A Conversation With Matt Mason on Writing Genre Poetry, Part 1 (Killer Writers)
This past September, I was asked to give a series of lectures on writing at the South Dakota Festival of Books, an incredible event that took place this year in the iconic Western town of Deadwood, South Dakota. I love these gatherings because I get to shake hands with so many writers whom I admire, as well as getting to meet new authors that soon become some of my favorites.
(100+ Poetic Forms for Poets to Try.)
One of these is poet Matt Mason, Nebraska State Poet, and author of the poignant book At the Corner of Fantasy and Main, a book of poetry reflections on Disneyland through the eyes of mid-life. I love the poetry of the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Peter Straub. I have shelves of books of story poem collections such as Eccentric Orbits, Empty Bottles Full of Stories, The Pocket Book of Story Poems. It’s been one of my goals at Killer Nashville to encourage fiction writers to consider writing poetry and, in my many conversations with Matt, he agreed.
“So, Matt, I’ve really been trying to expand the idea of writing poetry for people who normally write genre fiction: mystery, thriller, suspense, noir, sci-fi, western. I love reading these when I can find them, but unfortunately, they are few and far between. I’ve found there is an interest among fiction writers in writing poetry, but they really don’t know how to start. Of course, they’ve tinkered with poems—what writer hasn’t?—but they’re not really sure how to begin or how to take their own writing of poetry seriously. What is poetry for the non-poet writer who wants to pursue and experiment with that?”
“Well, for me, poetry is telling stories that someone can feel as much as they understand intellectually. I love the old Bill Kloefkorn definition of poetry, that a poem is an attitude looking for something solid to sit down on, just meaning that a poem is a feeling, an attitude, an emotion that needs solid details or specifics to frame it so that someone else can both understand it and feel it. Poetry started thousands of years ago as basically a fancy way of fiction, fiction with rhyme and meter so that it could be memorized and passed down before there was written language. We’ve definitely gotten away from that, especially in the last hundred years, to where poetry is more of an intellectual exercise that’s about difficulty and a difficult way of communicating. I like poems where I see it fitting more genres of being horror-poetry, thriller-poetry, something that appeals to fiction writers and fiction audiences is what I’m really shooting at for poetry.”
“So, if poetry began as ‘a fancy way of fiction,’ is poetry story?”
“I think so. I mean, sometimes it’s stories, sometimes it’s a snapshot, but I think it is very similar to what a short fiction writer might be going for. It is different from fiction in how it is done, but I think it’s going towards much of the same purpose. It’s a little bit less speaking to the brain and more speaking to the heart and the stomach of a reader. Trying to really make someone feel an experience as much as they intellectually grasp it.”
“So what does it take to write poetry, and how do you know if you’ve written a good one?”
“For me it is starting with an idea, an image, a particular feeling, and then trying to find the right words for it. Anyone who’s tried to translate emotion into language so that other people will feel that knows how difficult that is. Writing a love letter? You know, good luck. We’ve all done that poorly at some point in our life, and hopefully we’ve all done that well at some point in our life. But we are all brought up wherever in the world we are brought up. We are brought up with different cultures, different languages, and everywhere everyone wrestles with trying to say things in a way that someone else will be able to grasp the feelings that we are experiencing. And poetry is putting that into language. And it has been something that has been part of human culture as long as we’ve had human culture. It is part of who we are as humans. And so, it’s got that importance. And it’s not just an intellectual exercise like it has kind of been looked at for these last 100 to 120 years. It really is something about us communicating our own experiences in a way that someone else will really be able to feel. It’s not just brain-to-brain communication. It’s more of a heart-to-heart or stomach-to-stomach, or whatever kind of communication.”
“Is that what differentiates it from a short story or something else? You’re actually going heart-to-heart?”
“Yeah, I think that’s more of what does differentiate it. I put the border lines as pretty blurry, though. You know you read a novel like The Bell Jar written by someone well-known in poetry…”
“Sylvia Plath.”
“Yeah, Plath. And it is doing what a poem does, I think through most of that novel and making you feel what she’s going through. That is really what she’s trying to communicate as much as the story of the book.”
“How do you know that you’ve written a good poem that you feel confident that you’re not going to be so stupid sharing it with someone else, or even, audaciously saying, ‘I think I’m going to send this to a literary magazine and see if they will take it?’”
“That is the question. I’m certain I’ve sent terrible poems to literary magazines.”
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“And probably got some accepted because you don’t know how the reader is going to take it.”
“That’s it, and that is where the poem goes from something of your own to something of the culture. If an editor loves a shitty poem, then is it a shitty poem? I don’t know. These are the things we wrestle. This is why it stinks to be a writer. We’re sitting here trying to do our best and hopefully doing it well, but who knows? If a poem is going to be something I send out, I don’t just send away something I wrote yesterday because I’m still so deeply into the experience of writing it that I don’t know how good or bad it is. It might resonate with me, but I’m not sure how well it stands up for other readers. So I like holding onto a poem a little while, reading it out loud plenty, putting it in a drawer for at least a week so that when I pull it out maybe I don’t remember the emotion I had when I was writing it. But if, after I put it away for a little bit, I can still feel what I was feeling that day and if it recalls that like a time capsule, then I think it’s got a chance. At that point, I’ll send it out to magazines, or I’ll read it at a reading or an open mic and see how it feels in front of an audience. It’s not so much the audience reaction. It’s, as I read a poem to an audience, do I feel like an idiot? And you know, sometimes you do. Sometimes you don’t. It is an odd thing. The best we can do is write what we think is good and hope that that resonates and works. I spent a good amount of my time writing poetry not being sure if what I wrote was poetry or was good poetry. After college I kept studying poetry, and I would go to a bookstore, get a book of poems that won some award and go, ‘Oh, if I’m studying poetry, I want to study this book.’ And I would read it and maybe hate it, maybe think, ‘I don’t write anything like this. I don’t enjoy reading this. What am I? Is that on me? Is that on them?’ And it took a little while before I found poets. At some point I stopped believing that what I was writing was poetry, but it was just things in the shape of a poem, until I found writers like Galway Kinnell or Denise Duhamel, or others who are writing poems that were socially conscious, but also a little bit of humor, a little bit of strangeness in them in ways that connected to me, in ways that those other books I had read just kind of pulling randomly from a bookstore shelf didn’t. It’s kind of realizing the different genres of poetry. That it’s not just one thing that we like or don’t like, or we write like, or we don’t write like. But there’s so many different forms of poetry out there right now. It’s figuring out what we enjoy, what you enjoy, what I enjoy, what works for me, what doesn’t work for me. The poems I read that I don’t connect with don’t make them bad poems, but it’s just poems of a genre that I don’t necessarily connect with.”
“So, we think of poetry in genre much as we do with stories of fiction. Do you ever feel stupid sometimes when you read some poetry? Like, ‘I just don’t get this?’”
“I used to. But now I don’t as much. There are some very complicated, intricate poems that I do enjoy, and some I will read and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really complicated and intricate, and I just think it’s shitty.’ So, I mean, I’m less critical of myself these days as a reader and more critical of poetry in general. Not the poets, but the publishers who choose to put out a book that has no appeal for an audience or something like that. You know, the poets are doing as best they can. They’re writing what they find is interesting, so good on them. But it’s the publishers, and how they put out a book, and where they put it out, and all that I think I’m more critical of. So to answer your question about being lost in some poetry, always. Always. Constantly. Yeah, so I’ll pick up a book like Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, which is a book of poems written from the perspective of Hurricane Katrina, and it is wrenching, and heartbreaking, and beautiful. And I read that book, and I love the book, but it’s just makes me realize that I’ve got a lot of work to do…”
“Even as the Nebraska State Poet?”
“It’s a challenge. I want to be that good. It doesn’t make me think, ‘Oh, I’m never going to write a poem again.’ I want to figure out how I can write poems in my own way of a magnitude like that. And it’s a challenge, and it spurs me on.”
“And you’re going to tell us how to do that?”
“I’m going to try.”
“This is Part One of a two-part interview. In Part Two, let’s talk about elements relating to poems and how genre writers can capitalize on those, as well as suggestions on where to submit poetry, and thoughts for how genre writers can enter the poetry market.”
“Let’s do it.”
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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/