two poems by matthew rohrer; and an interview

(poem one)

HOMAGE TO ATTILLA JOZSEF

My back hurts. On one side.

Also I feel that I am simply too large a creature,

that I am spindly. I have lost certain abilities.

I used to be a better driver.

Most of my pleasure comes from eating.

Eating fulfills more than hunger.

Carmina Burana touches me for personal reasons

related to performing it in high school; in other respects

I know it is worn and trite.

I am slowly wearing down my teeth.

I believe my dreams are real, with sincerity,

but am not sincere enough to move into them.

I have a physical condition which makes it impossible for me to fake
interest.

I think everyone on TV looks like me.

I hold many conflicting beliefs. I take pride in this.

My anger is blunt and uncontrolled.

I am able to view nearly everything with a sense of wry detatchment.

I am too ashamed to be unproductive.

I rely on humor to connect with people most of the time.

I try to view nearly every situation as humorous and detatched.

People enjoy working with me.

In an office setting I am often described as 'laid back'.

I can type 67 words per minute.

I am at home,

in a chair,

available for work.

I am the right man for the job.

(poem two)

from THE WORLD AT NIGHT

I went out one night with people from work

to an editor's apartment. I drank

a glass of poison. She served me poison

and everyone else was either immune

or politely refused. In the subway

I didn't know the meanings of any words

and my sweat stung me. People on the car

pushed me off at the next stop when I puked

in my hands. Without any meaning, time

accreted to things in funny shapes—old,

asymmetrical hobbledehoys

tormented me, a stern but benevolent

lizard gave me counsel. My stomach contents

spilled around me. My mind was actually

seven or eight minds, all but one of them

composed of helicopters. The other one

was sad. Satellites could tell I was sad.

When another subway came I crawled on

and technically I passed into death, but

passed through and awoke at Coney Island

and saw black cowboys galloping on the beach.

Hungry, mentally defeated, I stared

at The World's Largest Rat—for fifty cents.

Really, it was only the same color

as a rat. "It's from the same family,"

the barker explained. I felt vulnerable

illuminated by neon and fried light.

Everyone had to use one big toilet

and the sky was orange with satellites.

And satellites know everything.

(interview)

In another interview you say your poems are not to be interpreted allegorically. So when you say, "And satellites know everything." You do not mean that god knows everything. You mean that it feels like satellites know everything. Or you mean, wouldn't it be funny (or strange, nice, scary) if satellites knew everything. Or something like, "What if satellites knew everything?" Or, you are talking to someone and you say it to be amusing or for fun. You say, "Look at that SUV, it knows everything." But that only works with some people. If you say that to some people, they will go away from you and not like you as much anymore. Say it to different people and they will appreciate you and talk back. In school, they do not teach this kind of thing. Kafka is taught to be prescient of fascism, or something. Everything is a symbol for something more 'important', it seems. But... the kind of people who when talking about Kafka keep saying he's Jewish and keep talking about his dad... those people are generally (I am generalizing) the ones who see no humor in Kafka. They are also the ones who do not find most things to be melodramatic. I find everything to be melodramatic. The Great Gatsby is melodramatic, has a lot of symbols, and is not funny. So there's a connection between melodrama, allegory, and humor. Those who have a high tolerance for melodrama also interpret everything as a symbol for something else and also do not think that Kafka is funny.

Some people can only deal with life if everything they encounter is a symbol. These are people who cannot or most probably don’t want to think for themselves. The symbols (which are handed to you by some authority) tell you how to read about or think about things. They are fundamentally reductionist. Everything, whether it be grand and inspiring like a fog bank mingling with some trees or more mundane like an argument on the street, becomes reduced to what it is supposedly a symbol for. And this is fascist. Well maybe it is. It is certainly lazy. Religion, unsurprisingly, traffics in symbolism like it’s going out of style. Anyone who has an interest in your not seeing what is actually there, but wants you instead to see everything as a vast symbolic stage play representing something else has something to hide. When you talk about people reading Kafka as Jewish or as a victim of some father-related issues...you’re right, that’s lazy. That’s PART of Kafka, sure. No one can deny that Kafka had issues with his father, that his Judaism informed his work, etc. But stopping there is lazy. When I said “and satellites know everything” I meant at least three things, as you point out. None of them symbolic. But my favorite of them is that I say it “to be amusing or for fun.” The truth is I would love to be able to say “SUVs know everything” in a poem, but now I can’t, because you already said it, and it’s great. That is a big part of it: saying something to say something amusing. To myself. Hopefully to others. But in a very real way, that poem, at that point in it, is about the fear that satellites see and kow and possibly report on everything.

What you say about melodrama is very apt, I think, because the love of melodrama is the love of objectifying symbols and watching symbols fall in love, and go to war, and cry. Somehow we are not watching individual people do this. Authority never wants you to think about individual people, it doesn’t really fit well into their big schemes.

In your interview you and Matthew Zapruder said that those who interpret Kafka as allegory are wrong. I think that that (thinking that other people are wrong) is wrong. I think people are just different. No one suffers as a result of interpreting your Satellites as airplanes when you were a little boy, or something. It is just that people are different. You can't connect and create understanding with everyone. You can only learn to tolerate their differentness. So what was meant by 'wrong.' What do you think about all this?

Touche. That is a slippery slope, yes, to start to call people’s opinions wrong. But I guess to regain some of my ground here, I can say that they are wrong if they think that Kafka only wrote his stories (or, you could say, I only wrote my drunken subway satellite poem) in the service of transmitting the Great Symbols to people. Kafka was writing about real situations – taking absurd situations and making them real.

I have a question about poetry. Poets always talk about going beyond 'right' or 'wrong' or 'bad' or 'good.' James Tate, in his introduction to some book, said that poems should not say that 'killing children is bad' or 'dying is sad.' Poets always talk about writing about things that are mysterious. Reaching some sort of strange place of epiphany that cannot be explained. Irreducible, mysterious. And they talk about the poems writing themselves, or something. They say they reach some sort of higher consciousness or shared consciousness, or something, and it feels like they are not writing the poems themselves. Okay. That is all nice. I interpret all that as poets saying something like, "There is no such thing as identity. There is no such thing as right or wrong, those are arbitrary; there is no such thing as evil; there is just the mystery of why we are here, where did we come from, what happens when we die; or, rather, there is just the mystery of consciousness; what is consciousness, and why?" Or something. And that is nihilistic, a worldview of meaninglessness, of atoms and zeroes and ones, and it is enlightened, I think. There is no preconception in that. Yet when poets talk in real life (and particularly about politics), they forget all that. They start talking about Bush being bad. They get 'unpoetic,' or something. They suddenly know what is good and what is bad. They have many preconceptions. They vote. In a poem, they may say that 'pain' may be 'good.' 'Death' might be 'good.' They stay open-minded. But then in the real world they know that 'killing children is bad' and 'dying is sad.'

My question is if there is any poet out there who in his or her real life is as 'poetic' as in his or her poetry. As nihilistic and enlightened in their worldview. As identityless. I want to know so that I will have more poetry to read. (Also, say what you think about all this.) And, continuing that... you said in an interview that poems are useless against Bush and Cheney, so poems shouldn't try. So you are also what I described above. Are you? Here's what I would say about poetry and politics: "Politics requires preconception, I like poetry without preconception; therefore I will write poetry without politics." Does that make sense? That is very sad.

I think the main problem I have with the thrust of this question is that I disagree that most or all poets think there is no such thing as right or wrong. I agree that those are problematic terms, and are almost always used in dangerous and destructive ways by Authority, but I certainly don’t believe it. When Tate says poems should not say “killing children is bad” he’s right, because that’s a given to everyone in our culture; we know that is part of the cultural contract. I’m very happy with part of what you were saying, when you say poetry should have no preconceptions. I agree 100%. I think almost every poem that sets out to do something is going to fail, because it is in the writing that we often discover what we have to say. I mean that very physically — I think that it is in the combination of words and sounds, how they look, how they sound together, that poetry is made. If that starts to get away from your great plan to write a polemical poem about date rape, then suddenly you are in a bind: follow the poem, or follow the polemics? When I said that poetry can’t topple the Bush administration, I believe that. I don’t even have to believe it, it’s simply true. But that doesn’t mean that poetry shouldn’t incorporate politics. I was arguing more against the notion that certain kinds of poetics ARE politics. That’s nonsense. Politics comes up all the time in my poems, I even mention the president himself, it’s not about avoiding politics. It shouldn’t be about avoiding anything. I was arguing that those self-appointed avant garde poets who think that disjunctive syntax is a political act are morons.

But back to the right and wrong. Sure, if you look at the universe as a whole, which I try to do as often as I can, you get the long view, and in the long view, the death of one human being is insignificant, as is the destruction of habitats of other creatures, and adultery, and lies. But there’s another long view that involves thinking of us, people, thinking of humans in their early form, when we were useless beasts who suddenly realized that we were designed to be specialized, that we didn’t all have the same talents, like tigers or bluejays. And that if this is the case, we should all basically build some cities right away because our promise is only going to be realized if we come together like this. To me, that alone is enough to support a strong argument for ethics. Religion is unnecessary to this argument. Authority is unnecessary to this argument. Though they are inevitable. So killing children is going to make a whole lot of people very, very unhappy. I believe everyone should be as unobtrusive as possible. The least intrusive acts by people or government are always the best. This might be taoist.

How is HOMAGE TO ATTILLA JOZSEF an homage to him?

Jozsef wrote CURRICULUM VITAE which is much better, and more tragic than mine, but whose general theme and movement is what I based my poem on. The saddest thing is that he actually wrote his as part of a job application. The poem in question is from PERCHED ON NOTHING’S BRANCH, translated by Peter Hargitai.

I want to ask you about meaning. To one of those allegory-people, your poems will have meaning because they will find the meaning, no matter what; and to an allegory-person, there is meaning in the universe also because they find it, no matter what; and when they find it they are comforted. To me, there is no meaning in your poems; and to me there is no meaning in the universe; I won't allow meaning, no matter what, because meaning is final and anything but confusion is a lie and lies make me feel bad. What's the difference between these two views? What do most poets you know think? Which are you?

I don’t think I can speak for anyone else, but as I said above, I don’t think most people, even poets, actually hold to the extremely mechanistic worldview that you ascribe to their work. But I know that some of the so-called Language poets are interested in this, and play with it. But as I think you also pointed out — the hypocrisy of their standpoint is that they begin to care about hierarchies and cultural norms when their houses get infested with termites, for example.

I think the conversational equivalent of your poems is to say things like, "What if I was poisoned and people on the train just pushed me off the car?" To say, "What if..." and then say something that would be funny (or somehow exciting or original or interesting) if it really happened. There are people I know in real life who when they talk (or act, in the world) are as good as your poems. So, to me, listening to certain people talk and seeing what they do in the real world can be just as good as reading your poems. (And wait, I am not saying your poems are bad; I like your poems more than anyone else's, I think). And the function of being good (in this 'artful' way) in conversation and in the real world is to (1) get people to like you (by making them happy, by entertaining them, by being less boring than the world or other people to them) (2) get people who 'get' you to 'get' the most good and real and 'revised/edited-to-goodness' part of you (3) amuse yourself (you can want to be 'good' even when no one will 'get' you). So is it the same (same/different reasons?) when you write poems?

Yeah, I think those three reasons for writing you gave are absolutely three of the top reasons I write, and most of my friends as well. I’d put number 3 first though. Then 2, then 1.

Daniel Alarcon said in an interview that you either are an artist or you aren't. I quote him: "Of course it's true that you either are or are not an artist..." He was not being ironic. There was no sarcasm. And I believed him, that he sincerely believed that. Because I believe that most people in the world somehow believe in meaningless statements, talk and write in cliches and idiomatic expressions that are often meaningless (James Tate's introduction to Best American Short Stories 1997 is something I recently read that is that), and use a lot of abstract words that are often meaningless. Yet they want to have meaning. I think there is a connection here. People who write and speak mostly in words that are meaningless are the ones who get meaning from Kafka, who do not think that Lord of The Rings is melodramatic and interminable, and who write "So?" at the bottom of your poems (You said in another interview that an editor of yours at Norton wrote "So?" at the bottom of your poems; did not 'get' them). My question is... can you elaborate a lot (a lot, a lot; be very detailed and comprehensive) on what happened with that editor?

First, you’re on to something by pointing out that those who most crave meaning (and most often create meaning out of natural occurrence through symbolism, etc) are most often those who write meaninglessly, using abstractions instead of saying something real, using cliches and trite expressions that signify nothing. I have a student right now who keeps writing what is essentially the same poem — every single word, and I mean EVERY word, is an abstraction, like “motivation” “investigation” “morality” “fame” and “instinct” and so forth — and I’m getting so tired of reading this same semester-long poem, as I’m sure he is getting tired of my saying the same thing to him about it each time. The funny thing is, of all of my students, he is the one who assumes that he is getting at something big, that he is unraveling some great Truths; my best students are just exploring what they can say.

Second, about the editor...I’ve talked a lot about her, and I’m a little weary of it. You seem to have read my interview in the Verse Book of the Interview, and I cover a lot of it there. Basically, I feel conflicted about the whole situation and I’m being very open here: yes, she was a poetry bonehead who didn’t understand my poetry or really any kind of poetry other than the most baldly confessional and straightfoward; but the truth is that had she simply published my MS at that point, it would have been much much lamer than Satellite is now. And I’m proud of Satellite, I don’t care what the cowardly unsigned reviewers at Publishers Weekly say. So you can see my quandary: her treatment of my poetry was shabby and simplistic, but by rejecting my MS, I fell into an infinitely better publishing situation, and into great friendships, for which I wouldn’t trade a thing. Verse [and now, the upcoming Wave Books who have folded Verse into themselves] are so good, and have been so inextricable from my career, that I wouldn’t leave them for a Billy Collins-sized advance.

“But now I suspect you are looking for something/and here it is:” She wanted my poems to reveal the secrets of my personal life, and anytime they veered from that, she thought they were uninteresting, and would write “So?” at the bottom of the page. [Well, she did this at least twice].

You said you changed parts of the poems to try and appease that editor over a long period of time. Did you feel bad when doing that? What did you say to that editor when that editor wrote "So?" Did you try to explain your poems? What did that editor say? Did that editor explain the editor's not 'getting' your poems? Did you think that the poems were improving or being 'diluted' somehow? Did you become angry at the editor? Frustrated?

Yes, it felt terrible to make the changes she suggested, and those poems were either eventually thrown out completely, or the changes were un-changed after Norton and I parted ways. I was frustrated and angry, but very young, I was 26, and felt pulled in 2 directions: staying true to my poems, or having a powerful editor at a big press want to change my work in order to publish it. Ultimately, she just wanted to change it so it “meant” something, or revealed the inner workings of my life with my wife. How boring. There’s plenty of poetry out there like that. So in the end, it wasn’t really a struggle-- I obviously wasn’t going to change my whole aesthetic. And painfully, as I’ve said, I realized after the fact that in a sense she was right: the poems weren’t ready at all. But not in the way she thought.

Did that editor ever just think that that editor maybe has a different worldview (as in what I talked about in the first question above) than you?

I think this is precisely what she thought was going on.

Rank five literary magazines in order of (1) most likely would want to publish HOMAGE TO ATTILA JOZSEF to (5) would never publish HOMAGE TO ATTILA JOZSEF. Then say some things about your little list.

Well, the amazing magazine CROWD already did publish HOMAGE TO ATTILA JOZSEF, so they’d have to be #1. They did it because Aimee Kelley and Brett Lauer are beautiful people with exquisite taste. And their magazine is top-shelf. The truth is, I can’t even imagine what other magazines would want to publish it or a poem like it, because who knows what evil lurks within the hearts of men? And who am I to say? But I think I can list a few that would probably never ever publish it:

1. The New Yorker. Why? Because it doesn’t look like a poem that you would see in the New Yorker. And the New Yorker is consistently filled with poems that look exactly like poems you’d see in the New Yorker.

2. Poetry. Why? Who knows what’s going on at Poetry these days. They’re attempting to change their image, and they published a poem recently by Joshua Beckman, who certainly would have been voted most like never to be published by Poetry....I guess the real reason is that I probably never would have sent it to them, thinking it would be a waste of a stamp.

3. The Economist

4. Soldier of Fortune

5. Nugget.

What fiction is there that you know of that is as satisfying to you (and that is satisfying in the same way) as your own poetry is satisfying to you? Try to name fiction not in translation.

I’m trying my hardest, but I have to mention some fiction in translation....Bruno Schultz.

Todd Hasak-Lowy’s short story collection THE TASK OF THIS TRANSLATOR is one of the most exciting books of fiction I’ve read in years. And doubly so, since he and I are friends and I’ve watched his writing grow over the years into the amazing thing that it is now. My favorite fiction writer, though, and this is sort of a secret that I’m letting out now, is Philip K. Dick. I wish I were Philip K. Dick. I’m completely serious. The feeling I get reading his books is unparalleled.