Love Versus Serious Shit: A Conversation with Matt Mitchell
Matt Mitchell | Grown Ocean | Word West | 2021 | 52 Pages
DT McCrea: As a poet living in the world where we’re all currently living—especially as someone coming from a marginalized community—I often find myself drawn toward reading and writing poems that deal with the tragic, with the suffering I’ve endured and seen, and do so with some degree of cynicism and/or anger. I think one of the things that was so affecting to me about Grown Ocean is that while it doesn’t shy away from the tragic—climate change feels like a constant presence in the book, for example—at its core it really seems to be a collection of earnest and beautiful love poems. Can you speak to that a bit? If you see the book that way, and what your relationship is to love poems?
Matt Mitchell: I agree. I think it’s like 90/10 love versus serious shit that’s not involved with my current romantic relationship. Around 75% of the poems were originally in The Neon Hollywood Cowboy and then we got to this point in the editing process with that book where those love poems didn't really match the tone that I was going for. Not to say that the love poems didn't have a place, but they just didn't have a place in that book. That book was me doing a lot of world-building with my own personal undergoing, you know? I just was trying to understand what was going on with myself. That was where the focus had to be. With Grown Ocean, the poems are almost focused on discovering new things about the people around me. That's why I feel like Grown Ocean is kind of just an extension of the first book, but it also can stand on its own, which I like about it. You don't have to read the first book to know what's going on in the second one.
Also I think love poems get a bad rap. Sometimes I think that the poets of the canon in the mid-20th century ruined love poems for us a bit because everybody quotes them. But I think love poems are sick. I'm always returning to Frank O'Hara because I think there's a lovely way to write a love poem about somebody—and you and your heart know who it's about, but you present it in a way that it can be about anybody, which is what I was trying to go for. I wanted it to be poems that if my partner read them she would know that they're about her, but I wanted other people to be able to read them and kind of latch onto them in a specific way. That's why there's very few gender signals in the book. As someone who is unsure of where an intersex identity falls in the juxtaposition of fluidity and cis-ness, I felt like it would have been a slog if it was just love poems about a woman, because I think poetry has too many of those right now written by people who identify as men. At the same time my own relationship with gender is not set in stone and it's not a concrete thing. So that relationship gets projected onto my romantic relationship. I wanted the book to reflect that. How the subject in the poems is certainly the person I'm in love with, but also the camera could be rotated and put on me and I could be the other person in the poem. I really wanted to reflect that in the final poem too.
D: I love that. It makes me think of Ross Gay. Ross is one of my very favorite poets—both in his work and because I know him as a person—because his work is so obsessed with joy, but it's joy from the perspective of someone who knows real suffering and still chooses to seek joy. Similarly in my reading of your book, I think there is a lot of—let’s not call it suffering—but what it is to be a marginalized person in the world and what it is to just live in the world we're all living in where things are ending and often painfully. These aren't naive love poems from the perspective of someone who hasn’t had to deal with adversity. And then there’s the second thing you were talking about of like making these poems not have gender markers and be able to resonate with a reader who maybe could see their love—whoever that is—as the subject of the poem. There's even times where, as the reader, you can feel like the subject of the poem. You can feel some of that love coming from the speaker of the poem.
M: Yeah. I feel like it's hard for me to ever take the identity of feeling marginalized, because I've gone my whole life being able to pass just fine for whatever I wanted. Also just being a white person in America, I already have a significant advantage systematically. I gravitate more towards the “you” poems than I do the specific poems because I think you can be specific with just the second-person “you” and those can still be about anybody. Although, there are some poems that like name-drop someone specifically, and I'm like yeah, this is a good poem. I can't fit myself into this poem, but it's good. I love Ross gay. I think he had some very unintentional influence on the book because the way he writes sometimes just feels so conversational. It's as if—the final edition of a poem that he presents—he just spoke the poem and that's exactly what we get. I wanted to do that a little bit with this book. Have these poems that are conversational in that when you read them, they feel like you're eavesdropping on a conversation. I really admire other poetry that can do that effectively.
D: I completely agree. I love that element of Ross too. And I see that in your work. Both as a peer and a reader—as I've gotten more familiar with your work—I’ve placed you in my mind in the same sort of school as Ross and Hanif Abdurraqib specifically around this very conversational feeling. It does feel like you're eavesdropping, or having a conversation with the speaker.
M: Thank you. That's incredible company to keep. I love being lumped in with those two. Shout out to Ohio.
D: In the acknowledgements section of Grown Ocean you mention, “most of these poems were once a part of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy manuscript, but were cut during different parts of the editing process.” Reading that, with your love for music in mind, got me thinking about the concept of B-sides. I think people often hear that phrase and assume it means songs that weren’t “good enough” for the album. But that doesn’t have to be the case, right? Often an artist goes into an album with one idea of what it’s going to be, and over time it coalesces into something else. And so they realize that some of the starting material—though just as strong in terms of quality—simply doesn’t fit the vision of the album anymore. Does Grown Ocean feel at all to you like B-sides of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy? When you were making the cuts for NHC was there a moment where you just realized you had enough really good poems that didn’t fit to start another collection, or was it more like you realized you were writing to distinct books? Because as a reader this book doesn’t feel like a collection of good poems that got put together because they didn’t fit somewhere else. It feels like a cohesive collection of poems that belong with each other.
M: Yeah. I love what you're saying about the B-sides thing. I framed that in my pitch for the book many months ago. A lot of people do think that B-sides are like the leftovers that nobody wants, but there are so many compilations out there of B-sides by artists that are just so good.
The reason I was on my phone for a second was I wanted to look to make sure I got the album title right, but Brighten The Corners by Pavement is one of the best B-side compilations ever. It's got some of the band's best songs on it and they're all “leftovers.” So these poems are like B-sides, but in the A/B side situation of, let's say, “Hey Jude.” “Hey Jude” is the A-side and “Revolution” is the B-side on that single. So like, they're both great.
D: That's interesting to think about because the term B-side—if I'm correct here—originates from flipping an album over. So it wasn't like we put our good songs on the top and our shitty songs on the bottom. It was just like, there's two sides to this.
M: “Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac was a B-side, let that be said, and that is the band’s best song. So never diss on the B side. But to the second part of your question, I'm kind of framing this whole thing as an anthology because they are different worlds happening at the same time. It's like a cinematic universe almost. At the same time that all this shit's going on with The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, Grown Ocean is also occurring. They’re happening concurrently and the unfortunate thing is that they just don't really go together. I've got another book coming out next year and it's like the third installment. They're all a part of the same moment. I think that we kind of assume that one moment can only be that one moment. I think that there are so many factions of moments inside the big moment. So yeah, they're leftovers. But also like, what do you do with leftovers? You eat them anyways. After I cut them from The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, I was like, why don't I just put them all in their own book and put them out as like a book of love poems and let everybody know that they were once in a different thing and now they're their own thing and you can still have it all.
D: I’m interested in what you’re saying about this book being more outward-looking than The Neon Hollywood Cowboy. When I read both of these books, I was often breaking that rule of separating speaker and writer, because these poems all feel very personal, and you and I have a relationship in real life. I can read some things and be like, I know Matt well enough to know that this is Matt speaking to Matt's real experiences.
M: I hope that the cowboy book, at least, comes off as so deeply personal that it can't be misconstrued as someone else dealing with this shit. I also break that rule about speaker and writer. It's a hot take probably, but I feel like for fiction you can separate the speaker from writer. However, with poetry I don't think I've ever done it. I think I'm always just sort of assuming poet and speaker are connected and I think that's okay. Even if it's maybe not the best shit that the speaker is sharing about themselves in the poem, I think it's fine. I think we're all so complex and not immune to mistakes. I was very hesitant to put in the long poem in the middle of the book where I kind of talk a lot about all the ways my gender has fucked up.
D: The one with the line “My gender is the one that killed all the Buffalo”?
M: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite lines in the book. But I was very scared at first to put that poem in the book, because I admit to using the word faggot in a way that wasn’t cool. And even now in my adulthood—where I'm starting to be proud of the way I embrace my own queerness—I'm still full of regret for the way I prolonged this horrible stigma in my hometown of associating bad things with that word. I talked to my partner about that and she was very supportive of me keeping that line in the poem and putting that whole poem in the book. I could just so easily be like: That's not me. That poem is not about me. You know what I mean? But it is about me. I fucked up in high school, many times. I feel like people should ditch that facade and just own up to mistakes and just be ready to be open and vulnerable.
D: Yeah. I love that. I mean, I'm so glad to hear you talk about it because I also share that hot take. I've never really believed we should separate speaker and writer in poetry. Unless it's obvious, you know? Unless it's like Ai writing persona poems. But even then I question—as with almost anything that people call a rule—why are we calling this a rule? Just use your better judgment.
M: Yeah, good readers know. Really good readers understand the weight that certain narratives hold. Also, good readers understand how to define the quality of a poem without attributing anything to the speaker. It's kind of like how so many lit journals read anonymously. Even though that has backfired a little bit in recent times.
D: On the other hand, one of the reasons why I'm kind of against the universalization of this rule of separating speaker and writer is because it feeds into this false idea of the universal poem that is created by cis-het, white men who think that their experience can be a universal experience. All of my favorite poets are people of different marginalized identities and they're brilliant, amazing poets. And they're brilliant, amazing poets in part because they're writing from their lived experience of being marginalized instead of writing from this privileged place of thinking that your experience is everyone else's experience. When I'm reading a trans person's poem, for example, I'm never separating their transness from the speaker of the poem because it's really important to the poem and especially to my experience as a reader of the poem.
M: Yeah. I love that. It reminds me of something that Kaveh Akbar told me once. There was a time in my writing where I was really struggling how to flesh out all my ideas that aren't explicitly related to my identity without losing that sense of identity. And Kaveh told me that because you are a writer of whatever identity you are, whatever poem or writing that you do, it is inherently that identity because it's who you are. So I don't remove anyone's identity from the poem because that's just inherently how it's always going to be. For me as an intersex person, every poem I write is going to be an intersex poem just by default, because that's who I am. And even if the poem doesn't speak directly to being, it's still a part of me while I’m actively creating that poem, while also actively pursuing my own queerness.
D: Related to that presence of identity even when the poems aren’t explicitly speaking to identity, something I—and I think many admirers of your writing—love about your poems is their relationship to pop culture. I read a wonderful interview between you and Hanif on The Neon Hollywood Cowboy where you two talked about—correct me if I’m wrong here—not wanting to be sort of pigeonholed as “pop culture” poets to the point where the pop culture references become (for the reader) the thing in and of itself and the deeper narratives and personal vulnerabilities are missed. The thing I’ve always loved about your work in this regard isn’t the inclusion of pop culture for its own sake, but it’s the way that you use all these references to express such clear and earnest love. That shows through especially to me in Grown Ocean. This book feels so full of nostalgia to me. Nostalgia as love of place and time. There’s so much love here for places you’ve been and called home, and for times in your life—childhood, adolescence, young adulthood—and you often use pop culture references to paint pictures of these times and places. But then where I think the pop culture part is most interesting is when you use it to express deep love for places (and especially times) you’ve never actually been yourself. So, to make a question out of all that, can you speak a little bit to how pop culture can serve as a sort of portal, a point of connection, to other times and other places? How that experience has shaped your writing?
M: For context, I was excited to do this interview because I was absolutely sure that you would ask pressing questions about queerness and identity, which is something that I've fucking struggled with in a lot of press around my book. People tiptoe around certain things. They don't want to say the wrong thing. I'd almost rather someone say the wrong thing to me than nothing at all. Even if you maybe get an assumption wrong, at least you're trying to formulate something about that rather than being too scared to bring it up.
As far as using pop culture in my writing, sometimes when writing about gender I feel like you have to treat cisgender readers like toddlers because they're sometimes so scared to critically read stuff about gender—whether it's being bisexual or trans or intersex or whatever. So when it comes to using pop culture, for one, I really like it. I love everything that I’m referencing in my writing. But also, I had to use it as like a way to sort of get people interested in what I was trying to say about gender and identity. My poems that didn't have those little pop culture signals weren’t getting as much traction or interest. As much as that sucks, I'm thankful for it because I love how they came out. I love how I've sort of come into my own voice with that.
To the other part of your question, a lot of people were attributing a lot of the stuff in the cowboy book to nostalgia. And I'm a stickler for correctly using the term. Nostalgia's a thank you for correctly using it. Grown Ocean is definitely nostalgic for a time and place that I've already lived through. Whereas I don't think you can be nostalgic for something you weren't alive for. So when someone talks about nostalgia in The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, I would say I'm not nostalgic for the eighties. I have a yearning to understand that era. What I've been fed about that era is just manufactured joy. It was a terrible decade for a lot of people. The music fucking rocks and the movies are good, but America outside of pop culture sucked in the eighties. So no, of course I don't wish I lived in the eighties. The first book is about yearning for that manufactured joy, in conjunction with dealing with the fucking clusterfuck of my life at the time. I'm always listening to records and I'm also always interacting with different forms of entertainment, whether it's new or old. With that book I wanted to tap into the older side of my interests. With Grown Ocean, it's a very present-day set of poems. The focus of the book on my relationship is very much in the moment. So all of the signals in Grown Ocean are very recent things. Funny People came out in 2009. The Wilco record is from 2001. As much as I could possibly do, every reference is from my lifetime, which is a lot of nostalgia. I like nostalgia a lot because I definitely wish I was living in any time other than now. Ever since Bowie died I feel like everything has fucking sucked. So I'm nostalgic for when Bowie was still alive. I said in my conversation with Hanif that a lot of those references in The Neon Hollywood Cowboy were for people like my parents who maybe don't understand the structure of poetry and the metaphors but can understand the feelings you get when you listen to certain things or watch a certain thing. I didn't want that to be the focal point of Grown Ocean, because the things I'm feeling are direct responses to something that someone else is doing right in front of me, rather than a song that's playing. In The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, the songs are as much a part of the setting as myself, but in Grown Ocean the songs and the movies and all that are much more background pieces. Me and the other person in the poem are at the forefront.
D: What’s one piece of media—album, movie, show, book, etc.—you would recommend to anyone who wants to read this book?
M: You could read The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan. It's a fantastic book and a big influence on what I was going for. I always want to throw a record in there too. I would say Wilco's self-titled album is something that I played nonstop throughout the entire time writing Grown Ocean. My partner put the song “You and I” on a playlist for me right before we started dating, and it has continued to be sort of our song. So if you want to get into the mindset of what I was thinking as I was writing, that album would be a good place to start.
Matt Mitchell is a poet and music critic in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of Grown Ocean (Word West, 2021) and The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Lucks, 2021).