Visibility Regime: On Farid Matuk’s “Moon Mirrored Indivisible”
Farid Matuk | Moon Mirrored Indivisible | University of Chicago Press | March 2025 | 96 Pages
What do you not know, how do you become aware of what is unknown? How do you differentiate between a lack of information and an impossible knowledge that depends on experience? One might feel disturbed by a lack of information; one can grow with and through an impossible knowledge. In Farid Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the central nervous system of “I” exceeds oneself. The mirror reflects one person—the formal temperament of a poet arranging these words—just as it expands across languages, cultures, and nations. A collective is formed as a series of “I” statements that necessarily indulge and resist solitude. “No empty space but a transom / Between life and word,” Matuk writes in “Against Occupation.” Embedded in that indulgence, one finds eros; embedded in that resistance, one finds the thresholds knowledge cannot cross.
When confronted with an impossible knowledge, I tell my students, there are methods for situating yourself in what feels familiar—in the poem’s terms, never our own—a position from which we can contextualize absence. Say you don’t know what a particular word means, an allusion is not immediately clear to you: the poem is operating outside of your cultural and historical framework, reinforcing the existence of the framework itself. “We had so much—ideas, tasks that don’t really ask for names / To burn in some America’s idea of presentness,” and the American obsession with categorical expansion becomes a time and place, as Moon Mirrored Indivisible situates us in proximity. The idea of presentness, however, felt viscerally by those made vulnerable, is not consistent, is designed to not be consistent, a way of forever extending a demand on the people who live outside of America’s idea of itself. So ask again more seriously: what do you not know? Poetry is one way of giving the self a different sense of time—“Words having made a vector of time / In a way that rounds space into a nest” says the poem “Perfect Day”—one way of creating different contingencies for sound. We experience form, and these patterns transform, if just for a moment, our relationship to language and metaphor. Listen to these lines from “A Page without a People”:
Trained to follow after vernacular
American loneliness, I’d pretend
The page was blank
Even when it folds
Into proximities that overwhelm
The fantasy of empty space
What is occluded by these conditions? What does the poem itself not know but points to by acknowledging the state of “vernacular / American loneliness” (with a nod to Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric)? The social terms for blankness erupt “into proximities,” which is why the figure of “we” is a structural method, an accumulation of first-person speakers mirrored in their assembly: indulging and embedding, embracing and resisting.
At the edge, a self reflects through and refracts against another; this is how the book situates itself historically, not about identity but moving through the possibility of several identities. In full, here is the poem “Show Up”:
So, we’re at the edge
Of this visibility regime?
Maybe two inches back
A little and aging
Against it we’re told to repeat
Our dissonance and lack of closure
Again, the imposed conditions, and now a “we” who approaches a threshold. Who imposes the framework for lack of closure? For Matuk, as for many poets before him, dissonance becomes a kind of coherence. We are thinking about poems written in English, a combination of Latinate and Germanic words, published in 21st century America; whether you sense the movement between Latinate and Germanic roots, you feel that pulse in the layered diction of a phrase like “edge / Of this visibility regime”—the Old English blade dividing the couplet, the Latinate flourish allowing us to intuit a shift. We are thinking about poems written by Farid Matuk, a previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, a survivor of childhood sexual assault—a person, like all of us, with such idiosyncratic experiences that “visibility” is eclipsed by its promise on the page.
When its surface is a mirror, how does a poem begin in one place and end elsewhere? The distance between two points is closer than one imagines: form, the event of moving through the poem, changes the image so acutely that we simultaneously feel we’re at the beginning and somewhere entirely new. For Matuk, that process is productively slowed by bodily fluids: there are boogers, a person “shitting / To a news video of a beheading,” “a different video of boys spitting tobacco / onto each other’s tongues,” “daddy’s spit,” and the experience of dreams that “take you into small rooms to cum.” A state of abjection dramatized in these moments, saliva and excrement double to mark the human: “I happen close enough to consciousness / To taste what words would go to what mouths,” writes Matuk in “Sentences Heard upon Emergent Devotions.” We are included in that process. Anticipation is distributed throughout these poems: what assumptions readers will make about several “I” figures and their accumulation into “we.” The poem continues, “Don’t call it an ingenious use of the materials / And signs that would carry / This thingly, distributed body,” and one can hear the multilayered tone of “ingenious,” the patronizing descriptor that cannot quite fit these materials and signs in an academic toolbox and so must frame them as novelty. Not merely a conversation with readers, this sense of anticipation happens across time; later, one poem quotes Nathaniel Mackey: “in language we inherit the voices of the dead.” The dead, of course, are not only those figures one chooses to place in a living tradition; the dead cross all distances, and in this case, one cannot hand-select the assembly of voices. I suspect this will feel uncomfortable, if not like an outright violation; Moon Mirrored Indivisible transforms this inheritance into a formal energy.
So the poems expand until they reach a limit: in temperament, in form. In acknowledging their limit, Matuk refuses any prescriptivist readings of poetry—the “I” as significant merely for its capacity to speak—to create an assembly, a group of temperaments unified by formal patterns. What tends to be labelled the “speaker” of a poem often seems to me a narrowing term: a hangover from the vogue of confessionalism, the shorthand “speaker” sees complex patterns reduced to a psychological subject: “We’re not inside the words / No interviews,” read two lines from “Redolent.” Is the trend I’m describing in Matuk’s work a political question? Of course, but perhaps asking this in the first place only reinforces a dominating framework that the poems resist—a condition Monica Youn writes about in From From, her most recent collection, as does Fady Joudah throughout much of his work. Joudah himself makes an appearance a few times in Moon Mirrored Indivisible, as here in the poem “Arts & Craft”:
Fady says that Darwish said,
“No people are smaller than their poem”
Say it again
When they come to ask
Mahmoud Darwish through Fady Joudah through Farid Matuk: the imperative to “say,” a “we” grouped together apart from a “they” who will impose a question. One can feel Joudah’s influence throughout this collection—the simultaneous embrace and resistance to names, categories, definitions—just as these pages reinforce Matuk’s idiosyncrasies. In “A Movie Called Mimesis,” a present “we” moves into the future, watching “a movie about us,” the pronoun here referring to people who “took an accent // From a dialect that never made it / Down the mountains.” The image of oneself almost becomes categorical, misrepresenting even in the smallest terms what’s left of experience. Watching the movie, what changes in an imitation, what is inflected? Joudah’s own “Mimesis,” from his 2013 volume Alight echoes what is and is not an answer. Father and daughter discuss the implications of removing a spider web from the young girl’s bicycle: “She said that’s how others / Become refugees isn’t it?”
Increasingly I am bored with poets, critics, and scholars of poetry who speak from a position of uncomplicated certainty. Yet too often the opposite means inertia (one example: the charge that criticism, especially book reviews, trend positive, no teeth, no grit). We know what’s on the page: we can speak to sentences in lines, stanzas, rhythm, sound, image. The effect of these patterns—what invites us, demands from us, to re-experience the poem—often elides, for me, rational explanation. This does not mean one cannot find another idiom for description and observation, language that approximates the experience of reading in the most specific terms. When reading a good poem, one that layers and patterns the above effects generatively, provocatively, it feels almost like I’m discovering what a poem is for the first time. I am sent back to a state of unknowing, if only for a moment, from which I can reconstruct my sense of poetry through that particular poem, through that poet’s sensibility. I trust the critics and scholars who work through this process rather than giving a poem their own framework for legibility; I read the poems that cultivate in their readers, through music, a particular kind of intuition. The title poem of Moon Mirrored Indivisible begins, “In the mirror I’ve said, ‘Immigrant / my name is argument, / as small as my means…’” Whatever notion of formal coherence one might have before approaching the page, we must approach poetry as a process of relearning those conditions, lest we take for granted our own taste. One attribute—anything from metered and rhymed poetry to typographically experimental work—is not better merely for the fact of its attribution. Otherwise, to return to the beginning, one cannot foster for themselves (for their readers, for their critics) that generative impossibility: at the threshold, aware of proximities. The title poem ends:
On a day without gods,
With only the staff they offered us to strike Earth
And there make the navel of the world
Don’t even bother to break it