Ted Mathys

Ted Kooser was recently appointed the position of US Poet Laureate. How do you think this position influences American poetry? Do you keep up with the current Poet laureate's agendas and programs? If so, which 'program' do you feel has had the most benefit?

The position is a double-edged sword, both for the poets who hold the position and for poetry in general. If the purpose of the position is to bring poetry to a wider audience and raise its profile in American society, then the goal is admirable. Who wouldn’t want more people engaging with more and different kinds of poems? But in the mix of this is a buried assumption about poetry in general, that assumption being that “poetry” in American society can be represented by a singular, appointed voice. Of course the folks at the Library of Congress who read a lot of poetry know that there are many types of poetry being written, with many different aesthetic goals in mind, but it doesn’t stand to reason that the general public knows this to be true. The best selling books of poetry by Pulitzer Prize winners don’t make the splash on the general public that even, say, a mid-list novelist does. So the Poet Laureate is the one pipeline to “poetry” that many in the general public have. Music can illustrate the assumption about poetry nicely. Nobody expects Nina Simone to achieve the same thing in her music as Philip Glass or The Ramones. Yet I would hazard a guess that there are a lot of people out there that enjoy all three. But the idea of a Musician Laureate would strike many as absurd. We allow music to have jazz, punk, hip-hop, classical, pop, reggae, etc. and we allow visual art to have painting, sculpture, photography, installation, etc., all with somewhat different goals and standards of achievement. Poetry in America today is just as variegated, and the best thing a Poet Laureate could do would be make this apparent to the public, whatever their personal artistic concerns may be.

At what age did you become interested in poetry?

Like many teenagers, I ingratiated myself with the idea that I could interface with the universe through language during high school. I was never committed enough to the idea of a journal though, feeling a certain falseness or fabrication in that form of documentation. I wrote occasionally, though it was incredibly bad and I doubt it was poetry. I suppose I became ‘interested’ in poetry when I really started reading it, in college. Those readings cracked open some sort of dormant geode that had been hanging out in my body for a few years.

Who were some of your favorite poets when you began writing?

In some ways I feel like I am still beginning, or will always be beginning, so many of those I was initially drawn to are still important for me. But among those in the cannon, Hart Crane and Rimbaud probably had the most profound effect on me. Among recent or contemporary poets, C.D. Wright and Aime Cesaire.

Do you recall what you admired about their work?

I am from Ohio, Crane’s home state, so I initially took some solace in the fact that he made it legal to find beauty in Akron and Cleveland. The wreck that his life was drove him to dwell in language, and that tension, that constant war with one’s own self that manifests in language, has been crucial for me as a writer. He had probably the most eclectic diction of the twentieth century. I never bought it that he is impenetrable. I didn’t 'get’ a lot of what was going on in the poems, but didn’t need to or want to. It was the sensuality of the language itself that was redeeming for him, and I took to this immediately. As for Rimbaud, though he’s been co-opted by nearly everyone writing today that would have abhorred him if they knew him, I loved it that he was a bratty derelict who, by the age I was when I read him, had already given the big fuck you to poetry with a capital P and was running guns and smoking dope in Africa. There is a simultaneous beauty and pathos in his work. Reading C.D. Wright’s "Deepstep Come Shining" in the Hong Kong airport was a singularly memorable experience. Her odd admixture of Southern goth eroticism, grammatical and syntactical innovation, and investigation of the nature of perception and blindness in that book pulled a lot of things together for me. Cesaire’s work pulled me to a deeper, more visceral, primal place, as if my life, or all of our lives, are simply part of a never-ending ritual.

How did you come to write, "CHERRIES IN THE FACTORY OF BLACKNESS," was it a line, image or story that developed in your mind—was the poem spontaneous or had you been sitting on the idea of it for awhile? Is your method usually predictable? For instance, do you write at a certain time everyday? Or do you wait to be inspired? If you could, please elaborate on your method.

The poem is from a series called "Factories." I started them with the pastoral in mind, but wanted something of a fractured, degraded pastoral. They soon took on a different shape, but I suppose what was retained from the original, pastoral impulse were memories from the farm where I grew up (the girl who wore fishhooks as earrings, roasting marshmallows with a pitchfork, etc.). As I wrote the series, I found that what I was most interested in was a sort of sedimentary poetics. Each is a "factory" in which the lines are component layers of something built, in this case blackness or darkness. Other poems in the series revolve around liquid, choice, simultaneity, zero, and so on. If the individual lines are spokes, then these ideas are their axles. Or if the lines are layers of rock or annular rings, these would be their canyon walls and tree stumps. The semicolons are important, I think, in that I don't see these poems as shooting for the juxtaposition that end stops or more jarring turns of phrase would imply, nor do I see the lines wedded seamlessly to each other as colons would imply. They are layers or spokes about an idea, and I wanted friction between them. This poem deviates a bit from the form of the others, but in most there are clipped twangs, images, declarations, questions, and broken clauses and phrases. With the lack of rhetorical skeleton (who is saying what, to whom, and for what purpose?), I was trying to allow the different language elements in the poems attempt to build something together, and was trying to allow the poems to get manic and frustrated in their doing so.

Photo credit: Leah Wiste