Deeper the Tropics, Matt Broaddus’ second collection of poems, begins with an origin story. In fact, it begins with a poem titled “Origin Story.” “There is a non-existent island. I have to make it every night,” the poem begins, describing, among other things, a speaker locked inside his own creativity. Though the speaker “didn’t ask for this island,” he is made to take part, nightly, in its regularly scheduled de- and re-construction, which includes scheduled electrical storms and other kinds of dismembering weather. And as these disasters start to deepen—as thunder begins to “sleepwalk through palm trees”—the speaker, seeing no other way to avoid being among the deconstructed, decides to dive into minutia, into “lowness,” hoping it might save him. “I will swim to the bottom of the ocean,” he says. “There I will seek an audience with the lobsters.”
This poem, like many poems in the collection, concerns itself—to steal a phrase from Robert Hass—with time and its materials: all the little objects and actions that dress the set of one’s time in an often repetitive world. These repetitions are Broaddus’ key material—the repetitions built into an individual life, such as having the same breakfast from the same grocery store supplied by the same corporations that squeeze eggs out of the same dead-eyed chickens every day. There are also those larger repetitions that continue to be enforced by the state: “I go into the mist tonight. Another black man is dead.” Throughout the book, Broaddus never stops pointing to the strange, the awful, and even the glorious ways our lives, and the so-called separate segments of human history, continue to overlap.
Broaddus’ poems are well aware that they can never step outside of time. As Broaddus would put it, “I live in time / so I dance.” And he’s right in that his poems do often refuse to sit still, preferring to glide their way through the scenery of different cultural and historical eras in quick-footed succession. Take the first stanza of his poem “Excuse me, I am lost” for instance:
Excuse me, I am lost in the cave in which I am drunk on ancient Mayan beer, paddling through cacao clouds in my boat the artificially depressed market paid for. Or this one, the first stanza of his poem “Bang Bang Tao”:
My staff is 18,000 lbs
and makes a joyous thwack! batting away your rockets.
Your armies are totally besieging my city,
and I am the pizza delivery guy.
These stanzas are emblematic of the work done in Deeper the Tropics. Their speakers, caught in the dewy webs of capital, and surrounded on all sides by the bristling of both the market’s and the military’s violence, still maintain their unflappable good humor. And it’s a good humor that willingly discards temporal and geographical limits. Every inch of human history, particularly the history of poetry and the history of literature at large, are fair game for Broaddus’ poetry. Even if you’re standing in the present, Broaddus knows you’re dancing with the past.
And one of his favorite waltzes is the good old persona poem—they make up roughly one-fifth of the book—each spoken by a cast of different historical and imaginary speakers. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the book’s persona poems:
“From the Journal of Doomed Prospector, Prospector Joe”
“Oppenheimer Visits Huntington Gardens, 1945”
“It’s good to be Ashurnasirpal II”
“Monkey King Gets Introspective for a Minute”
“Oppenheimer Goes to Work, Los Alamos, 1943”
In case you’re wondering, Matt Broaddus has told me that the Oppenheimer poems were written prior to the release of 2023 the blockbuster. Clear proof of Broaddus’ influence, I’d say.
Despite the ancient origins of some of these characters, the poems are filled with both contemporary objects and images that call up our modern techno-plasticine world. In what other time but ours would Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II say “I roll out of the desert on my immaculate bactrian, sipping an adult beverage from one of those neon crazy straws and tipping my hat to no one in particular?”
Broaddus’ poem, “Oppenheimer Goes to Work, Los Alamos, 1943”, for example, is full of these anachronistic flourishes. If the first poem in the collection, “Origin Story,” described a speaker caught inside of his own day-to-day, this one zooms out—and shows us a speaker caught inside of history. The poem begins by describing Oppenheimer’s morning routine mid-WWII: “Everyone in my house is quite mad. A man called Boris wants to take a few of us on a little boat ride, torture us in international waters, and throw us over the side. My wife asks over the bugged line what the FBI would like for dinner.” Further images, too, hammer in that sense of the speaker being surrounded—“Morning checkpoints. A smile and a gun.”—“Beyond the barbed wire, a coyote announces itself in the tenebrous fog of 6 a.m. See, everyone around me knows these parts.”—by deploying recognizable American paranoia, surveillance, and torture, the mention of which, as it moves from the poem’s placement in 1943 to our eyes in 2025, also kicks up the dust of all those America has surveilled and tortured since. To use a louder metaphor, the present is a gong which certain poems set ringing. And it’s with that particular clanging that Broaddus’ poems build their song. It’s out of those harsh repetitions that Broaddus makes sense of the world.
Some of the poem’s references are meant to be obvious: the reference to Alice in Wonderland in the first line, and the mention, near the end of the poem, of Oppenheimer’s own infamous reference to the Baghavad Gita (“The Gita of Implosion”). But there are more specific turbidities within his imagery that also call up, and enrich themselves with, pieces of late 20th century and early 21st century American poetry. When, in the middle of the poem, Broaddus says “The mountains scab over with another summer’s scrub,” I think of the Forrest Gander couplet, from his poem “Ozark Log,” “The years will scab over, / impossible not to pick at them.” When Broaddus says “Winter bandages the wounds”, I think of the Gregory Orr moment, from his poem “Aftermath Sonnet,” “Long season / of silence— / trusting that under // its bandage of snow, / the field of me is healing.” And when he says “Beyond the barbed wire, a coyote announces itself in the tenebrous fog of 6 a.m”, I, at least, can’t help but think of the coyotes that appear over and over in Dean Young’s poems. (For example, from his poem “One Story”: “In one story, the coyote sings us into being.” Or, from his poem “Irrevocable Ode”: “Broken vow, broken silence with a coyote’s howl.”)
Matt Broaddus is, of course, no plagiarist—listing these isn’t meant to claim he’s unoriginal. It’s to say that he’s a part of history. And he knows it: a Matt Broaddus image understands that, for any reader, there are aquifers of culture, of literary and historical reference, burning underneath us all the time. One thing an image allows you to do is dip into that water. It is, in fact, how you get the past into your poems. An image is a well that the past can crawl out of, covered in meaningful goo.
And this is exactly how Broaddus’ poems end up becoming so present. In a poem like the one on Oppenheimer described above, he re-constructs our present American reality—the long eye of the feds, the broad surveillance networks inside of which we’re made to live, even the now world-wide ubiquity of American-made bombs—by pulling in its historical particulars. While that may seem a dauntless task, in Broaddus’ poems it works. Over and over again, these poems hum with a strange accuracy about what it’s like to walk the streets of the empire we call home.
That’s no small thing, making art out of the world at one’s feet. Both Jorie Graham and Fady Joudah have implied in their recent writing that one of the purposes of poetry is to help construct an emotional record of the present. As Joudah writes, “I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant.” As Graham writes, “When they dig our poems up out of the rubble, we want them to know who we were, what consciousness was, but also how astounding and unimaginably infinite and mysterious life was.”
Once again, Matt Broaddus is up to the task. There are few poets working today as able, I think, to convincingly render, and re-imagine, all the little sodden strangenesses Americans live inside. More than anything, his poems track a way of being-in-the-world—a way of mixing a smirk with a frown—that begins to feel, as it unfolds over the course of the collection, ghostly familiar. Broaddus’ poems, while they remind you what it’s like to be alive, also force back to the surface questions you know you’ve asked yourself before. What does one do with the present? Living already in the rubble Jorie Graham describes, where is one supposed to look?
Alongside those specific historical dramas that unfold over the course of the collection, there are many poems that place themselves much closer to, and define even more clearly, the reader’s present tense. In Broaddus’ poem “Morning Meditation / Meditation #1,” we’re shown the dawning considerations of a speaker moving through the minutia of his morning commute. As the speaker sits there on his bench “of aesthetic solitude,” we see him trying to “decipher” his surroundings, the everyday “pageant of objects… that won’t give up their significance.”
Broaddus’ poems, when not engaging with named persona, often work in a closer-to-home mode like this, building for themselves what Broaddus calls his “pedestrian language.” His is a deeply ‘pedestrian’ poetics. Throughout these poems, Broaddus never stops reporting what it’s like to have one’s feet on this decade’s buckled ground. Many of the book’s poems were first written while walking the streets of New York during the poet’s grad school years. And “Morning Meditation / Meditation #1” places itself at ground level, once again in the pedestrian mode, evolving from the mouth of a speaker looking up, out, and around at a world, and at a set of power structures, which, though present, is only partially comprehensible to the speaker.
Still, the poem is an attempt at comprehension. Bringing his vision down to ground-level, the speaker begins to gather with his eyes those little chunks of human life that lie around him: “discarded soda bottle, broken / dog leash, individual windows lit with the living, / fellow anthropologists.” Literal trash or not, these images serve to drive the speaker’s thinking deeper: “Then I think it’s all one rune / or a single crystalline vase”, he says, bringing the poem to an end with a final scribble of uncertainty: “As I debate with myself in the square, / a white letter, now a black letter, / multitudes compose / my pedestrian language.”
Reading this poem for the first time, I was surprised by the overlap between the method of its thinking and that of William Blake, at least as described in his essay on his “A Vision of the Last Judgement”: “If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought… then he would arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy. General knowledge is remote knowledge: it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too.” Not bad at all, William. And Broaddus’ own approach seems to agree, even if it’s applied to less ‘lordly’ materials: as the speaker debates with himself, moving into, and contemplating, these lit particulars, he finds himself enlarged: it’s only then that we move from particulars into “multitudes.” It’s only then that the speaker names himself as a pedestrian: someone fully involved in—and fully on the level of—the pageantries of our dust-buttered earth. I would argue that this method of building a present for the reader by staring, first, into the ground, is one of the most successful ways that he could have followed Jorie Graham’s and Fady Joudah’s advice. Broaddus’ own approach, as a pedestrian, accomplishes it beautifully—and with great imagination. So many of his images—for example, from his poem “Commute”: “Life is much as I remember / it being yesterday. Shoe ads / meant to arouse / make me hungry. The necromancer on the corner / wears the same animal / face I never recognize. // I’m one of the undead / and proud of the teeth I have / professionally cleaned / twice a year.”—do reveal the world, entire worlds, to the reader. And this is not in spite of their imagination but because of it; as long as the reader is, of course, willing to hitch their own chariots of contemplation to Broaddus’. William Blake did also say, in the same essay, that “The world of imagination is the world of eternity.” And I agree with him. So does Matt Broaddus. He’s willing to take us there—to his own non-existent islands—on the wheels, wings, whims of his thinking.
Lloyd Spencer Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. You can read more of his work at lloydwallace.com.