Featured Writer: Matt Dennison

Interview and Four Poems, February 1, 2011

Reading a Matt Dennison poem is often like seeing a new star appear in the sky—so much energy and light, even in the darkest pieces. Tell us about the creative process from your point of view.

“I write a little every day, without hope, without despair..”
—Isak Dinesen

One way to begin is to stick your hands in the memory lake, feel around until you touch something gliding past, feel for it again, wait until you have some kind of a grip, then start pulling—some pieces pull straight out, close to being fully formed; others will need a huge amount of straightening once on dry land.  Either way, if it’s covered with music it’s the real thing and a place to begin.

Matt reads Enemy Camp

A lot of these memories don’t want to be caught or brought to the surface, and will fight to stay hidden.  They are not down there waiting, hoping, to be discovered.  But they are down there, and all you can do is hold on until the beast stops struggling and then pull with all your might, day after day.  Sometimes, though, you just have to tie off your line and come back later.  But when you do come back, both you and the creature will have been altered.  It’s a new day, a new battle, and one that is usually winnable to some degree.  Also, if there isn’t the occasional sense of horror at what you find, either you’re not going deep enough or you don’t know where to look.

Another place to begin, and one I’ve been using more frequently, is to gather words, phrases, anything that catches my eye, and put them on a word-pile, so to speak.  As with so much of the creative process, it’s an act of faith, trusting that the words have been chosen for some purpose beyond your current understanding.  Once it reaches a certain size I’ll stir the pile, read it over and over until a pattern begins to emerge. With this essentially being a compost pile, the phrases begin to break down over time, to reform, reshape themselves.  Some disappear completely as they combine with others—their purpose, unknown at the time of their choosing, having been to act as catalysts—but their flavor remains. The words that are meant to come together eventually find themselves and a new creature emerges.  Some of these creations, admittedly, will be deformed, not able to stand, but the best pieces will be strange and new.  It will not be what you started with or what you expected to end with, but if you keep at it you’ll discover it is usually so much more.

To expand a bit, I think too many people are trying to catch an invisible fish on a see-through hook with a non-existent line.  How would you know if you did catch it? What value could it be to another?  True art consists of, and feeds, the actual.  You must have something to show as proof of having at least wrestled with the beast, or else it is all a striving after nothingness.

Matt reads Premise

There is a personal and an impersonal aspect to life and all of existence.  On top of this, as humans, we are driven by an infinite longing within a finite existence.  This creates a huge dynamic, a hydraulic force that travels through time and space.  Press your fingers against your heart and a bulge appears in the rings of Saturn.  This somethingness and nothingness, driven by an at-times-unbearable longing and the unavoidable connectedness of existence, is present everywhere, from the exploding of a distant star down to the one-celled organism trying to divide itself one last time—and is what you should try to capture in your art.

I think the secret is to strive to catch the elusive, thought-to-be-invisible fish with a hook and line so strong that the reader can see the unseeable, touch the untouchable; for nothingness is always wrapped in the actual, in this world, and I think for art to succeed, it must be too.  Every living creature, every living impulse, every ounce of matter, contains the impersonal, infinite, force that lies behind our shared existence, but is also furred and muscled with the visible.

Conversely, some people are hypnotized by the mere somethingness of life and fail to include the mystery.  I feel both approaches are off-balance: the striving after nothingness with nothingness, the embracing of the obvious with the obvious.  For the spark to land on your creations, for someone to be able to say, “It’s alive!” and have it be true, your art must be a made vessel, a something able to contain, at its core, the eternal emptiness of life while presenting a knowable face.  Without the spirit made flesh, where would we be?  So it’s up to you to make the spark-catcher—keeping in mind that the spark itself does not care if it is captured or not—and you can’t do that if your workshop contains, on the one hand, nothing but longing and emptiness, or at the other extreme, only cheeseburgers and tattoos.

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A child appears or lurks in several of your poems. You mention an extended second childhood in your bio note. How did your first and second childhood form the way you experience your work, and the works of others?

“A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.”
—Goethe

As a child, part of me always preferred being alone, in the woods, fishing or looking for rocks—especially geodes: the secret within the secret—fossils, skeletons, arrowheads, and the like.  Doing this, and being rewarded time after time with the discovery of something unique, beautiful, and, most times, small enough to hold in your hand, taught me faith in the process, the walk.  There may be nothing in front of you at the moment, but if you keep walking along the riverbed, deeper into the woods, you will find something of value: an encapsulation of the universe in a perfect leaf, an undisturbed fossil, a snapping turtle caught when a fish was expected.  Even observing the motions of nature, such as watching a snake move through the water, a bird flying along the river at dusk, or a dragonfly hovering next to you,  is a type of finding.

I think this early, and richly rewarded, exploration is what moved me toward poetry: the desire to capture life with my own naturally-formed creations.  I feel the same excitement today at encountering a perfectly-formed poem by another writer as I did when finding one of the million beautiful broken-off pieces of this world.

Since you mentioned my “second childhood,” when I was a street musician in New Orleans, I would get off the streetcar at Canal Street and carry my guitar through the French Quarter, heading for a favourite corner or place in Jackson Square.  One day I realized it was the very same thing as carrying my fishing pole through the woods, that setting down my tackle box, baiting the hook and making that first cast was the same act as setting down my guitar case, opening up and beginning to play.  Obviously, I think most creative acts are reminiscent of fishing, that extending of yourself into the unknown.  It’s like shaking hands with God, when that fish hits, when that word-thought appears, when that song soars.  Doesn’t always happen—sometimes it’s the wrong bait, wrong time, wrong place, wrong life- but when it does, you know it.

I was lucky enough not to have a television in the house until I was seven or eight years old.  Was also lucky to have a mother who took us to the library on a regular basis.  So reading and books were an important part of my life from an early age.  There was very little pollution from the world at large.  Going to the library, too, was like a walk in the woods: always looking for the beautiful, the engaging.

How this affects my relation to other people’s work today is that I’m always on the look-out for the unspoiled, the pure, the unique; something that has not been formed by the crowd; something that has its own mathematics, so to speak.  I forget the term, but nature has a mathematics of survival regarding the arrangement of leaves on a tree, scales on a fish, seeds in a sunflower.  I seek the same mathematics when I read.  One person I’ve recently discovered doing work of this nature is Chris Okum.  The natural world tends not to appear in his writing, but each piece of his is uniquely formed, sharp as a knife, and, like every true beast, is composed of varying degrees of humor, horror, and beauty.

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As a poem evolves, are you aware of a threshold which when crossed transforms the piece into art? Does every poem have to reach art status?

“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”
—Carl Sandburg

My personal definition of art is that which generates more energy in its consumption than is expended in the act of consuming, whether it be reading, listening, or seeing—perhaps even touch could be considered a tactile art to be shared.  It is a relatively rare event, but you know it when you experience it.

The successful piece of art is a matter/anti-matter machine holding great reserves of energy which are released in the reader’s mind when the piece manages to transport you to the next-higher level.  I know that in my own work I often begin with the known only to find myself suddenly elsewhere.  It is hoped for, but can’t be forced, this levitation, this crossing of a threshold into the marvellous.  The best chance you have of achieving it, I believe, is to make sure you have tapped, sounded, and tested your material thoroughly enough to know where to dig once you begin—hopefully breaking through to an energy capable of carrying you, and the reader, into the unknown.

So, to answer the question of do I know when a poem crosses into the realm of art: no, not while writing.   During the writing everything feels completely real and grounded, the fantastical even more so.  It is only on going back that you can discover the particular place where lift-off occurs.  One thing I do know is that it usually involves a physical reaction of some sort, a quickening of the breath, an increased heart-rate.

Matt reads Scrofula

Being in the midst of the birthing of a piece can be exhilarating, while at the same time  intensely anxiety-producing; therefore the desire for completion is both a great driving force and potential enemy.  Without it, nothing will be attained, but surrender too quickly and your work will never be able to swim with the big fish.   Learning how to dive deep and remain long enough to grab the good stuff—I consider art to be brilliant thievery—is what it’s all about.

Does every poem have to reach art status?  Again, no.  But it should at least wink in its direction.

Scrofula

After the old man found it, the solitary,
upright marker bearing his mother’s
mother’s name, we worked for several days
clearing the small hill of its hundred summers’
growth, and then marched with pitchforks,
side by side, shoving their fingers into the ground,
feeling for what had been slowly bowed
and buried by the dull weight of time.
And when we felt the grip, the pull,
we would slice the earth and slide
our fingers below, force the cool slabs
against the wind once more, restoring
the eddies and swirls that formed their borders
and lifted our hair as we brushed away dirt,
reading names and dates to each other,
hands moving over faces growing
both older and younger until the entire
hill was awakened—and not once
did I think of the skulls which stared
beneath our feet but noticed,
instead, how entire families would be
laid out in descending scales of grief,
all voices stopped within the same small
circle of days, and how one family,
in the winter of 1868, from suckling-child
to still-young father, had been Taken By Scrofula,
the dark, earthy sound of which I tried again
and again in the thick summer air,
imagining horses in snow, their hot breath
warming hands in the stubble fields.

Scrofula, I chanted as I slid the tines in—
scrofula is what I am searching for. It begins,
an unspoken sound of blackness circling
high overhead, looking for someone able
to hear its message of release, to blacken
their lips with the passing of its taste—alone,
and then in staggered harmony with those nearby.
It begins, a whisper in a child’s ear growing
louder and louder until no prayer for health
or moan of love can penetrate the rush
of falling night—so loud his very eyes
become the lips which form the name and all
he can see is the small hill behind the barn
so it is there that he flies, to lie in untouched
silence, waiting for the others, and those
who would come much later, seeking soft marble.

*

For two more days we built a fence
around the hill, digging the holes by hand
and tying the posts together in a complicated,
old-fashioned way whose secret of doing
I knew would vanish with the old man
when he heard his own irresistible sound,
the high, whispered, calling of his name
in the ultimate foreign tongue.

originally appeared in Natural Bridge

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Who are some of your favourite authors?

“What has worth, charm, beauty, wisdom, cannot be lost or forgotten. But things can lose all value, all charm and appeal, if one is dragged to them by the scalp.”
—Henry Miller

There have been many, over the years.  But what I think is more important than having a ready list at hand is recounting favorite reading experiences.  People tend to reel off names as if to pass a test, to gain entrance to some club, but never, to my awareness, do they place the authors in the context of their lives.  Where were you when you read So-and-So?  How old were you?  Were you at home?  In college?  On a Greyhound bus?  Taking a break at the bottle-cap factory?  In the bathtub for hours with your big toe on the hot-water tap?  With this in mind, I think it’s essential to read certain authors at certain times and in certain locations.  Reading Ayn Rand or Thomas Wolfe as a young man in a roominghouse in some strange city can be exhilarating.  Probably not so much as an adult in a lazy-boy in front of the TV.

As I mentioned above, books were always a big part of my life.  One of my earliest reading memories was a child’s book about a penguin who had a secret ice-floe he could go behind and be transported to a new world.  I wanted to go with him. I wanted the same experience, the same through-the-looking-glass excitement.  To this day that’s what I look for when I read.

Being taken to the library when I was quite young, and, of equal importance, being allowed to pick whatever I wanted, was once again like walking along the riverbed, looking for the strange, the beautiful, the compelling.  Because of this, I was reading very widely from an early age.  I remember reading Jules Verne’s “The Mysterious Island” when I was eight.  The book itself was huge, big as the world it contained; definitely big enough for a child to live in, night after night.  I picked up “Crime and Punishment” in the fourth grade because I liked the title, and only became bored at the end, when he found religion.

I was lucky enough to be given a set of  “The Alexandria Quartet,” by Lawrence Durrell when I was quite young, down in New Orleans.  Excellent city and age in which to read those books.  Also, very importantly, someone gave me the novel “Women,” by Charles Bukowski, which completely changed my world.  But again, timing, and location, to a certain extent, is everything.  To be young and poor in America’s most foreign city, suffering in love and terribly insecure about everything, well, Bukowski was a great comfort.  What’s funny, though, is that although I read every single book of his an ungodly number of times, I can’t recall a single poem.  But that is what made it such a comfort, I think: he placed no burden, no expectations of any sort on the reader.  Life as he presented it simply was, and might be survivable after all.

Henry Miller was a godsend, a bolt of lightning.  He showed the universe, the way, the goal.  Going back to the Greyhound bus I mentioned above, I was on one when I looked up and noticed we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.  Then I went back to reading “Tropic of Cancer.”  Also, in the universal generosity and love that was his spirit, he introduced me (and it did feel personal) to many of the great European and Asian writers, which I then found while exploring the used bookstores in the French Quarter—another wilderness to explore.

Matt reads Forever

Finally, when I did finish college, I was very lucky to have a number of very good teachers.  I had already read many of the works in question, and of course was exposed to so much more.  But wonderful as that was, there’s nothing like soaking in an old bear-claw tub for hours,with no telephone, no TV, no computer, no radio, and bumping up the hot water every twenty minutes or so while reading “Journey to the End of the Night” in the absolute peace and safety and solitude of youth.

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Forever

O to be dismembered on a Sunday afternoon,
spread out in succession on a soft white cloth
as eyes, soundly cuffed into the great palm,
watch an emerald lawn flow past the mighty hand.
Removed ears hear the distant bird’s whistle,
the satisfied smack of competent lips. Arms,
legs, hands: all washed in a tub of octane’d
blood, roughly swirled then set out to bask
in the heavenly sun; liver and lungs,
soaked and wrung till they bounce back firm
like a fresh, wet sponge. Tongue scraped,
muscles lengthened, torso drained and lubed;
back straightened, head hand-tightened
(two-thirds turn past snug)—eyes and all
appendages thumbed flush into wet sockets.
Momentary hesitation, threshold of rejection
reached, the hand discards the heart and rips
a small box open: fibrous, stiff, clamps included,
it’s quickly soaked and snapped with muted
flourish. Lingered-over brain considered—
Bah! Out with it! The hand drops a globe
into the scoured skull, secures breath upon
the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,
appraising, fading, receding, forever.

originally appeared in Welter

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Enemy Camp

Ed in his white cap holds
the railing with his
shaky left hand,
cane working the ground
as he smiles, hesitantly,
desiring to approach.
“Ah,” his wife says,
sipping her tea,
observing the sad
spectacle from
the veranda.

“As you can see,
my husband cannot walk. The war—
horrible wounds, not to be
mentioned. His lungs, at first,
black spot small as a quarter,
and then the brain, which reduces
the spinal column to
grease and gravy
and there you have it.
Shall I pour?”

Later that night, looking out
the window, I see Ed
slide out the back door,
look around twice,
hide his cane behind
the potted flowers then
spread his arms to slowly
rise and fly into
the moon-lit clouds
for a little wifeless
while.

originally appeared in Main Street Rag

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Premise

When I was a child it was my job to carry
water to all of the animals. And one day I thought:
if there is a God, He will not let me drop

my bucket before I reach the pasture—
If there is a God who does intervene,
He will stop my hand from weakening

in the service of His beloved creatures.
I turned the handle and watched the water flow,
stopped the spigot and stood in the brilliance.

I filled and dropped the bucket three times
that day, then forgot about it. The animals
needed water, and it was up to me.

originally appeared in Natural Bridge

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After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans (as street musician, psych tech, riverboat something-or-other, door-to-door poetry peddler, etc.), Matt Dennison finished his undergraduate degree at Mississippi State University where he won the National Sigma Tau Delta essay competition (as judged by X.J. Kennedy). He currently lives in a 100-year-old house with “lots of potential.” His work has appeared in Rattle, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cider Press Poetry Review, GUD, Natural Bridge, A Cappella Zoo, Marginalia, G.W. Review, and Main Street Rag, among others.

Matt is the author of four chapbooks of poetry–Dog Medicine and Scrofula are available from Pudding House Publications/Pudding House Innovative Writers Programs, The Wedding Tree and Waiting for Better may be purchased by contacting columbusmatt@cableone.net

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Interviewed by Carol Reid

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