The Kiln Project's Interview with Ted Mathys
Ted Mathys is the author of three books of poetry, Null Set, which is out this spring from Coffee House Press, The Spoils and Forge. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Verse and elsewhere. He holds a masters degree in international environmental policy from Tufts University, and has also received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Ted is currently Creative Writer in Residence at Saint Louis University.
Kiln (Brenda Suhan): From where do you draw your inspiration?
Mathys: In much of my poetry I'm drawn to the discovery of patterns and to meditating on figures of extremity. By patterns I mean everything from the relationship between camouflage patterns on woodland birds and camouflage patterns on military fatigues, to patterns of speech and sound or mathematical relationships in the world. My poems often nudge, poke, and prod language in search of formal patterns, and once these patterns emerge I feel totally inspired and then try to write my way out of them. And by figures of extremity, I mean artists, poets, even politicians who force us to reevaluate our psychological categories and habitual assumptions. I think this is why I'm drawn to the films of Werner Herzog, the poems of Hart Crane, whose life in poetry seems a glorious failure, and so on. This interest in figures of extremity led me, in my last book, to a 25-page poem cycle about Henry Kissinger and World Cup soccer.
Kiln: When did you decide to seriously pursue writing as a career?
Mathys: I started writing brooding, introspective poetry in high school, as high school students do. And I continued to write throughout undergraduate school, but mostly for my own pleasure. I was a political science major and wanted to be a diplomat. But during my senior year I took a poetry workshop, and the professor, who is now a dear friend, pulled me aside one day and expressed earnest confidence in my poetry. I was stunned, and decided to get serious, so I did an independent study and read the canon of twentieth century American poetry. I was hooked and haven't looked back. I guess this says something about the value of mentorship.
Kiln: How would you describe the feeling before beginning a new piece?
Mathys: If I know I'm sitting down to write a new piece the feeling resembles the futility that comes with trying to remember all the details of a dream but not being able to. I know the poem is lurking somewhere, in the room with me, manifested in objects, memories, overheard snippets of speech and vernacular quips, but it refuses to show itself. Come out with your hands up! But most often I don't sit down with such teleological intention. Or I intend to write something new and end up shifting an old piece into a new context and realizing that this whole time that old thing was wearing the wrong clothes.
Kiln: In terms of your work/process: what is your greatest source of anxiety?
Mathys: I get anxious about the inevitable disconnect between the poetic experience in its ideal form and the inscription of that experience in language. Sure, there are always new possibilities for experience created in the writing itself, but I often feel the tension between production and reproduction, between poetry as lyric expression and poetry as curation. It's like the way that the number 2 exists in some weird, beautiful, conceptually pure form somewhere, but in writing it gets attached to "two" apples or "two" shoes. This makes me anxious.
Kiln: Do you have a set process for writing?
Mathys: Not at all. I maintain a distinction between poems and poetry. While poems are artifacts, I think poetry is a way of life that requires heightened perceptual acuity and a fluidity in the world that, for me, doesn't lend itself well to a set process. When I'm in the throes of something, I might write every day for three months and then feel totally evacuated and just spend time looking at my dog for a couple weeks.
Kiln: How has your writing evolved over the years?
Mathys: It has gotten shorter, more precise, and more interested in form and the possibilities for creating emotional friction and affective experience through form.
Kiln: Do you have any advice to share with a developing writer?
Mathys: There's the do and the don't. Do read, read, read. Finding your heroes is essential. Knowing why they are your heroes is equally essential. It creates intimacy in the act of reading, challenges you to ask yourself why you write, gives you company, and raises the stakes of what you produce. Don't be a magician who is good at smoke and mirrors and gizmos that obscure the core of the poem; instead be an escape artist whose hard work it is to transcend your self-imposed constraints. This raises the stakes, emotional and otherwise.
Kiln: Can you explain your experiences with the publication process? How do you decide when your work is ready for publication, and how do you proceed from there?
Mathys: In poetry the individual pieces are often published first in magazines and literary journals and then as a book. For journals I assemble lots of different permutations for submissions. Sometimes poems work thematically or formally for a journal suite but only one of them might make it into the book, because the architectures are different. For journals it's important to assess the aesthetic tendencies of the publication, to choose poems that might best fit, and to write a professional cover letter that says something accurate and honest about why the journal is meaningful to you. Throwing a bunch of poems out there to see what sticks never works. For book publication, I was fortunate to have found a publisher early in my career who made an investment in helping me develop as a writer. So rather than having to shop around, I spend a lot of time thinking about arrangement, framing concepts, and what kinds of intervention these different iterations of the manuscript might make. I often have ten or so trusted readers look at the book and ask them to rearrange it and tell me why.
Kiln: Which poets/writers do you turn to for inspiration in terms of form, style, and content?
Mathys: I think my influences fall into several areas. First would be poets who I think of, for lack of a better term, as the "rural avant-garde." I grew up on a farm in Ohio. My mother was a school teacher and my father a brick mason who ran his construction crew out of our barn. I feel kinship with writers who have a ruddy, rustic, rural experimentalism like Lorine Niedecker, James Agee, the Black Mountain poets, C.D. Wright, and Ronald Johnson. Second would be Hart Crane, my hero from Cleveland, who dwells in the possibilities for tension and release in the poetic line, employs sensuous language and almost arc diction, and proceeds by the logic of metaphor such that you always know what he is saying viscerally without ever knowing what he is saying intellectually. Finally, a cluster of poets who are philosophically inclined, like Wallace Stevens' perspectivism or Rosmarie Waldrop's engagement with the language problems of analytic philosophy.
Kiln: How did you get involved with the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series?
Mathys: Strangely, I read in the very first reading of the series four years ago. I was relatively new to Saint Louis, and founders Jessica Baran and Jenny Kronovet had been planning a new series that would be in a gallery setting, collaborate with local printmakers on handmade broadsides for each reader, and have a festive atmosphere. After I read, I went to the series religiously because I was impressed by the caliber of poets they were bringing in and because the series was a blast to attend each month. When Jenny moved away from Saint Louis, the poet Paul Legault and I stepped in, and we're excited about the events we've hosted this year and are now getting requests from poets across the country to read for us.
Kiln (Brenda Suhan): From where do you draw your inspiration?
Mathys: In much of my poetry I'm drawn to the discovery of patterns and to meditating on figures of extremity. By patterns I mean everything from the relationship between camouflage patterns on woodland birds and camouflage patterns on military fatigues, to patterns of speech and sound or mathematical relationships in the world. My poems often nudge, poke, and prod language in search of formal patterns, and once these patterns emerge I feel totally inspired and then try to write my way out of them. And by figures of extremity, I mean artists, poets, even politicians who force us to reevaluate our psychological categories and habitual assumptions. I think this is why I'm drawn to the films of Werner Herzog, the poems of Hart Crane, whose life in poetry seems a glorious failure, and so on. This interest in figures of extremity led me, in my last book, to a 25-page poem cycle about Henry Kissinger and World Cup soccer.
Kiln: When did you decide to seriously pursue writing as a career?
Mathys: I started writing brooding, introspective poetry in high school, as high school students do. And I continued to write throughout undergraduate school, but mostly for my own pleasure. I was a political science major and wanted to be a diplomat. But during my senior year I took a poetry workshop, and the professor, who is now a dear friend, pulled me aside one day and expressed earnest confidence in my poetry. I was stunned, and decided to get serious, so I did an independent study and read the canon of twentieth century American poetry. I was hooked and haven't looked back. I guess this says something about the value of mentorship.
Kiln: How would you describe the feeling before beginning a new piece?
Mathys: If I know I'm sitting down to write a new piece the feeling resembles the futility that comes with trying to remember all the details of a dream but not being able to. I know the poem is lurking somewhere, in the room with me, manifested in objects, memories, overheard snippets of speech and vernacular quips, but it refuses to show itself. Come out with your hands up! But most often I don't sit down with such teleological intention. Or I intend to write something new and end up shifting an old piece into a new context and realizing that this whole time that old thing was wearing the wrong clothes.
Kiln: In terms of your work/process: what is your greatest source of anxiety?
Mathys: I get anxious about the inevitable disconnect between the poetic experience in its ideal form and the inscription of that experience in language. Sure, there are always new possibilities for experience created in the writing itself, but I often feel the tension between production and reproduction, between poetry as lyric expression and poetry as curation. It's like the way that the number 2 exists in some weird, beautiful, conceptually pure form somewhere, but in writing it gets attached to "two" apples or "two" shoes. This makes me anxious.
Kiln: Do you have a set process for writing?
Mathys: Not at all. I maintain a distinction between poems and poetry. While poems are artifacts, I think poetry is a way of life that requires heightened perceptual acuity and a fluidity in the world that, for me, doesn't lend itself well to a set process. When I'm in the throes of something, I might write every day for three months and then feel totally evacuated and just spend time looking at my dog for a couple weeks.
Kiln: How has your writing evolved over the years?
Mathys: It has gotten shorter, more precise, and more interested in form and the possibilities for creating emotional friction and affective experience through form.
Kiln: Do you have any advice to share with a developing writer?
Mathys: There's the do and the don't. Do read, read, read. Finding your heroes is essential. Knowing why they are your heroes is equally essential. It creates intimacy in the act of reading, challenges you to ask yourself why you write, gives you company, and raises the stakes of what you produce. Don't be a magician who is good at smoke and mirrors and gizmos that obscure the core of the poem; instead be an escape artist whose hard work it is to transcend your self-imposed constraints. This raises the stakes, emotional and otherwise.
Kiln: Can you explain your experiences with the publication process? How do you decide when your work is ready for publication, and how do you proceed from there?
Mathys: In poetry the individual pieces are often published first in magazines and literary journals and then as a book. For journals I assemble lots of different permutations for submissions. Sometimes poems work thematically or formally for a journal suite but only one of them might make it into the book, because the architectures are different. For journals it's important to assess the aesthetic tendencies of the publication, to choose poems that might best fit, and to write a professional cover letter that says something accurate and honest about why the journal is meaningful to you. Throwing a bunch of poems out there to see what sticks never works. For book publication, I was fortunate to have found a publisher early in my career who made an investment in helping me develop as a writer. So rather than having to shop around, I spend a lot of time thinking about arrangement, framing concepts, and what kinds of intervention these different iterations of the manuscript might make. I often have ten or so trusted readers look at the book and ask them to rearrange it and tell me why.
Kiln: Which poets/writers do you turn to for inspiration in terms of form, style, and content?
Mathys: I think my influences fall into several areas. First would be poets who I think of, for lack of a better term, as the "rural avant-garde." I grew up on a farm in Ohio. My mother was a school teacher and my father a brick mason who ran his construction crew out of our barn. I feel kinship with writers who have a ruddy, rustic, rural experimentalism like Lorine Niedecker, James Agee, the Black Mountain poets, C.D. Wright, and Ronald Johnson. Second would be Hart Crane, my hero from Cleveland, who dwells in the possibilities for tension and release in the poetic line, employs sensuous language and almost arc diction, and proceeds by the logic of metaphor such that you always know what he is saying viscerally without ever knowing what he is saying intellectually. Finally, a cluster of poets who are philosophically inclined, like Wallace Stevens' perspectivism or Rosmarie Waldrop's engagement with the language problems of analytic philosophy.
Kiln: How did you get involved with the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series?
Mathys: Strangely, I read in the very first reading of the series four years ago. I was relatively new to Saint Louis, and founders Jessica Baran and Jenny Kronovet had been planning a new series that would be in a gallery setting, collaborate with local printmakers on handmade broadsides for each reader, and have a festive atmosphere. After I read, I went to the series religiously because I was impressed by the caliber of poets they were bringing in and because the series was a blast to attend each month. When Jenny moved away from Saint Louis, the poet Paul Legault and I stepped in, and we're excited about the events we've hosted this year and are now getting requests from poets across the country to read for us.