10 Questions for Matt W. Miller
- By Edward Clifford
How they get you is first they give you more
to do by rolling out two more machines
but slowing down each loom to 100 beats
a minute to mitigate the impact of working
two looms at once and this is what they called
back then the stretch out and once they stretch you out
once you get good at working four at once
then comes of course the speed up . . .
—from “A Brief History of American Labor,” Volume 60, Issue 4 (Winter 2019)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Beyond the bad high school rip-offs of Jim Morrison lyrics and Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”? I remember writing a poem in high school about a friend who had recently died, and they put it in the school paper. It wasn’t very good, but it was mine, if that makes sense. I was trying to find the right language and images to fit her and our friendship instead of aping some Jim Carrol lyric. I think it was called “False Day Spring”. But the real, most fully realized piece I wrote as an adult was about a diner in my hometown that was open all night and everyone from punch drunk old boxers to gang bangers would slide in for a bacon, egg, and cheese or a slice of pie.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Jeez, what or who hasn’t? Whitman’s “Learned Astronomer” was the first time I read into a poem. But it was Sylvia Plath who really wounded me into poetry. Then Ginsberg and the Beats (my grandfather knew Kerouac) until Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O’Hara blew my head off. Henry Dumas’s “Knees of a Natural Man”, who you never hear about, was someone I was reading a lot as I headed into grad school a million years ago. But there are just so many. Recently Willie Perdomo’s Crazy Bunch is a book I read in manuscript as I was working on this new project along with Jess’s Olio, Long Soldier’s Whereas, Adam Vines’ Out of Speech. Brenda Shaughnessy’s Octopus Museum makes me want to throw my poems in a fire and start over. Lynn Melnick's Landscape with Sex and Violence just changed the way I saw everything. Hart Crane, especially The Bridge, is something I keep going back to, even as I am ever thwarted by his long poem, I love it. And I got to throw love to poetry pals who have all made me a better writer like Todd Hearon, Maggie Dietz, Ralph Sneeden, Will Brewer, Meg Day, Brandon Courtney, LS McKee, Kate Hanson Foster, Ryan Vine, Kerrin MaCadden, and Malachi Black. And I barely got the wrapper off the tootsie pop.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have been a short order cook, a security guard, a bouncer, a reporter, lugged furniture for a moving company. I’ve done tons of work as a landscaper and I’ve done some cement form work. I worked for a window treatment company that had contracts with colleges, so I’ve installed blinds and drapes in just about every dorm room in Boston and Cambridge. I remember keeping rods, hardware, and blinds and a drill in my truck while I was at grad school at Emerson in case I had time to go fix a drape rod in an undergraduate dorm room before workshop to make a few extra bucks.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I’ve been working on a book about the Merrimack River Valley in New England, from its emergence after the last ice age to its indigenous people, the birth of the industrial age, and up through contemporary times. And I was reading a book called Women at Work about the mill girls of New England and the ways in which their labor was exploited even though we hear all these nice myths about ow it got them out from under family control to be independent women. But it was on their backs, and the immigrant labor that came after, that the country was built upon. And of course, the only reason these women had jobs in the textile industry was because of slave labor and the cotton industry in the south. Learning the language of their work, especially having grown up in the shadows of these now defunct mills, got me thinking about how a poem may come out of it. And it sort-of wanted to be in a kind of blank verse, bricked in by the mill of inherited (or thrust upon) European forms.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
No, I often write in silence or in the low hum of coffee shop conversations. I don’t want other rhythms to pull me out of ones I’m trying to create, at least when I’m drafting. When I do listen to music try to listen to stuff that does not have lyrics, so I don’t get pulled in by the language. Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson sessions have been getting a lot of play lately.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Ideally, drink black coffee and read until something kicks in. During the school year, with classes that go from 8-6, with dorm duty and committees, it can be hard to carve out the time to sit and think. I’m not alone in that, I know. As my own kids have gotten older they need me around less but now I want to be around them even more because I feel like I’m going to blink my eyes and they will grown-up and gone. I guess my ritual is to be a hot mess and figure it out as I go. My colleague Willie Perdomo talks about protecting your dream spaces. I guess that means making the time for your heart. I’m always keeping that in mind. My ideal would be to surf from dawn till 9, get coffee and write till lunch or so, and then spend the rest of the day with my family.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My brilliant wife, Emily. She’ll say she doesn’t know anything about poetry, but she knows what’s true and real and she can’t lie. If she reads a piece and says, “Well I don’know much about poetry” in that “That outfit looks good on you!” voice then I know the poem isn’t ready. But when I get a tear or two, or a laugh, I know I’ve gotten it right. And then there a couple of other poets who generously are willing to read early drafts—Sarah Anderson and Lee Ann Dalton. The three us often share work to buoy each other up.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I love film but it is so necessarily collaborative that I don’t know if I’d be good working within all those moving parts. Plus, I’ve fallen behind with film tech and even making my own stuff seems daunting. I would like to get back into drawing. As a kid I drew comics and I’d love to get back into that. The graphic novel and poetry share a lot in their focus on the studied image and the play of time and space. And if I still had the knees, skateboarding which makes a beautiful art from concrete and asphalt desolation.
What are you working on currently?
For the last few years, I have been immersing myself in the Merrimack River Valley of my youth, where once roamed members of indigenous tribes, where America’s industrial revolution and labor movements began, where writers like Frost and Kerouac and Dubus grew up near and wrote about. Now I am finishing a book, entitled Tender the River, that spans the eastern New England narrative from the last ice age through the 21st century. The poems begin with the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers that creates the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, which then travels down through Massachusetts mill towns and spits violently out into the Atlantic at Plum Island. In its journey across the centuries, the Merrimack River has been a source of trade and resource and inspiration, from tribes like the indigenous Pennacook to the tribes of farmers and industrialist that supplanted them.
Topics of race, gender, sexuality, environmental discovery and destruction, all so tied to America’s democratic experiment and the successes and failures of capitalism, weave through the book along with personal narratives of living in the decline of American industrialism. As a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, I have been steeped my whole life in the history of this area. I grew up amid the fallen glory of that mill town, the many immigrant populations trying and often fighting with each other to make a life there. Its attempt to rebrand itself as a creative economy, its scourge of Oxycontin addiction and gang violence, its triumph as a people of never quitting. It is a place as universal as it is specific, and I have been weaving the story of this place around my personal narratives as well as its historical and geographical narratives. I have been reading about the indigenous tribes of eastern New England to know that story better. As well, I have been researching the natural and geological history of the area to see how humans have been shaped by their experiences with the land and how the land has been shaped by its experiences with humans. The book will weave historical, geological, and personal narratives together. It’s my hope that the book as a whole will take both a celebratory and critical look at the relationship between the human worlds as well as the natural world they occupy and give readers a sense of the bigger story we are all a part of by using this one small scratch of the earth as an example. This poem is part of the new collection that should be out with Texas Review Press in the spring of ’21.
What are you reading right now?
Well, I’m reading The Tradition by Jericho Brown, A Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade, rereading Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz, and Silas Marner partly because I’m teaching all of those books right now. I’m also reading a translation of Nole Me Tangere by Jose Rizal, Michael Bazzett’s translation of the Popol Vuh and I think everyone should read Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus because, for me, it was the best book I read in 2019, and I don’t think it got enough notice. I just read Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and dug it. We were lucky enough to host Arthur Sze at the school I teach at and digging into his Sight Lines was amazing. Diannely Antigua, Tanya Olsen, KMA Sullivan, and Emily O’Neil from Yes Yes Books all visited my school recently, and it’s been a blast reading their work and learning from them. And, you know, the new Massachusetts Review, of course.
MATT W. MILLER is author of The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems. He has published poems and essays in Harvard Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Narrative, Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and other journals. He is a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, River Styx’s Microfiction Prize, Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize, and The Poetry by the Sea Conference’s Sonnet Crown Contest.
