Dana Levin Interviews Matt Donovan

Poet Matt Donovan has written a new book of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape (Trinity University Press). Dana Levin, writing for Boston Review, calls the book "very timely."

Its central locales are Pompeii, the Pantheon, and anywhere scarred by the birth of the atom bomb. For Donovan, the past too is a place: time and memory offer historical and personal topographies to survey. The book commits great acts of ekphrasis: Pompeiian frescoes, the paintings of Raphael, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, and all manner of kitschy Americana are but some of the objects that help Donovan think.

Levin talks with Donovan about the book, the relationship between art and empathy, the sacred and the profane, appropriating Christian tropes, and forthcoming projects. An excerpt:

DL: I love the way the book seamlessly mixes the sacred and the profane, the classical and the kitschy. You seem to have an impulse to bring the lofty down to earth, as in the essay “Dew Point,” where you keep calling Masaccio “Sloppy Tom” (telling us this is what “Masaccio” means), or your essay on the Pantheon where you describe Rome as a city in “infinite shades of Tang.” What drives this impulse?

MD: I have a couple of thoughts on that. First, it seems as if daily life in the Internet age makes us constantly careen between the sacred and profane, the ridiculous and sublime. Here is a photograph of a refugee boy drowned on a beach, and, with a click, here is an animated GIF of a pug on a sled. Looking through the postcards at the Pompeii souvenir shops, I saw images of plaster casts of whole families who must have asphyxiated in the volcanic ash and then, with a turn of the rack, flipped through erotic statues and frescoes excavated from the homes. Meanwhile, I talk to my writing students quite a bit about the importance of incorporating their own idiosyncratic lenses on the world into their writing. Writers can potentially find a lovely distillation of accuracy and originality by not shying away from an association that only one’s wacky own self might make. There is a fabulous essay by David Gessner, “Sick of Nature,” in which he beautifully eschews the conventions of nature writing by describing a heron’s “funky seventies TV pimp strut.” Besides, who wants to truck with untouchable grandeur?

Read it all at Boston Review.