudia Castro Luna’s “Vindication”. In these, and in other ghazals, the repetition can be a drum beat or pulse that propels or slows my reading. It can also be a call to remain present with what is difficult or an invitation to play with the sound of language itself (particularly true in poems like “Red Ghazal”). 

KARAN

Do you see your book in conversation with Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf? What are some external influences that have played a role in helping you shape your book — you are welcome to respond outside of the world of books/language — any artforms, your children, even AA meetings — just things that have aided your research outside of your personal experiences?

MATTHEW

I don’t know that this book is directly in conversation with Akbar’s amazing collection, though in some ways, I would say that they share a kinship in calling out from a damaged place toward a different future. In a larger sense, I see writing as a long conversation with writers, living and dead and still to come. I read a lot of poetry, both in literary magazines and in full collections, and so my influences are diverse and somewhat amorphous. In many ways, I wish I could write like Larry Levis, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Kaveh Akbar, Jamaal May, Li-Young Lee, Ellen Bryant Voigt, or Yosef Komunyakaa (among many others), but I am a different instrument. I am inspired by the wildness and excellence of so many writers, and this engagement with the world of art has been necessary fuel for anything I have made.

          Beyond the influences of other poets, my sons are often my greatest teachers. Living deeply in my role as a father and as a husband has played a significant role in shaping this book over the last several years.