Emotional Currents & Figurative Concerns: A Conversation with Matthew Olzmann
Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
On Wednesday, November 13, 2019, Matthew Olzmann visited Interlochen Arts Academy and say down with The Interlochen Review editors Bianca Layog, Sara Carmichael, and Lane Devers for a conversation about the role of humor in poetry, the art of epistolary collaboration, and the development of voice over multiple collections.
Bianca Layog: How does your earlier work inform Contradictions in the Design?
Matthew Olzmann: I’m not sure if I thought of it as a progression—here’s my first book, here’s my second book—while I was writing. I tend to write poems more than I write books. There’s some writers that I really love who can write books— they’re going to write all these poems on one subject and that’s going to be a book. And for me it’s usually been, I’m writing one poem at a time and I’m not always thinking about how it’s related to other poems, how it communicates or how it’s repeating or how it intensifies other poems.
Both my first book and my second book emerged as loose collections of poems. I started putting them together when I reached a point where I had more poems than I needed. And then I started thinking about how these things are related, how they are connected to one another. It was sort of a strange process of putting those books together, where you're looking at those poems and thinking some of them don’t necessarily fit together. Some of them are too similar. But you start to think of different ways of organizing because the books aren’t necessarily telling a single story. I had some of these poems already written and I withheld them from my first book because I thought it might be a series that went together, like some of the fiction gallery poems. I’d written several of those for, around the time Mezzanines came out. There were enough of them that I thought, these things kind of go together, so I set those aside to kind of see what would happen with those, how those might develop.
Stylistically, I think there are some things that I was doing more intuitively in earlier work that I was doing more consciously in this book. Some of the things I’m drawn to in poems—the way a poem might not just use figurative language but the whole poem might function figuratively itself. Or how a poem might move between two different narratives, two different sets of images. That was something that I was starting to do in early poems but was more conscious of in this book.
BL: I was really interested in your title poem and how it was interacting with the rest of the collection. How did you decide on its placement?
MO: It wasn’t originally the title poem. It was a large process of trial and error. When thinking about how a book is organized when there isn’t a single thematic thread or narrative, or there’s not a chronology to organize it, I was thinking about other ways of organizing, like tonally, how do the poems move emotionally from one to another. You might not want to have a poem that’s really irreverent after a really sad elegy or beforehand—you’re sort of thinking of tonal contrasts and tonal similarities. I had several other titles before it came to this title. It’s funny, because I really like titling poems and I find it easy to title poems. I usually have multiple titles that I could use that I like in some way, but titling books has always been really hard for me. My first book, when it was accepted for publication, my editor said, “We really love the book. We want to do the book. Will you change the title?” And I wasn’t necessarily attached to it, I’d gone through several, but I like the one we settled on in the end.
Contradictions in the Design was the same way. One of the things that makes it hard to have a title poem for me is that when you have this loose collection with all these different thematic threads or emotional currents or figurative concerns, a title might be perfectly fine for a poem but then when you put it in the book, suddenly that poem has to carry more weight. It can't just be a poem that's a regular poem; it has to be interacting with the rest of the book. That's one of the reasons why I found it challenging. That poem in particular seemed like it worked in a way because there's a lot of poems in the book that have to do with contradiction or paradox or things that seem slightly off or not working right, whether implied or intended or designed.
Lane Devers: Going along with tone, we talked a little bit in workshop about the humorous aspect of the book, places where you seem interested in undercutting your own authority with humor. I was just curious if you could speak a little to that decision, or more broadly about humor’s place in poetry.
MO: It's hard to pin down what makes something funny. You might laugh today at something that you wouldn’t have laughed at five years ago. It's hard to explain how humor works, but I’m drawn to different types of incongruities. That’s one of the ideas behind humor, that humor is a type of incongruity often when our expectations for something are overthrown. Humor, I think, is an offset of two different interests. I'm interested in the points of emotional contrast. I’m the type of person that knows things by their opposites like hot and cold, day and night. I think you find if you have more than one emotion, the effect doesn't have to be laughter, it can be anger to peace, joy to sorrow.
I’ve noticed that in the poems that I am drawn to there is always a hint of secondary emotion. That emotion can set off the other emotion. In Anne Carson’s love poems, she has the lover, the beloved and that which could come between them—that concept, amplified. I think poems when they have more than one emotion can be really interesting. Humor is interesting because it stands out as a point of contrast. You notice if you're laughing and it shifts to something else, that contrast can be really apparent. The other thing I'm drawn to is just a general sense of absurdity, of strangeness. I think the absurd can be used to overthrow or stifle a reader’s ability to anticipate what happens next. As a writer, it gives you a different type of freedom to go in different directions.
Sara Carmichael: In regards to your conversational tone, how do you grapple with topics that are harder to ground while still maintaining it?
MO: Sometimes I don't, but I think there are some poems where the gravity of the situation just demands that I'm not telling a joke. I also have really been drawn to satire, where I don't think of humor as necessarily a solely light-hearted thing. As a reader, I come out of a place where I think of humor as a type of criticism, not just a type of light-hearted entertainment or something that's frivolous. I see humor as something that can actually be really serious. Humor almost always has a target, and it’s pointing out a discrepancy between the way things should be and the way they are. I think humor can sometimes transition really well into talking about more serious topics. That’s probably why you have so many satirical news shows. The news can seem absurd and humor can be a way to sort of poke fun at that or to highlight the absurdity of very real actions.
SC: It seems like your poems think a lot about time, whether historical time periods or how time passes for a person or a place. Did you think about this when you were writing this book?
MO: I think that's a recurring obsession that I have a lot of questions for: what is going on?
LD: Were there certain things that you were obsessively researching or reading while writing Contradictions in the Design?
MO: For me, research can be a lot more random. It’s trying to learn the name of a plant that grows in a place or something and then just going down a rabbit hole on the internet. There’s a balance between some of the more fictional poems where I'm making things up and then there's other poems where I’m trying to remember the exact line by Keats, going through and reading a book that I already know. That might be a type of research, but often research is very strange. I'm doing that research without realizing that it's going to end up in a poem. Say I’m writing a book about how the brain works and then eventually come across something that's really interesting, and then later when I'm writing a poem I think about that and I can go back and get it. Some of the factual things might come up, but it's not necessary that I go out looking for it. It might be something that I encountered and then have to try to re-remember.
BL: I was really interested in the voices in this collection. Would you consider the speaker to be a consistent figure throughout the poems, or are you occasionally interested in working with other forms like persona?
MO: I don't do a ton of persona. I think a lot of the voices in this collection, and probably my first collection, are an extension of a particular identity. I don't see them exactly as me, but a lot of the speakers take aspects of me and sometimes they're exaggerated. I'm not saying that I walk around talking like this, speaking in poetry to people. I've heard people say all poems are persona or autobiographical because they're an extension of the author's worldview in some ways. I think the poems are somewhere in between. There's some fictional elements, there’s some parts of me that are exaggerated, there's definitely a lot that I pulled from my own life or my own ideas about life. I wouldn't say exactly one or the other, but a sort of hybrid.
LD: Talking of content versus form: lots of the book seems to be concerned or interested with building or construction, like the Rubik's Cube or even tables. Did that inform order or things like lineation in the poems?
MO: Putting together the poems, I wasn't trying to say, this poem is enacting the construction of a staircase. I think there’s always a relationship. One thing that makes poems poems is that the manner of delivery— the form, if you will—is part of the content. It’s not just a vehicle for delivering content like a newspaper article or restaurant menu, where it wouldn't necessarily matter if you change the margins. So a lot of what I'm thinking about formally in these poems is the line in relation to the sentence, how the line might be used to create a pause to highlight or isolate words or phrases, to create slight nuances of meaning when we're thinking about the syntax of the sentence. There is always a relationship between the content and the container, but it wasn't that I was trying to use one to imitate or enact the other.
SC: Speaking about this book as a whole, how long it takes you to develop it into its final form in. Did your voice as a writer change in that time?
MO: Yes. I am hoping my voice is always sort of changing. There's a sort of standard sound for my poems, which might be frustrating to me, but I think that writers choose to use different voices at different times. This book is kind of an extension of things I was doing in my first, but I was hoping I was doing them better. My first book came out in 2013, this one came out in 2016, but I submitted it for publication in 2014, and my first book was accepted in 2011. That's about a three-year period of writing and organizing. There are some poems in here that predate the first book, too, so that means there's probably a range of maybe seven or eight years of poems. I was noticing my voice changing, but in subtle ways. I don't think you would read my first book then this book and say, “These are two totally different poets,” but I think some things I'm doing more consciously or more deliberately in this book. In the next book, I think you will see similarities, but I'm hoping it is the more developed version.
SC: It seems that often your work is concerned with interacting with other poets and text outside of your own. In what ways is your work concerned with the larger community of poetry?
MO: “Department of Doubt” is written after Jenny Johnson, a poet that I'm friends with. “Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose” begins at this writers conference in Vermont. Brown was there, Ross White, Jamaal May, Kellam Ayers, Chip Cheek. Those are all just people who were there that I was friends with, and I asked them if I could write them into this. Mike Scalise, one of you mentioned the poem “Minotaurs,” he's a friend of mine. That comment was something he posted on Facebook: “Can someone go upstairs and check on my neighbors?” Poetry has a very small audience. I feel like a lot of the people who will read your book of poems are going to be people you know or other artists. It's sort of fun to just write those people directly into it.
The next book is this epistolary collection of poems. Most of them are letters to the things or ideas or concepts or animals or things that aren't going to respond, but there are some letters that are written to actual people. There’s a letter to Jennifer Chang, there's a letter to Jamaal May. I start thinking about how with musicians, it's totally common for when an album is released to have a track featuring someone else. That happens all the time [in music] but doesn't as much in poetry. I was thinking of ways to collaborate. Some of the letters in this next book are “Letters to Matthew” from other poets I know. There'll be six poems in this next book that are written by different poets.
There need to be two people for the art to really exist. The writer and the reader, the artist and the audience. I'm always conscious of that and thinking about how it can be not just a monologue.
Jamaal May has a poem called “There are Birds Here” and I reference that poem in this letter “Letter to Jamaal May Regarding the Existence of Unicorns.” Then Jamal took that home and wrote “A Letter to Matthew Olzmann about Shipwrecks and Sirens” that appears in his most recent book. So that's an ongoing conversation taking place in different magazines and different books. It's not all gathered in one place, but I do like how art can be interacting actively with other art, not just referencing.
LD: You said something earlier that I was interested in, about writers and yourself having several different voices, or modes of things that you like to write. Could you talk about what those different voices are for you personally?
MO: I think this idea isn’t just true for writers; it’s true for everyone. You might write an academic paper that might be a very different voice from you in a text message and it’s still the same writer. You’re making choices and the readers are going to respond to or experience those voices in different ways. In daily life you have these different voices, using language to create or shape a sort of attitude or projection of your ideas. The same thing happens in poems. You might have one that's very formal, you might have one that's much more chatty. You might be making those choices based on what seems most appropriate to the poem or you might be thinking about what's more fun to write. I think that's an under-discussed aspect in poetry. We often mythologize the brooding and suffering poet. But most people are drawn to art as if they're going to participate in it, because there's something that they like about it, to have fun or enjoy. No one ever picks up an electric guitar and says, “This is miserable, I’m going to do this forever.” If there is a voice you find engaging, something you just feel drawn to or compelled by, that's another way to choose.
I do try to think of it as multiple possibilities. You could tell a story in two short sentences or long winding sentences detailing everything—both of them are telling the same thing, both of them would sound different, both of them would be experienced differently, but those are choices we make. Voice can be complicated just in terms of sentence structure and the type of vocabulary and diction that you would use, but voice is also a combination of some more intangible things, what the audience is expecting based on the situation. There are a number of tools that go into shaping how you're presenting.