Farid Matuk’s poetry, essays, and translations from Spanish appear in a wide range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection, This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine), several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta), and The Real Horse (2018). He teaches in the MFA program at University of Arizona, where he is poetry editor for Fence, and serves on the editorial board for the book series Research in Creative Writing at Bloomsbury. In this episode, we talk about Matuk’s newest collection of poetry, The Real Horse, and his intention behind not using punctuation throughout the book. Matuk passes on life-changing writing advice that he received about filling the negative space of a page and writing into the “weaving of self and other that’s always around us.” During his time as a professor at the University of Arizona, he was able to publish his poetry with the university press there. That’s also where he experienced, for the first time, the helpful process of the blind peer review. As we spoke about Matuk’s work at Fence, the phrase “mutual entanglement” came up to describe the work being done there. Matuk leaves us with the question, “Which phrases and ways of naming the world that feel really powerful today will end up with quotation marks around them?” Honorable Mentions: University of Arizona Press Fence Fence founder and editor, Rebecca Wolff Visual Artist, Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez and her paintings of lace. Poet, Jorie Graham Poet, John Ashbery

Published Date: February 2, 2023

Transcription

Phuc:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP conference and book fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers.

Kate:

For writers.

Jessica:

Farid Matuk's poetry, essays, and translations from Spanish abound across a wide range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection This Isa Nice Neighborhood from Letter Machine, several chat books, and the Real Horse from University of Arizona Press where he teaches in the MFA program, is the editor for Fence and serves on the editorial board for the book series Research and Creative Writing at Bloomsbury Not Bloomsday. Welcome to the show Farid.

Farid:

Thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

Jessica:

I feel like your bio, which I obviously [inaudible 00:01:26] from, thank you, but the way you start it, it feels like an act of resistance in and of itself, and it also feels like a poem. And then once I read your poetry, I felt echoes of the way you introduced yourself, identified yourself in your bio. So I'm going to read a part of it. You identify as a queer writer of mixed Syrian and Peruvian heritage, and the specifics that you give, that you've lived in the US since the age of six as an undocumented person, a "legal" quotation marks around legal, resident and a naturalized citizen. It just connects so beautifully to your work. I feel like especially in the Real Horse, which feels very migratory.

And there's a mix of references and language and shifting scenes as if one is on horseback or in a moving train. I also really connected your bio to, and we're not supposed to do this of course, it's the speaker who writes in an echoing true name something like I am an American artist. And in another place, a speaker asks are we a successful people putting your wilderness in the wide eye of a horse for you? Which I might argue is perhaps the central question of this entire gorgeous book. We'd love to hear some of your poetry. Would you read it for us?

Farid:

Yeah. Thank you so much for those takes on the work. Yeah, if you don't mind, I'll actually start with a new poem.

Jessica:

Yes.

Farid:

It's a brand new poem and I've got to read it once before and didn't do it justice. And you know when you perform a poem, you learn it more and more, right? So I want to try again.

Jessica:

The best revision technique.

Farid:

Yep. So we'll give it a go. It's called Glistering. Young clairvoyant body, I'm sorry I'm loud. This long, this poorly around you. The mask worship slide is steep and never stops. I aged trying to be at both ends, 9% humidity, burnt oranges still on their stems, scintillating wind, barking boy without friends, sitting under Jupiter in the sky. All I have is sentiment. Will bound in me, but not in you who reads the spent or rested words. Who sits on the grain sparkle, I don't know. I'm holding in the quiet space next to [Jaydite 00:04:17] for abundance. I dreamt my transparency that you sprayed my throat in Clorox from within. A real friend knows to stay well enough away. A cover song of love seen through to revolutionary intent. My imitation of my poem is my poem. The evil in us, the actual absence of it. My young clairvoyant body through the dry, bright envelopment already in the world, gesturing sand in the air seen through. Come round, come rain hand. Here. Thanks for letting me give that one a second go.

Kate:

It's beautiful. One of my favorites is diving into a book of poetry where I come to it with not knowing much about it and then getting to hear after spending time with it and then getting to hear you read it really sets it for me in my mind so that I really feel like I know it now, hearing you have read it. So thank you so much for sharing.

Farid:

Well, and The Real Horse is a tough one. I've written about this and I've now taken to incorporating it into performances of the book where I regret in that book not having used punctuation and a long line, because many readers took it as an invitation to run across the line as fast as they could in a breathless way. And the intent was absolutely the opposite. There's this critic James Logan Bach and Alice Notley, poet and critic, James Logan Bach and Alice Notley, also a poet who's written about poetry.

They both have similar things to say about a kind of mid-length verse line, but Notley summarizes it and she says, "A line is its events." A line is its events that the interior play of the pushing and pulling of IM's and [inaudible 00:06:29] and the interior play of stresses is as important as any line ending. And that's what I was hoping to invite readers toward. And it's been fascinating when readers have gotten it with that book, but I think the tendency has been to kind of run through the lines as if it's a speed race. So when I read that book, I read really slowly.

Jessica:

That's so interesting because when I was reading it aloud to myself, I did watch a really lovely YouTube reading where a fiction writer at U of A introduces you and it's just very lovely. So I did hear you read, but before that, when I was just entering into the book by myself, I was reading it silently quickly, but there's no way to read. I'm not an opera singer, so I don't have the breath to do that. And then I realized it reminded me a little bit of poems by CK Williams that I also feel, and I've taught him and talked about how even though he's wrote, and it's interesting you mentioned in your poem pouring and then a lot of negative space and negation and silence. And those are the two things I wanted to talk to you about with the Real Horse. But there's an idea of sort of an over pouring or over brimming over line, but it really is in line break, even though it's the page line break. So I had to slow down, so I'm glad I did the right thing.

Farid:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica:

Just reminds us that poetry is an oral tradition, and the reading aloud will tell us how to read a poem a lot of the time.

Farid:

For sure. Yeah. And the spilling over is in that book, the spilling over is there at the level of form where you've got these sequences of sonnets and each one is a little container, but then they spill one to the next.

Jessica:

Right. I found the notes section of the Real Horse so fascinating and also so helpful. It felt like a mini course or a series of mini courses about erased/forgotten/entwined histories. And it also led me to the how poems think, and this idea of lyric poetry occupying a negative space rather than a self-assertive space, which I'm assuming is narrative that occupies that space. And in the opening poem, the speaker is with his daughter at a playground while cicadas sing around them and the line, "And if words alone are tracers in the negative, I'll keep writing you." Can you talk a little bit about how the act of writing, which is kind of self-assertion and this negation function in your poetry?

Farid:

Yeah, that's great. Thank you. It's really dear and special to be with careful readers. And precious. So yeah, writing is a lot of filling up of space. The supposedly blank page. And it's hard not to talk about this without sounding really esoteric or mystical, but in a way that's where your question is coming from or leading to, I think. So I just had the opportunity to wrap up a collaboration with a visual artist named Nancy Freedom and Sanchez, and she makes really amazing work. And so she read the Real Horse and did a series of paintings in response. And then I wrote new poems in response to those paintings, and it's going to come out as a book arts object, I guess, from a press called Singing Saw. But I had occasion to write about that collaboration and this is what I wrote.

How committed to making a romance out of vernacular American loneliness, that I would commend myself for pretending the page was blank, and that I faced it with words meant for naming more than for saying. Maybe a poem is actually a way to fold into proximities, that despite stories to the contrary, routinely overwhelm the body's hail stand against supposedly empty space with all the potential for plunder that emptiness implies. Let it imply. Atoms already attest to the unaccountable means by which they touch across strange surfaces, the strange distances, which is to say across time. That transiting leave space replete with traces of languages, materials, memories, viruses and ghosts, their rage and love. It's not art. Only sensate living to be fibers in that fabric. But hearing and saying at the double edge of body and breath can be one technology for working with or remaining of that dense weave, pleading and slacking and pleading again by the shapes of a poem's measure.

The statement goes on, but that's how I've come to think about negative space or full space or writing into an asserting versus maybe I can say it more simply as one of the best lessons I ever got right after my MFA from some older poets I had the opportunity to be in community with, Dale Smith and [inaudible 00:12:17], was that you can just, rather than intending, rather than expressing, you can receive. So that your notebook, your page can be a record of what you receive.

And that's an old idea. I was lucky enough to hear it for the first time from them. And my thinking has evolved from that point to what I just read, this sense that we write not to fill something up that was empty and not only to receive, but that we write into this weaving of self and others that's always around us at all times, if that makes sense. And my hope is that in writing or thinking in that way, some dissolution happens of the ego, the singular author or the ego, while still enough tension holds so that we are with the weave, not completely erased or lost.

Jessica:

But it wouldn't be a weave without the tension. So it does hold. That's so interesting. And the difference between saying and naming is really something I'm going to think about for a while too. I really want that book. I was going to ask you about it because the title Redolent, that brings in the sense of scent as well. And I wondered how you added that. I know it's not like a scratch and sniff book, but how you brought in that other sense or sense of scent.

Farid:

Yeah, I find it really hard to do in general, but it came up in that project because Nancy Friedmann-Sanchez the artist is from Columbia, is Colombian, and often includes in her paintings, so she has multimodal works, so sculptures and stuff. But in the paintings, there's often really detailed representations of flowers. And flowers are an export of Columbia. So many of the flowers that kind of trade in the US are grown in the savannahs of Columbia. And there's a whole history of economic opportunity from one perspective and also a little bit of exploitation from another perspective, and how those flowers are grown and raised. And then Nancy's really interested in the intricacy of flowers along with lacework in order to, but she paints them on a heroic scale. It's her terms. And so she wants to play with the old kind of gendered patterns of who does what kind of art.

So male artists doing minimalist work at a massive scale, female artist doing domestic craft on a scale of minutia. And so she kind of blends the two. And so the title was a nod to that concern of Nancy's. But it's also when I write in that statement, if the normative thinking about space is being empty and therefore ready to be colonized or taken over to be plundered, let the materials imply that plunder back into us, that redolence and scent and stench are ways to think about responsibilities that might always be around us, but that we would rather not smell and not think about. So that's another register to that title.

Jessica:

That's really interesting. Wow. When is Redolent coming out?

Farid:

We don't know because the Book Arts lab in New York that Singing Saw uses has been shut down due to Covid. So when things ease up, we hope maybe toward the end of 2021.

Jessica:

Okay. Keep us posted. I'm sure you will on Twitter and other avenues. Speaking of presses, I know El Camino Del Sol is the University of Arizona Press, right?

Farid:

It's a series within the University of Arizona Press. It's their series for Latinx poetry, broadly understood the whole diaspora. There's also sun tracks for indigenous poets. So there's two poetry series inside of University of Arizona Press.

Jessica:

That's pretty amazing. And how was the process there? How did they work with your collection?

Farid:

So it was a cold call from me. Even though we share a campus, there's no relationship between the press and the department of English or the MFA program. The press is a wholly independent entity, and it has a really broad portfolio that's kind of heavy on history and the social sciences, anthropology, a lot of anthropology, a lot of border studies work, memoirs, fiction, and then those two poetry series. And I just got to know their series over the years and thought it was a great fit for the book. So I wrote to them and sent them a query, and they asked to see a more formal query or book proposal.

I sent that, and a rough version of the manuscript. And then they sent it out for, well, they went through editorial review, and then once they went through editorial review, they sent it out for external reviewers. So there wasn't really a completed contract until it went through all of those checks. I think because they're a scholarly press, they do blind peer review, which is actually not my experience as the norm in the poetry world. Usually editorial review is the thing, or a judge or a contest. So I went through all of those processes and the blind peer reviews were incredibly helpful. They were really, really incisive and well-matched. I got the sense that those folks knew what I was trying to do and could see where I was falling short. And so I think I revised the book for I want to say at least six months after those reports came back.

Jessica:

Wow. What a gift.

Farid:

Probably more.

Jessica:

I don't know if this is totally putting you on the spot, but I don't know, my former very good friend and former colleague at UC Davis published her first two poetry books at Camino Del Sol, and so it's Maria Melendez Kelson I think she has in her... Might just be Maria Melendez. I don't know if she added her other last name, but as a plug for them, How Long She'll Last In This World is amazing. Both of them are, but that's her. It was just fun because I like, oh, I helped her with that line in workshop and there it is. Beautiful book. I have good feelings about that press because of her. So it seems like it's a great one.

Farid:

Yeah, it is. And they just got a new, I guess, executive editor. I'm not sure what the proper title is, but Frigo [inaudible 00:19:34] Gonzales is taking over that particular series, so it's kind of getting a new life and a whole new refresh. So it'll be interesting to see where he takes it.

Jessica:

That's good insider info. Thank you.

Kate:

I was going to ask about your work at Fence, if you'd like to share just a little bit for folks at AWP who might be listening and want to know a little bit about Fence and what you do there.

Farid:

Yeah, so Fence is a journal that's been around, I should know this, but I don't, it's been around a long time. I mean, in poetry terms, right? So it's got to be at least 20 years. Rebecca Wolf is going to kill me for not knowing that, but she's the founder and executive editor. I was not there at the beginning. I must have joined around 2008, 2009. And kind of the origin story that I know about Fence, and again, Rebecca might offer more nuances, is that it emerged at a moment, maybe in the late nineties or very early two thousands, when there was this tension between so-called experimental and so-called traditional poetries, so-called difficult and so-called accessible poetries. And I think she chose a title fence as something that swings in both ways, or that would be open to something to work that would be in the best ways disinterested in those categories.

And I think she took heat for that at the time because I think at the time it felt important to maintain that opposition, that these were truly separate sets of lineages and poetics and interests and shouldn't be reconciled. Some folks, I think, believe that. I kind of think we're at a moment where those tensions matter less, or at least I feel like with the work that kind of gets national attention or the work that my graduate students are interested in, that those categories seem to collapse on one another and learn from one another in really interesting ways. As an aside, I'll also say I remember being in graduate school and the poet Joy Graham coming to share her work, and she told the story, this would've been like 2003, about how John Ashbury's favorite poet was a very traditional poet. And then that traditional poet's, and I'm sorry, I don't remember that person's name, that traditional poets, I think it may have been Merrill, that his favorite poet was John Ashbury, and they didn't know that about one another.

There's that. But anyway, so Fence has for a long time had a book in print and in journal. I just work on the journal side. On a couple of occasions, folks have approached me with book manuscripts, and if I thought it was a good fit, I pass them along to folks who work on the book side. But it's a team of editors. I think we're up to eight or nine. We're committed to the slush pile, so we solicit, but we also are committed to open submissions. So it's such a large team because we make that very, very large submission pile as manageable as possible by distributing it across everybody. And then we kind of come together and reconcile the selections that we make, and then that's when the deliberations start. But each editor is assigned a few hundred submissions and we go through them in advance.

Kate:

Intense work, but important.

Jessica:

No, very democratic. Glad you asked, Kate.

Kate:

As you were talking about the John Ashbury and Merrill sort of, and the fence swinging open and closed, I was thinking about the phrase that it was from your panel where you were talking about collaboration and you called it mutual entanglement, which is a phrase I'm going to take from this conversation and hold onto it for a while because I really like it, and it's something that's come up with some others of our podcast guests. And it's such a great description for the work that we do in those liminal spaces. So I really appreciate that being a part of your work as well.

Farid:

Thank you. I wonder, this is on my mind because it just came up with students in a class yesterday. I wonder though, which of our phrases will cause eye rolls years to come. We were reading a poet of a different generation who was using a lot of colloquial language that was very relevant to that time and to that subculture that the poet was writing from, and the students were registering their resistance to that. And so it did really make me think which phrases and ways of naming the world that feel really powerful today will end up getting quotation marks around them. They'll end up feeling [inaudible 00:24:48].

Phuc:

They will all will.

Jessica:

It'll survive, but in a slush pile sort of.

Kate:

Relic of the past kind of way.

Jessica:

Yeah, quotation mark way.

Farid:

I guess I want to say that doesn't necessarily make me sad. So there's a way to think about just folks in some future picking up what they need and revising what they need from what came before.

Jessica:

Wow. Thank you so much. What a fantastic conversation. Hope to keep in touch.

Farid:

Thank you so much for the questions and for reading, and for all the work that you guys do. Thank you.

Kate:

Thanks, Farid. It's so nice to meet you.

Phuc:

Yeah, we appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Farid:

Nice to meet you. Bye bye.

Phuc:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP conference and book fair.

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusty and hardworking intern is [inaudible 00:26:09]. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever podcasts are found.