Interview with Matthew Henriksen

Poet Matthew Henriksen took part in an interview with The Fayetteville Flyer to discuss, primarily, his work editing a feature on Frank Stanford in Fulcrum#7, which we reported on a few weeks back.

A bit on Stanford, and Henriksen's own poems, from the interview:

RB: Do you think Frank Stanford will always be a cult poet? Do you think his cult status is a result of his subject matter, and working class characters?
MH: He is a far better poet than his cult readers are capable of acknowledging. The working class element of his work maybe clashes with the old ideas about poetry, of Yeats and Eliot and their predecessors, but contemporary poetry is infused with the vernacular, just like fiction, cinema and music. The difference with Stanford’s work is the astute rendering of it, his immersion in dialect that one could not fabricate (he talked the talk) synthesized with his immense lexicon fed by classical, romance, and contemporary literature. Dickinson and Blake no longer have cult followings. I’m not saying Stanford is Dickinson or Blake, but great neglected poets, like Lorine Niedecker, Joseph Ceravolo and Jack Spicer, inevitably suffer such reductions before they are rediscovered and embraced, which cult followings often inhibit, unfortunately.

Explaining how Stanford influenced him, Henriksen mentions that the other poet "studied formal verse with James Whitehead, one of my primary mentors," and adds:

His poems reflect an ear both attuned to formal measures and determined to defy their unnatural restrictions. Because of him, along with Blake, Dickinson, and Stevens, I try to hone each line to its utmost intensity, to create a universe with the miniature auricular landscape of each line.

Love the end of that last sentence. The full interview can be found here.