Julie Marie Wade in Conversation With Matthew Olzmann

At The Rumpus, Wade asks Olzmann about his "work, his worldview, and how poetry can help us stay 'alive and full of wonder,' especially during difficult times." Picking up from the beginning of their conversation: 

The Rumpus: Matthew, given our whimsical and ongoing conversation about prospective bands and band names, I’d like to begin with the following supposition:

Let’s say you’re the founder and lead singer/songwriter of Matthew Olzmann’s 100% Natural Good-Time Poetry Band Solution—appropriate nod to Arrested Development here—and you get to choose who plays the inaugural gig with you from among your contemporary poetry-writing peers. Who do you invite to share that first stage and why? What kind of music are you engaged in making as a contemporary poet and with whom are you especially excited to harmonize?

Matthew Olzmann: All of them. It’s an astounding time to be a writer or reader of poems. There are just so many gifted poets today with unique visions for this art. With the possible exception of maybe four or five sociopaths, all the poets could be in this make-believe band. I tried to answer differently, and began in a couple different ways, but each time the list kept growing. I’m not just thinking of poets that my work might seem to be in overt conversation with, or poets whose writing seems to be guided by a similar impulse. If we’re keeping with the music metaphor, there’s room for a lot of instruments in the concert hall. The rising hum of an orchestra tuning right before the concert begins, that moment where you first hear the oboe and then you hear everyone, each individual reaching toward a singular note—that might be the world’s best sound.

Rumpus: I’m thinking of this poem—by Matthew Olzmann, as it happens!—called “Build, Now, A Monument.” The poem begins: “No longer satisfied by the way time slips / through his life’s work, the maker of hourglasses / yearns for a change. // He elects to construct a staircase instead.” The poem goes on to chronicle the construction of a staircase: “A bride between / Earth and what Earth cannot touch.” On my copy of the poem, I wrote, “Is this an ars poetica for Matthew? Is this how Matthew thinks about the way he makes a poem?” And now I’m lucky enough to be interviewing you about your poems and our lineage as makers, which of course is at the heart of the meaning of poetry, too.

I’d love to know if “Build, Now, a Monument” is an ars poetica for you, conscious or otherwise—and/or other poems you’ve written that might be—and most of all, I’d like to know about the drive you have to make poems in general: where you think it comes from, when you first discovered it, and how it feels when you approach the threshold (or staircase, perhaps) of a new poem-to-be.

Olzmann: You’ve given me a new way to see that poem! I did not intend it as an ars poetica, at least not consciously, though I can see how it would read as one. When I wrote the poem, I was more thinking about grief, how we grieve and what that would look like if the feeling were made tangible, what kind of enormous thing might be made from that enormous emotion.

In this light, that poem does, I suppose, resemble an ars poetica, because that’s usually what I think poems are trying to do. As a reader, I’m drawn to poems that objectify some feeling or idea. I don’t mean “objectify” in the pejorative sense; I mean it quite literally, as in literally making an object from that feeling or idea. For me, art (in general) and poems (in specific) step in at the points where discursive language or discursive thought reaches its inevitable limitations or outright fails us. You have something nebulous and immaterial, an emotion, an idea, a paradox in the middle of your life, that the poem takes that tenuous, indescribable thing and gives it a form and a shape. As a writer, I’m usually trying to do that through metaphor. The poem itself works as a type of metaphor. For me, an elegy doesn’t just say “I’m sad,” it gives me a way to hold grief and understand it in a new way.

As for what it feels like when I’m approaching the threshold of “a new poem-to-be,” it’s a little harder to say. There are a couple ways this usually unfolds. I write a lot of new poems, and most of them I simply abandon. Often, I’m writing, not because this next poem has any grand ambitions, but because I like making things and this is the one thing that I think I can make. So, I write a lot of things just for the enjoyment of that process itself. With many of these poems, the feeling is something like a type of inquisitiveness, a low-grade wonder, not quite excitement, but a curiosity to see what might happen. Part of my revision process is figuring out what I’m excited about and what to discard. When I’m truly excited about one, when I’ve got a poem that I really want to work on, there’s more of a sense of discovery and possibility. That feeling usually comes from recognizing an inherent metaphor inside the thing I’ve written, a subtext rising to the surface, a sense of the potential for the object to embody the abstraction.

Read on at The Rumpus.