September 2010

Elizabeth Hildreth

features

An Interview with Matthew Lippman

Matthew Lippman is the author of the new Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing). His previous book, The New Year of Yellow, won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize and was published by Sarabande Books in 2007. He is the recipient of a Michener Poetry Fellowship and a New York Fine Arts Grant. Matthew teaches English and creative writing to high school students at Beaver Country Day School in the greater Boston area, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

In early July 2010, Matthew was interviewed over e-mail by Elizabeth Hildreth. They discuss, among other things, American Man vs. Today’s Man, why Matthew’s poems are like TV, being typecast as a poet, the benefits of living in low-middle income housing as a child, writing sports poems that aren’t sports poems, the selfish “hot topic dance” he’s doing, wandering through the poetry desert, and how if he’s sixty and writing about cardinals, we have permission to shoot him.

Hi, Matthew! I still remember the first time I read a poem of yours. I loved it, and then I looked in the back of the journal, the bio section, and everybody’s bio said, “So and so has recently published in XYZ,” but your bio just said “Matthew Lippman works at American Man.” Is that the name of it? Some suit store? I thought you were so amazing after that when I met you for two minutes at First Street Café I almost fainted. That was fifteen years ago. I haven’t seen you since. But I’ve been watching your work. Your first book you published with Sarabande. Now this new one, you’ve published with Typecast. It’s a new press, and you’re their first author. How did that happen and how’s that been?

So, I was up in the woods with a group of nine-year-olds feeling like shit because I was a forty-four-year-old camp counselor, and Jen Woods the visionary, founder of Typecast calls me up on my cell phone, tells me she is leaving Sarabande to start her own publishing company, do I have a manuscript to send? Hell yeah, I’ve got a manuscript. You want it? Damn straight I want it, she yelped, and we were in business. I was giddy for weeks. Jen’s whole thing is that she wants to get people to buy and read poems that don’t normally buy and read poems. Also, she has this artistic aesthetic which she shares with her brother, Eric, who owns and runs Firecracker Press. They specialize in beautifully created letterpress printings. Monkey Bars is their first book. Anyway… Jen calls me up, we get it going on and then I get a little hesitant, for a second, like I’ve just driven off the get-your-second-book-of-poems published road. But that passes because I realize the beauty in the whole endeavor. One, Jen loves my work. Narcissistic, yes, but it’s good to have folks in your corner. Two, I’m her only child. Only children get spoiled because all the energy from the parental unit is invested in that one little ball of energy. That’s what Monkey Bars is -- one little ball of energy that Jen, for her own beautiful reasons, wants to push, sell, have the world enjoy. She wants truckers to read Monkey Bars. She wants stock brokers and chefs and telephone repair people and professors to read this book. I knew this going in and that’s exactly what I want too, have wanted my whole life -- a big, democratic and everywhere. So, we shared that vision. It’s like I’ve been wandering the poetry desert for a long, long time. I’ve had some success with some tremendous people saying yes. I am thankful beyond belief for them because, in many ways, I should not have made it this far. But Jen, oh Jennifer, oh Jenny. She came to me in just the right moment in my life, in that day up in the hills of Massachusetts and gave me that cool drink of water, said, You want a sip? I did and have sucked down many a glass since.

Oh, one small thing. I worked at Today’s Man back then but I wish I had worked at a place called “American Man.” It was a men’s clothing store that went under some years back. The company also sold sportswear and shoes. Today’s Man. Tomorrow’s Man. American Man. It’s all the same thing.

Oh, Today’s Man, not American Man. Got it. When you say, “then I get a little hesitant, for a second, like I’ve just driven off the get-your-second-book-of-poems published road” what’s that’s mean? Does that mean you had split second reservations about going for this newbie boutique press vs. a more established academic press? If so, what were these reservations -- that you would somehow not be seen as serious as someone who publishes with, say, Graywolf or something? You know what I like about your poems? You use words like Wal-Mart and giant KitKat and Richard Pryor and motherfucker and Alec Baldwin. And also you have these passages that unapologetically promote family life and values. That’s simplifying things of course and making your poems sound like nothing anybody would ever want to read, but what I’m saying is you don’t really hide how you feel. You’re not at all afraid to say, “People should live like this. But they don’t.” Here are a couple examples that I liked a lot. Here’s two stanzas from “Silly and Brave.” 

For instance, my best friend’s husband went on a trip to the Sierra Madres
and met a twenty-four-year-old virgin from Nebraska
on the bush.
They fell in love after twelve hours of sex.
He said, We were like Sting and Trudy.
I was inside of her for eight hours straight,
Took a water break and went back in for three-and-a-half more.
I said, You are a Rembrandt of the coitus
It’s Kama Sutra, man. It’s true love. 

Back in Brighton his wife was fifteen weeks pregnant
watching t.v.
with their six-year old daughter,
both getting real pissed off
at all the commercials.  

Here’s a little bit from “Marriage Pants.” 

Eight years later
My buddy Stu said to me:
How do you stay connected?
I said:
You want to stay close, stay close.
You want to be in love, be in love.
It’s like watching t.v.
It’s like ping pong after dinner.
You pick up the clicker, you pick up
the paddle.

It’s sort of unusual nowadays, don’t you think? I don’t see much of that. I see more of this: I’m thinking about being born. I’m thinking about what it means to be born. I’m thinking about what the world would have been if nobody was ever born but I wasn’t nobody. I like those types of poems. But I’d like to see more of these kinds of poems, too. Poems that are reflective but outward looking and directive. These Get your shit together, people kind of poems. They’re fun. They’re like TV in a way. We’re used to people saying things on TV that mean something. We’re used to people on TV telling other people exactly who they are and what they did wrong and what they should have done instead. But a lot of poetry doesn’t do that. That’s why everybody watches TV and nobody reads poetry, I guess.

Goddamn, that’s good: TV. I have always believed that my poems were little TV commercials, ultimately. I think that is what I aspire to because I want them to be accessible to everyone. It would be fantastic if poems could take the place of television. It would be fantastic if the experience of watching TV and reading a poem was similar. In a way, it is. The components of a television show/commercial and a poem are actually quite alike: quick cuts, leaps, humor, drama, witty dialogue. The best poems and the best television are doing the same thing. Take a show like Fringe and a poem by Leigh Stein, it’s all the same impulse. Suck the viewer/reader in, give him/her a grounded, serious, dark, light, funny, sad experience, be beautifully bizarre. Entertain. So, I am glad you made the reference to TV and my poems. It’s the best compliment I have ever received.  I’d like to think I am in the entertainment business.

The thing about the second book -- I just did not want my second book to be a second book. I wanted it to be something special and that’s what Jen was proposing. Something out of the box, extraordinary, with a different look, feel, trajectory -- a book of poetry that could be sold at Urban Outfitters and enjoyed by everyone.

This book could definitely be sold at the UO. Did you know that Leigh visited Chicago, and I went to the beach with her this weekend -- literally two days ago -- and we had a great time? Is that why you name dropped her? She’s in almost every one of my interviews. Anyway, you play around with race and gender and disability and say outrageous stuff that’s bound to get you into trouble. Let me give you some examples. Like in “With Black Man (for Carl S.),” you write: 

I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out
How to walk down a street
With a black man
And not notice
That he’s black.
How do you do that?
It’s racist.
It has to be.

[…]

Once [Carl] said, I know you are not afraid.
I loved him then
because he was black
and he was Carl
with a huge neck.
Truth be known: I was afraid. 

Or in “Silly and Brave,” you say: 

It’s not fair to say that the woman I work with is a lesbian
Even though she is a lesbian.
How do I know she’s a lesbian? She told me.
It’s fun when people say stuff about themselves that is very personal to them but to me,
I couldn’t care less.
Not because I don’t care
But because nothing is very personal
And nothing comes as a surprise.
[…]
So, this woman I work with—the lesbian—
She tells me she hates men
And I’m eating a corned beef sandwich,
Because her father beat her momma
And her momma drank a lot of gin.
And, you see, she said,
That’s why I hate guys.
But, I said,
This corned beef sandwich is tremendous,
You should have a bite.
Then she said something nasty
about the way I chew
which is why I shouldn’t like lesbians. 

But I don’t care what the hell you are
Or call yourself, think you are, want to be.
It’s all a little Silly and Brave at the same time. 

Or “Wal-Mart Poem”: 

How’s that for a sight? I saw to her,
pointing to the one-eyed kid in a wheelchair
with a Spiderman costume on
He hasn’t taken off since Halloween. 

It’s the water, she tells me.
Or the soda, I say,
and soon enough
I can’t hide behind enough patio furniture
to save my life. 

We actually met because I asked to re-envision one of your poems called “Retards.” I wrote a poem called “Retard” in response. And another poet read our poems and she said she felt offended by your poem, though not so much by mine (which implied to me she was still a little offended by mine). I don’t remember her exact words. I know she mentioned she didn’t know how to read your tone in the poem. I felt really bad about it, possibly making this person feel bad -- especially considering my daughter is developmentally and physically disabled, and my poem was actually written for her, but you didn’t seem to care. You said something like, “Oh well. That’s the beauty and horror of putting these things out into the world. People misunderstand your intentions.” Have you ever had this experience in person? Hearing firsthand that you’ve offended someone with one of your poems? Do you feel obligated to bring things out, like race, like disability, so people can take a look at them? Maybe obligated is a strong word. Do you feel interested in bringing these things to paper? Or do random hot topics involuntarily fly out of you while you’re writing and end up on paper? How much do you think about your audience?

Oh, I think about audience all the time. But, it’s gotten to the point where I am just writing what I am writing because I imagine myself in the audience. I write what I would like to hear or read so at the same time, in the writing process, I am both poet and audience member. It’s probably a very selfish dance that I am doing but I do it because it’s fun and really, that’s the origin of all this writing stuff. Part of the fun making is dealing with “hot” topics in a way that pushes the envelope. I don’t mean to offend and no one has ever come to me to say that they were offended by what I have written. I try to confront some of my own darkness in these poems. I try to do it in a way that is honest, sympathetic and artful. See, the thing is this: there is all this crazy shit happening in the world -- The Gulf, Darfur, anger, rage, racism, sexism, kids getting bullied, kids taking drugs, adults taking drugs, black presidents, white presidents, dictators, poverty, bad air, bad dreams -- and it has an impact on me. I’m a poet. I write poems about things. Sometimes these “worldly” things get into my poems. They have to because if they didn’t the poems would suck. They would suck because they would be much too self involved. So yes, I am conscious of how oily pelicans will arrive in a poem about a street in my neighborhood that I would to love live on, Otis Street. It’s random and not. But I’m two thousand miles away from those pelicans and as a citizen of the world I have to take note. That’s what I can do. Jen Woods, can do something else. She is publisher. What does she do? She donates 25% of Typecast’s sales to Gulf revitalization. I think what she does is much more practical, hands on, pragmatic. No one is trying to offend. We are all just trying to help out because the whole goddamn thing is so fragile.

Your poems strike me as really honest. You don’t pull no punches, Lippman. Or if you do, you’re really good at hiding it. I didn’t know that Typecast did that. Wow, wow. In addition to the previously mentioned topics, you also write about fatherhood in this book. You love it. You complain about it. Like in “Like Lizards”:

The madness of having kids is they don't go away.
I want them to -- to the park for twelve years
or to college when they are ten --
even the ones who haven't arrived.

I feel like it's easy for people to dismiss poems when they’re a) funny and b) about kids. Do you ever feel that way? Maybe I feel like this is more the case with women? I don't know how I feel actually. A lot of people don't write about their kids. If you asked them, I bet they'd say it's to protect their kids' privacy, but I bet it's because if you're a poet, you're not supposed to do anything fun or have kids or watch TV or go to the mall. When you're a poet, you can only have a couple things:

a. a drink
b. a Ph.D. in creative writing

Does your wife like when you write about her and your family? I said to my husband, "It has to be so cool to have somebody write about you all the time," and he said, "Actually that's the worst thing about being married to you." Which most definitely is not true. There are much worse things than that. But it was nice of him to say that I thought.

When my first kid was born, I couldn’t write a poem. For two years. Then I started writing again, about her. I think the first poem I wrote that made any sense after her birth is called “At Keelers.” It’s about going to get ice cream and shutting up, about being quiet in the face of having a kid. After I wrote the poem I thought, hey, I can’t write about anything else but marriage, children, adult life. Four years later my wife got pregnant and I kinda flipped out. I wrote “Like Lizards” as a way of trying to be honest about the whole thing. I was scared. I was hesitant even though I had been in active participant in the baby making experience. We did not know it was going to be a girl when I wrote the poem. The poem talks about having a boy. It does not matter. What matters is that these topics -- kids, birth, marriage -- resonate with me deeply. It’s all there is now. I went to summer camp with this kid who turned out to be a highly visible movie critic for a major news publication. When I lived in Brooklyn, I ran into him on the street after not seeing him for twenty years. I asked him how he was, what he was up to and all he could say was, Kids. He had two. It occurred to me that given all of his acclaim, fame, etc., no matter how much all of that was, meant, his answer was kids. I got it but I didn’t. I get it now. They inhabit everything, take up every little second and there is just no way that I can write poems now about standing on the side of the highway thinking if I should stick out my thumb or sit down because I might, or might not, know who I am. In any case, I think there is more and more of this kind of poetry being written -- about the kids. I see it everywhere. Adrian Blevins taught me a little bit about the subject, about writing about amniotic fluid and those little motherfuckers that run around thinking they are reptiles. These days I see poems by a lot of women regarding children and childbirth -- Rachel Zucker and Dorianne Lux and Erika Meitner. Wonderful poets. The work is biting and honest and sink-your-teeth-in primal.

Yes. My wife likes it. She is a big honesty fan and sometimes I think I am most honest in the poems. So, yes, she likes it. My eldest daughter likes it too. She likes to see her name in print. She thinks it’s cool. And funny. For some reason all these poems, lines in the poems, are funny to her. Which is the best response there is. Poems that are funny, even when they are not funny, and about kids, even when they are not about kids, make the best fruit salad. That’s who I feel about it all at this stage in my life. I think about when I am sixty, will I still be writing these things. I don’t think so. It makes me sad, a little. It’s youthfulness, life, all that great stuff that comes through even at three in the morning when the little one is crying her head off because she wants the breast and there is nothing else. When I am sixty, one of my daughters will be in college, the other in high school. I’ll be writing about, I don’t know, cardinals. I hope not. Shoot me if I am.  

At AWP, I actually talked to Jen Woods when she gave me a review copy of Monkey Bars, and I remember her telling me a story about how you write standing up? I can’t remember the story. I can’t remember any stories exactly right -- see American Man above. But I remember her saying something about how your writing space is transient. Or makeshift in some way? And I think that this makeshift writing space tied to your kids in some way? Is any of this ringing a bell? If not, disregard. If so, please do explain what the hell you’re doing over there in Boston. You’re in Boston, right? Do you have any set routine for writing? Since kids, I write whenever, wherever. I had all the time in the world to think about the conditions under which a person might be able to write a good poem before. But now there’s no time for thinking. I type with one hand and eat a plate of spaghetti with the other. By the way, my daughter always laughs at my poems, too. She thinks poetry is completely absurd. She’s always trying to one-up me. After I read mine, she’s like, well, here’s MY poem:

CHUNG PING.
That means ABCDEFG
in Chinese!

Your daughter is a genius. I love that. CHUNG PING. I am going to walk around all day saying Chung Ping.

What the hell is going on Chicago? In Boston, yeah, I don’t have any space at home. The computer is on top of this cabinet we have in the kitchen. It’s next to a little window, next to my five year old’s wooden play kitchen. That’s where I write. Sometimes I steal away while the ladies are at the other end of the apartment until someone screams my name. Sometimes, late at night, when everyone is asleep, I get out of bed and try and write. I tried last night but I was too tired. That’s my routine. I have no routine. It’s all about the girls. It’s all so public, too. There is no space in our apartment for anything but family life. We got toys in the living room, kitchen, hanging off the ceiling, the light fixtures, diapers in the cabinet that houses the phone, laundry basket and diaper pail and high chair and little pieces of avocado winding their way onto the couch. Who the hell knows? I like it this way. Sometimes I look at my children and think about how one day they will be off on their own and all that youthfulness will be out of the house. I feel lucky that I don’t need an office or a studio or a den to go to when I want to write. Maybe it’s because I was born in Manhattan in 1965 and lived in low-middle income housing till my parents moved us out to the green pastures of Westchester County.

Chung Ping is right!

I think that’s valuable -- being extremely cramped from an early age. Developing low expectations for space. We have a two-bedroom house with three kids right now (one foreign exchange student) and no walls. Nobody seems to care. Oh my God, speaking of Chung Ping, we went to Chinatown last night and my daughter kept screaming “Chung Ping!” at anyone who looked vaguely Asian walking by. When I told her to stop it she said, “Why? It means, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ I learned it on TV!” I didn’t want to say, “No it does not!” Because maybe it does. Does it, Matthew? Does anyone know what Chung Ping means? Also, when we got to the restaurant, she was dancing all through the restaurant, pressing the palms of her hands together and making all these ridiculously deep bows at people who were eating. It was embarrassing. When I told her to stop, she was all annoyed like, “What? I’m doing the Spring Lotus Dance!” I never know when she’s lying. Like is there a Spring Lotus Dance? I’m sure there isn’t. But maybe there is. It sounds like there could be. What do I know about dancing? What’s next? What are you working on now? Just from reading your work I assume you write poem to poem and when you have enough poems, then you have a book. Is that right? Or do you start with a theme or an idea for a book and then fill in from there?

I have no idea what Chung Ping means. It sounds great. That’s what I know what it means.

I just started working on these poems about sports. I don’t know why. I am a huge sports fan. Not huge but huge. I don’t run around with statistics and players and trades and memorized matches in my head but if there’s a game on the television, I’m in. Last night I was watching the Red Sox/Devil Rays baseball game. I watch golf, soccer, women’s softball… anything. It makes no sense to me because I am a terrible sportsman. I played golf last week for the first time in about two years and hit the ball with a three wood that my father gave me like never before. Right off the tee. 200 yards. My irons were lofty and straight. I was alone on a public course in Newton. Hot day. Woke up in a foul mood. Rachel, my wife, said: Go play some golf, get it out of your system. There was something very beautiful to me about using these clubs that my father had given me. I came home from my nine holes and the house, unexpectedly, was empty. I stood at my computer and wrote. Some quiet. This poem came out of me about the golf but also about my father. The next day I wrote one about my daughter and baseball. We take these walks at five in the morning past a little league field. Every couple of days we find a baseball. Maybe these poems are about sports and family. They are hard to write because sentimentality and on the field competition go hand in hand. Just watch the television show Friday Night Lights. Great stuff but sappy as hell. I’m trying to stay away from that. The golf poem is called, “Shut the Hell Up Johnny Miller.” A touch of bitterness but love, always love. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a book of sports poems. I don’t care. The next book is called Lullaby for Earth. Birth poems. Global warming poems. I didn’t plan it like that. Just happened. I don’t think I can write any more poems about birth. We’re done making babies. I’m not done making poems, though. I’d like to have a book of sports poems that are not sports poems. That would be great. I started one about soccer but it sucks. No tension in it. Pele is in it, though. And those Spanish television announcers who scream, GOOOOOAAAALLLL, when the black and white ball hits the back of the net.

I’m not a sports fan either but if you write a poetry book about sports, I will read it. I promise. Also, in the future, whenever I feel like complaining about lack of space, I will think of you, standing up at your kitchen cabinet, next to your tiny window, tapping out your family/birth/global warming/sports poems. Thanks for sharing all your biz with us, Matthew. GOOOOOAAAALLLL!

Thanks, Liz. For all the good vibes, vibeology, for coming up with these questions and talking shop. I had a great time.

Elizabeth Hildreth is an instructional designer. She lives in Chicago and is a regular interviewer for Bookslut.