“A Kindred Feeling”: An Interview with Matthew Buckley Smith
Matthew Buckley Smith’s new book of poems, Midlife, is, like much persuasive, sustaining art, made of contradictory elements. The poems are brutal and graceful, intelligent and awestruck, airy and grim. They frequently sing of despair that has no place in our social lives while they audibly reach for human connection, and they make pleasure and beauty out of the truths that provoke despair. In “Object Permanence,” he sings to his young daughter, who cannot yet understand:
Because you haven’t yet developed faith
That what you see at nightfall will return
At dawn, when time begins again, it’s death
You nightly learn
To dread, like the recurrence of a dream
In which your father or your mother stands
And takes you (singing every time the same
Unmeaning sounds)
Upstairs into the reeling hall that slides
With horrifying slowness toward that room
Peopled with deaf-mute mammals on all sides,
Dim as the womb [….]
And in “Drinking Ode,” he tells his friend, in imitation of Horace:
Drink with me, old man — there’s no time
And no use trying to be good.
Our flesh was supple, our thoughts sublime,
And now death eats us alive, and should.
There’s a rightness in those lines that I find actively delightful – rightness, which, Smith told me, when we talked over Zoom during the latest cresting of the Coronavirus pandemic, is one of the things that compels him in both reading and writing: “the ring of truth.”
Smith is a dear friend, and he’s done a lot to shape the way I think about poems, art, and even thinking. Midlife is his second book of poems – the first, Dirge for an Imaginary World, came out in 2011. He writes criticism, too, and fiction, and he’s the Associate Editor of Literary Matters. He hosts the frequently dyspeptic and even more frequently entertaining podcast Sleerickets – about, as he puts it in the show’s tagline, “poetry and other intractable problems.” — Jonathan Farmer
Jonathan Farmer:
You’ve said that when someone reads a good poem, it should make them envious. And so, I’ll start by asking you to tell me about a poem that’s made you envious.
Michael Buckley Smith:
So this is “New Year’s” by Greg Williamson. He was my teacher, but I actually fell in love with this poem before I met him:
The sunlight was falling. A part
Played out in the deep snow.
We were all there. At the start
We knew how the year would go,
Played out in the deep snow.
The sunlight was falling apart.
We knew how the year would go.
We were all there at the start.
It has this perfect symmetry and it’s a thing that formal poets like to do a lot–repeating lines while changing the punctuation or switching a plural to a possessive in order to alter the meaning while keeping the words the same. And it’s often done in really forced sloppy ways. But this one just feels so casual and calm. It’s so simple it almost feels effortless. And yet it just gets me every time I read it.
F: Can you say more? Why is that something you covet? Why covet that as opposed to, or in addition to, other things that you could covet?
S: Alice Allan makes a distinction between distant admiration and proximate jealousy or envy. I don’t envy “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” In order to envy a poem, I do have to feel as if it’s at least in the same world as me. In some part of myself, I have to believe I might have written it. If I were a little better or if I were little older or a little different or little luckier or a little harder working or whatever it was.
When I read poems I really admire, they remind me of what I can’t do very well or what I try to do and fail at. They remind me of how I can’t describe anything. Or I can’t make metaphors. I can’t make abstract arguments. In this poem, there’s very little in the way of metaphor. There’s really no rich description. There are a couple images, but it feels a little more like the way my poems might work when they work well.
The thing, of course, that Greg can do that I can’t, is be perfect. Make the words fall effortlessly into just the right place with absolute control. So there are some ways in which this poem is within my reach – and then it’s just the exquisite rendering of it that my hand is too sloppy for.
F: So does that reveal anything about why you write, about what you’re trying or hoping to do or hoping to have done, about what compels you to keep sometimes sitting down and trying to make one of these things?
S: Well, it always starts with a desire to make someone feel something. Or maybe it starts with the feeling and then comes the desire to make someone else feel the same thing. So I have an emotional response to this poem and then I have a response of awe. There is a shorthand that my friend Ryan Wilson and I have for thinking about reading poems, which is the first mind and the second mind. And the second mind is the critical, writerly, analytical observation. And the first mind is intuitive and emotional and uncritical.
The response I have to this poem in that second mind is, “God damn, that’s hard to do.” And it’s hard to do in a way that is so difficult to engineer because it’s the kind of perfection in symmetry and in form that almost requires a stroke of genius. But then the response I have with the first mind is that it’s this beautiful, simple, effortless read. There’s no pressure required. There’s no strain. There’s no leaping from one line to another, there’s no, “Does that almost …? Oh, okay. All right, I see what you’re doing.” It just falls into place.
Like Bach’s Air on the G string –– it’s so simple and so inevitable that you think, “Good God, how was that not the most obvious thing in the world that every composer already knew to do before Bach ever got to it?'” And that’s how this feels. I want to cause people the feeling I feel when I read this poem, and I also am just endlessly jealous of the ability to make this kind of thing happen and then make it feel like almost nothing at all.
F: When you say you want to cause people to feel the thing you feel when you read this, does that have something to do with sharing a feeling or an experience of the world that exists prior to the poem, or is that more about a feeling or experience of reading it?
S: Oh man. What’s probably not healthy is that there is an always already an elegiac quality that I bring, as a reader, to poems. The really over-familiar example of this is Robert Hass’ “Meditation At Lagunitas.” Every word is an elegy for what it represents. And so the friends were all there at the start of the Williamson poem, and obviously one or more of them is not there anymore. To me, that’s the tune I recognize when it arrives, the one I’m always waiting for. It’s that feeling of loss that I guess I carry around with me. And so then when it chimes out from a poem, I recognize it and I feel a connection to it. And I want other people to have that same sense of recognition.
F: Part of the reason I ask is that a lot of the poems in Midlife are dramatizing the ways that people lie to each other, and lie to themselves, and create functional illusions. So there’s a lot of interest in telling the truth, or at least dramatizing the act of trying to tell the truth. Is truth for you, however you want to define that, a goal of a poem? Is it a necessary condition for a poem to do something else? Is it just a subject that’s fascinating for you?
S: I definitely have a conscious fascination with liars and frauds, especially frauds. For some reason, the bigger delusions, fraudsters, irrational beliefs, a bubble of falsehood in which people live sometimes, whether they know it or not. That’s always interesting to me for whatever reasons.
I’m resistant to any crusading notion of poetry as a vehicle for enlightening people. But what does feel always crucial is the ring of truth. From an emotional perspective, it needs to feel like, “Yeah, I know that. That sounds right.” It’s the same recognition that makes you laugh. That feeling has to be part of it in some way, or why bother?
F: So many of these poems are dramatizing a pretty grim worldview. I don’t think I’m surprising you by saying that. And I know you’ve said before that one of the necessary conditions or a good poem is that it be entertaining, that it gives pleasure in some way. And I do think these are pleasurable poems. I find them pleasurable. But I was wondering how you see relationship between literary pleasure and human pain.
S: Partly I’m just really depressed. I have a really pessimistic vision of the world. And so I’m as much as anything trying to entertain myself. And then I think I just project and I try to write forms that maybe I think I would enjoy reading in my worldview.
F: Does some of that go back to what you were talking about with the Williamson poem, that idea of sharing something? We’ve talked before about the Heaney criticism of Larkin. He doesn’t like “Aubade” because he says it doesn’t offer any hope. Whereas for me, that poem offers a profound sense of consolation, of sharing, and making something given and terrifying amenable to beauty. The worst of experience, the poem suggests, can still be sung and can still be tuned to that ring of truth.
S: A frequent complaint of religious or even semi-religious readers is that atheist or existentialist writing is sentimentally dark, is too bleak and rings false in its bleakness. And I can understand that partly because I have almost the exact same experience reading religious poetry, of feeling really engrossed and really compelled, but then when I get to the last line and Jesus saves everything, I feel like, “Well, that’s not real.” So when I read a poem and I get the impression at least that the landscape this poem describes is one without a divine safety net, I feel a little bit more of a kindred feeling with the writer or the speaker or the imagined speaker.
I feel a little bit of that fraternity across time or across space, which is part of what one goes to literature for. I kind of hope the religious/atheist split is not quite so absolute, because I would love for it not to be the case that you have to only read the poetry of people who share your ontology, but it is certainly an experience I have had, and I know religious people talk about it in a complementary way. So maybe that’s the case, I don’t know.
F: Sticking with this sense of possible connection. Another thing that’s true with a lot of these poems, whether they’re dramatic monologues or more traditional lyrics, they’re addressed to a specific you, not a generic you. Their speakers have in mind an individual who’s listening. Is that imagined company meaningful to you or helpful for you in creating a poem?
S: There are some cases where it’s specifically dedicated to somebody. I should say, my official statement is that if it sounds good, it’s about Joanna, my wife. If it sounds sad and bad, it’s about somebody else or a fictional character. But yeah, I think when I read a poem with a you or with an implied company–even the “we were all there” plural–it touches that part of me that misses people. It touches that part of me that feels distant from people I no longer have contact with for one reason or another. So when I’m writing, I scratch that itch for myself by writing sometimes to one of those people. Then my hope is that readers will have the same kind of experience I have, which is that it will chime with whatever their own personal sense of loss is.
F: And there are a few poems here where the addressee is, I think I can safely say that they’re your kids, who are in the poems at an age, or sometimes a pre-age, where they can’t yet understand what you’re saying. There’s one poem, “Elizabethan,” that actually directly takes that on. There’s a sense in which, in “Elizabethan,” meaning comes from the possibility of being heard and understood later on. That’s one of the ingredients of all this. You look skeptical.
S: You mean that meaning comes from the possibility of something suspended, like a letter to a future self in a time capsule?
F: Or just more generally about being heard and understood …
S: Oh yeah. I think of some of those poems as being almost the opposite of “Elegy Without Consolation,” which is saying that someday this will all be meaningless to you.
But in all of those, they’re written intuitively, and those are the ones that stuck around and seemed not-terrible enough that they were worth polishing. There were plenty of others that did different things that sucked more and so I got rid of them. But the feeling of wanting to be understood or having a meaning that is not being read, but maybe could be, or theoretically might be at some point, is part of having a relationship to kids, but it’s also native to plenty of other stuff. It’s part of how I write a poem in general. It’s me doing stuff on a page that probably nobody will ever read, but maybe somebody will.
F: And one of the ongoing concerns of the poems seem to me to be: what do you do with these truths, these beliefs about the world that just don’t fit in most social contexts, they don’t fit into the decorums that let people be at home with each other. And so it seems to me that’s an element there as well–saying what shouldn’t be said but never goes away. And occasionally the poems have this power that comes from a cruelty of being able to say to a you, to an individual, that thing that a person couldn’t or shouldn’t say.
S: Yeah, it’s another obsession of mine: failure, and specifically the failure to share meaning. I think there are a lot of failures and no-accounts in the book and often, some element of that has to do with failing to share an outlook with people.
F: You talk about writing as answering, or at least responding to these social appetites of yours. Do you have any desire to be present? There are lots of dramatic monologues. There are imitations of other people’s poems. Do you have any desire to be present in the book as a recognizable version of yourself? Or is that immaterial?
S: Oh, what’s the line, Je suis Madame Bovary. They’re all me. They’re all made up and they’re all me. Is there a version of myself? I don’t know, I think if I try to sleuth out a version of myself that somebody might infer from the things I write, it’s probably not going to be great. That’s what Joanna always says: “This sounds horrible. This sounds like you have a horrible marriage.” It’s not the intention.
I’m not as scrupulous as some people about never wanting to write about myself. None of these, they’re all characters: That’s not true. It’s basically me. Plenty of it is ballpark me or parallel universe me. Dramatic monologues are almost like a joke where you set out to write about a caveman 20,000 years ago, searching for fire or fighting off saber tooth tigers, and you end up writing about a suburban dad taking out the garbage. No matter what your ostensible subject matter, you can’t escape yourself. So that’s certainly true here.
F: I guess if I’m understanding right, your presence in the poem is not so much an impetus as something that allows you to then do something else? The goal is not presenting yourself or your experience, not making yourself available to someone else and thereby being a little less lonely, but instead that by using your life, using yourself, you get to do something else? Is that a fair way of describing it?
S: Oh, yeah. I’m so much more afraid of presenting an accurate version of my actual self and just repelling people than I am interested in showing a little leg and getting people to like the real me.
It’s hard for me to say, though. I have a really dumb method. I put the book together and I cut poems and I add poems and I change the order of poems, but basically I write a ton of poems, and then I get rid of most of them because they are too bad. Then I try to work on the rest of them make them better. But any time I sit down to write a poem, almost always with very few exceptions, I sit down and just say, “I’m going to write whatever I want right now.” So this is the best of what was left.
F: So let me try a much simpler version of the question then. Why do you keep sitting down and writing? And why do you bother trying to put some of those things out in the world where someone might read them?
S: Probably a big part of the answer is vanity. Part of it’s got to be just vanity. I also have gone stretches in the last few years without writing poetry much for a chunk of time. When I started the podcast, I didn’t really write poetry for several months. Then I started up again in October, November. When I read poems and I get excited about what I’m reading, that makes me want to write poems. Even if it’s sometimes miserable to write, when I go back several months later and look at what came out, pretty consistently there’s a thing or two that turns up that seems pretty good. I can have a little glimmer of the excitement I feel when I read a poem that I love by somebody else. I can have a little glimmer of that when I read something I wrote a draft of seven months ago that I forgot about.
And so I think, “Hey, this is pretty good.” It feels good to be good at something. And I’d like some credit please. I think a lot of it is that. There’s also the desire to demonstrate that I contribute something, even if it’s only poetry.
F: The very first poem in the book, first line, last line: “it did not rhyme.” In both cases, it does, it rhymes. “Rhyme” rhymes with “time” and then “rhyme” rhymes with “climb” at the end. One way of reading that is just this juvenile irony. But I don’t read it that way, especially with that poem appearing as its own section at the beginning of the book. I read it instead as, among other things, a bit of an emblem of what poems might be for and what they might do.
I think a lot about art having a double or triple life. One of those lives is an experience or an idea or an imagined something. Another is the potential pleasure or meaning that can be made out of that. They don’t wipe each other out. They live together. I just wanted to go back one more time to that relation between pleasure and pain, because I do think there is evidence of pleasure in these poems, evidence of pleasure taken, evidence of pleasure given. I want to push on you a little bit more to see if you can describe that pleasure, what it is as a writer, and if that has any connection to the pleasure of reading a poem.
S: To be really literal minded about it, that’s a poem about a bunch of bad things happening in one year, and the stuff that happened that year didn’t rhyme, but the poem does. The “it” is not the poem. The “it” is the subject of the poem. “Aubade” is not disgusting and terrifying, but death is, and death is just the subject of “Aubade,” and part of diverting your audience on the way to the grave is maybe finding a way to divert your audience with the grave. When I read a poem that feels inaccurately hopeful, then it feels like I’m being diverted. It feels like somebody’s lying to me or just showing me something else and saying, “Look over here, look over here.” I think when I’m able to take aesthetic pleasure in perceiving or beholding the bleakness that I tend to believe in, when I’m able to look into the abyss and take aesthetic pleasure from it, then it feels maybe at least just for a moment as if there’s something about that perception that is not wholly awful and worthless. Making it rhyme or making it shapely is in that way a kind of redemption.
F: It also seems like an instance of hope. It’s not hope that you’re going to transcend the grave, but it’s hope that you can do something in advance of it. And both are real. We tend to make a distinction between “real life” and art. But the art is a part of real life too. And so the poem doesn’t take anything off the other side of the scale, but it does put something on this side of the scale as well.
S: Yeah. There’s art, too. Art is also part of the ball game that you can’t quit and will inevitably lose.
F: And maybe this poem will stick around for a little while. Maybe it will live alongside some of that loss for a while.
S: That particular facet of vanity is no small part of it, less I think because people who write poetry have high-mindedly opted to pursue that art form which is famous for its durability than because, mostly because we all failed to achieve or even to try to achieve success with more popular ephemeral media. Poetry at least holds out hope for the long term.
F: And does that become a company for you as well, that you’re engaging with this thing that hundreds and thousands of years ago people were also engaging with? Is that companionship real to you as well?
S: Oh yeah. The dead poets are companions.
F: Companions in writing as well as in reading?
S: Always. I remember having a thought when I was a kid, because my dad was really excited by something. He heard a lecture, and he was excited about something that had all these references in it and he was telling me how cool it was. I remember having a thought as a kid like, “I wonder how you write something with a lot of references in it.” And then, of course the answer was like, “Oh, you just actually read.” I didn’t know because I hadn’t read anything. But if you just read a lot, it’s impossible not to participate in a tradition because you can’t learn how to read and write without absorbing all of these voices that are still there. The voices are still there. That’s the old premise of the epitaph on a tombstone: they’re supposed to be read out loud. So in the moment that you’re reading it, you lend your voice to the dead. Traditionally, the epitaph is spoken in the first person: “Here dead lie we.” So you give them voice again and that’s what reading is as well, in general, you’re giving, you’re putting wind back into these, passing wind back through these old vocal chords.
I feel comforted by the people I read. Even the people who are still alive, in a way, I feel a different kind of company when I’m reading them that doesn’t feel as connected to the personal relationship I might have to them sometimes. It feels like those are two separate things. I can enjoy having a drink with you and shooting the shit, but when I read your poems – your best poems–something else is happening. It’s less personal but more revealing, sometimes painfully so, like when you see a photo of your dad taken in college, before you were even the shadow of a possibility, or at a party when you see your wife talking to someone across the room and you remember how it felt when she was just this pretty girl that you were hoping to go home with. When at my grandfather’s funeral, I did this scripted reading at the church, and they had me refer to him as “Brother Alex,” which obviously I’d never thought of calling him in life. But of course in death we’re all peers, we’re all siblings, and I think the same – or something close to it – is true in poetry. When I’m reading your best poems, I stop hearing the voice of my drinking buddy and start hearing the voice of a kind of everyman, more vulnerable but also more universal, like a stranger who gets badly injured in public, and suddenly you’re the one who’s at his side. A friend is way more considerate than the speaker of a poem. In a poem, the ‘I’ is too busy being honest to make accommodations for your comfort. A friend will mostly avoid putting you on the spot, but not a poem. A poem is as compassionate as a friend, but way more merciless.