A Conversation With Matt Mason on Writing Genre Poetry, Part 2 (Killer Writers)

In the first part of my conversation with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason, we discussed how fiction writers can capitalize on writing poetry and that, in the end, it’s all just storytelling, but in form. In my continued conversation with Matt here, I was curious to know what essential elements a poem should have in our current poetry age, and then—as publication is always on our minds—how do we submit our poetry and get it published.

(Part 1 of the Conversation With Matt Mason.)

“Matt, for fiction writers who want to take a stab at writing poetry, what do you think are the essential elements a poem should have?”

“I would love to see more fiction writers writing poetry because it expands what we see as poetry. I would love to see these writers taking elements that they put into their fiction and just try it in the shape of a poem, even if you’re not sure it is a poem. Try the shape of a poem, work in some different uses of language and line breaks and shapes of what you’re looking at and have fun with it. There’s a book called Final Girl by the poet Daphne Gottlieb that is all about the final girl in the horror movie who survives, and it’s an amazing book. And I would love to see more books of poetry like that that take on elements of what we consider more like movies or like fiction. I would love to see someone writing a book of, you know, thriller noir poetry. Why not? Any creative writing is about experimentation. It’s about trying different things in different fashions, and I love seeing when that comes out.”

“Can you give some other examples of genre poetry?”

“Crazy Horse in Stillness (William Heyen) is a great book of poetry that’s mainly about Crazy Horse and Custer. What the Ice Gets (Melinda Mueller) is basically a nonfiction historical imagining of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. I mean, I love books of poetry that take on these things in different ways and teach me something, make me feel something I didn’t expect to feel, and just see what happens.”

“I was trained, and I studied profusely to try to be a good poet, which I don’t know if I’ve ever attained, but some topics seem to be subjects that appeal to me, and some of those seem to be styles that have been thrown out the window by the current trends. I’m going to ask you a few things, and you tell me where we are in reference to writing publishable poetry. Meter?”

“I think steady meter is difficult to come by. Steady meter was under assault by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot 110 years ago. It’s something you don’t see much of. You’ll still see some iambic pentameter, some blank verse, various things in poems, but not a lot. And when I’m writing poems, I don’t write in steady meter for the most part, unless it accentuates something that I’m talking about.”

“Then how do you define it as poetry?”

“I pay attention to the rhythm of what I’m writing and how I’m writing it.”

“Rhythm, not meter?”

“It tends to be more the rhythm of my voice, which is much more of a jazz rhythm. I think we need to pay attention to the rhythm of our poetry and figure out what we’re doing and why because it is an important consideration. But meter is less of a focus, I would say.”

“I guess some of that is reading out loud and seeing how it seems to pounce along?”

“That definitely helps.”

“Because, in the end, poetry is traditionally meant to be read aloud. What about rhyme?”

“Rhyme is absolutely crucial in a lot of poetry. Not all. Again, similar to meter, it’s changing rather than being eliminated. I don’t use the AB/AB sonnet format all that often, but I do use rhyme to connect parts of poems, to end a poem on a musical note, things like that. So, I love using rhyme in a different way than the classical uses of rhyme. I absolutely love rhyme because it is musical, it is powerful, and it is just kind of fun to work with. It’s also frustrating to work with because the English language is terrible for rhyming, but, you know, we do as best we can.”

“What about stanza form? And how do you determine how the poem is laid out on the page?”

“I really look for how my poems look on the page to match how I think the poem should be read out loud. It’s hard for me to write in paragraphs. I don’t write fiction partly because I am so used to poetry and what you can do with whitespace.”

“Whitespace?”

“It frames the urgency.”

“How do you mean?”

“It frames the feeling of sections of a poem in such a fun way that I love playing with that, and I love the use of a stanza, the use of a line, the use of just space on a page is so much fun to me. There’s the kind of traditional way. You can use line breaks to accentuate a word at the end or beginning of a line, or mark off a phrase that’s important. I forget who wrote it, but there’s a great essay on the line break that regards a line break as being like half a comma. It’s that little bit of a partial pause as we read a poem out loud, and I think stanza breaks even more so for me. I work hard on how a poem sounds out loud, and I would love as much as possible to be able to put that on a page in a way where someone else can read it in essentially the voice I hear in my head. I really work on how it looks on the page for readers to find that.”

“Do you have resources that you would recommend for learning how to write poetry? I mean, the best source is finding great poems that appeal to you, I would say. But is there a book on that? Most of the books that I’ve seen are on that traditionalist rhythm, meter, looking at Chaucer types of instructional books. And then there’s the other frame of thought of just, I don’t really understand what in the world this person is saying. And then there’s someone like you who’s writing accessible poetry that I get. I think most fiction writers are probably going to fall in my group because we’re used to communicating clearly and making sure that the reader understands exactly what we’re saying, and yet at the same time the brevity, and the line breaks, and all of this other stuff, and the meter may be foreign to us. So do you have any kind of resources where our kind of poet could go, ‘Okay, if I wanted to learn more about writing poetry as a fiction writer, where would I go?’”

“That’s the hard part with poetry and why most people are frightened of poetry, or hesitant to dive into poetry in that there’s no RottenTomatoes.com for poetry for us to find the poems we like, or that would appeal to us. Entertainment Weekly is going to put a review of a book of poetry maybe twice a year. It’s hard to find that kind of review. If we want to find music we like, there’s so many resources out there. It’s fairly easy to narrow things down and find something. Poetry, for whatever reason, is a lot tougher right now. One book I love for writing poetry is Ted Kooser’s Poetry Home Repair Manual. I think it’s aimed towards you. It’s aimed towards me. It’s aimed towards pretty much any reader. Kooser is amazing, too. He’s trying to write poems that people will understand, will read, and get something from, and I love him for that. That is probably the main one. There’s an old textbook, The Discovery of Poetry, by Frances Mayes, which is probably out of print. But I had it when I was in college in the late 80s, which I just thought was really helpful, and it has all the different styles, and it’ll tell you how to write a villanelle, and it’ll tell you about free verse, and it’ll give you all the vocabulary. So, if that’s something you’re looking for, that’s a good one, too. Also, Billy Collins did a couple of different anthologies called Poetry 180 or 180 More, which I love. Find a good poetry anthology and flip through it. If you’re five lines into a poem and you’re not interested, flip the page. I think sometimes we feel like we have to read the whole poem and figure it out, and if we’re just trying to find some poets we like, go quick through an anthology, figure out who in there appeals to you, who in there doesn’t, and look up more by the poets who jump out to you. You can usually figure that out within a few lines. Of course, there are some brilliant poems that start at like line 30. I mean, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn has one of the worst openings of a poem I’ve ever read, but the ending is my favorite ending of a poem I’ve ever read. So, it’s not a perfect technique, but you do what you can, and most of it is about finding those poets who you want to write like. That was my problem. That was what was difficult for me. As I was trying to research poetry, I would read these books that had won awards, and it’s like, I don’t want to write poems like this. I have no interest in writing a poem like these poems in this book. But it’s finding the poets that you hear or read, and it’s like, ‘Oh. That’s something different. I like that.’ That you could see yourself modeling yourself after, at least in some respects, or at least see yourself as a poet in the vein of that person. So, it’s all about finding the genres of poetry that appeal to you, and that you want to write like.”

“How do you find out where to submit your poetry? There are literary magazines, and tons of them, and you can probably spend weeks finding a place to submit five lines, and that doesn’t seem like a cost-effective use of time. What do you recommend? Where do you find where to go to submit?”

“I think the most useful thing for me is when you find those poets who you like, who you see yourself in the vein of your own writing, look at their books and see where they publish. So, if you like my book, look at the places where I’ve been published, and maybe consider those magazines.”

“I’ve never thought of that before. In a lot of poetry books, they put in the front where they were originally published, so people could find publishing opportunities that way in the books that they are looking at.”

“Any book of poetry should have that acknowledgments page so you can see what magazines poems from that book have been published in, and I use those a lot. I will flip through the books that I enjoy reading and that I think I write something similar to, or at least am trying to, and I’ll try those magazines. Otherwise, I’ll flip through the Poets & Writers online listing of magazines and just see if something’s description matches something I’d be interested in. I’m Facebook friends with a lot of poets, so I see where they’ll put up a notice, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new poem in Hawaii Pacific Review.’ It’s like, oh, I should look into that and look at the magazine, read a couple poems online in that magazine. If you feel like, ‘I like these poems, I could see myself next to these poems,’ send it in. It’s mostly about using your contacts and using your own bookcase, but then a little bit of blind searching on Poets & Writers and other publishing resources can help, too. And partly it’s being a little audacious. I mean, I’ve sent poems in for calls for anthologies that end up getting 8,000 or 9,000 submissions. And every now and then I’ve gotten something published, which is amazing. Don’t spend a ton of time on a farfetched possibility, but if it takes just as much time as anything else, try for those because you never know.”

“Fiction writers are trained to think a certain way, and you see Submittable where it says, X amount of dollars to submit your poem. And you’re thinking, ‘Okay, is this vanity press?’ Or should we go, ‘Oh, this is part of making sure they stay in business?’ And how should we feel about these submission fees?”

“That’s always a mix. I look for free submission periods. With poetry magazines, there’s a fair amount of those. Many magazines, even some big ones, have free periods, so I watch for those. When I find a magazine I really want to submit to, and the submission period is not open, or it’s not the free period and there is one, I’ll put it on my calendar. It’s like, ‘send some poems here.’ It’s a quick and easy way to kind of schedule yourself. If it’s a $2 or $3 submission, I figure when I first started sending things to magazines, you would have to put a stamp on the envelope, you would have to have a self-addressed stamped envelope inside, you would have printing fees. It probably came out to a couple of bucks for every submission anyway.”

“So that’s an operating expense, basically. What about $25 entry fees?”

“Yeah, $25 entry fees, I figure the odds are so far out of my favor. If it includes a subscription, then I might do that to get a year of the magazine, or something like that. Especially contests—I don’t generally enter those because they tend to cost $10 or $20, and the math is not in my favor.”

“As a parting word: Do you have any advice for writers such as us? Fiction writers wanting to write poetry?”

“I would say, try to forget what you’ve been told poetry is supposed to be and write what you wish poetry had more of. Why are you writing fiction? Why are you reading fiction and not poetry? What kind of poetry would make you as interested in reading poetry as you are interested in reading fiction? Write those poems, grow, make yourself more of a reader of poetry that way, and maybe inspire audiences. Poetry really needs a broader range of audience, and I would love to see fiction writers trying to break into it. As much as that annoys me, though, too, because you know, I’ve studied poetry forever, and I’m sure you know fiction writers will jump into poetry and do better than I. It’s like, dang it! I always hate it. Every now and then a book of poetry will come out from like a physicist or someone like that, and it is so damned beautiful, and I hate them for that because they’ve studied some other subject their whole life and then wrote a brilliant book of poetry, and I’ve been trying to make it with poetry my whole life. But, fiction writers, jump in. Come on. Enter the pool. A lot of fiction writers could look at poetry as something in a completely different way, which would have quite an audience, and I would love to see what they do with poems, what they do with form, and the more people trying different things the better.”

“So, what are we waiting for?”

“Grab a pen.”

___________________

Matt Mason

Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and has run State Department poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, Rattle, Poet Lore, and hundreds more. He’s received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. https://midverse.com/