In Retrospect: An Interview with Matthew Olzmann, Myths & Fables Guest Judge
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Matthew Olzmann, our guest judge for this year’s Myths & Fables Prize, which you can submit to here. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core writing practices and fascinations which have shaped Olzmann’s body of work. In his most recent collection, Constellation Route, Olzmann’s “playful imagination figures the poet as part Hermes… part Charon… part United States Postal Worker,” according to Gregory Pardlo. Here, Olzmann walks us through his life in poetry thus far, from early poems featuring epistolary inclinations to a current obsession with the particular staying power of myths and fables.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Matthew Olzmann: I can’t remember one specific poem, but I remember my first attempts—they all resembled unmailed letters. Things I wanted to say but couldn’t. Things I wanted to say but the moment had passed. Things I wished I said differently. They weren’t necessarily poems at the time, but some of them might have rhymed or looked like poems. I was a teenager, and I was becoming interested in poems as a reader but wasn’t imagining myself as a “poet” yet. I was simply writing things to work through ideas or feelings. And then as my interest in reading poems began to increase and my curiosity about making things from words grew, the life of the reader and the life of the writer began to merge. Having now written a collection of (mostly) epistolary poems, the aspect of those early poems that’s stayed with me is the idea of “who is on the other end of this communication?” I don’t mean that I think of a poem as a letter to someone, but I do think that the poem is creating an experience for someone else, and imaging that person on the other side of this device remains useful to me.
F.P.: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle Mezzanines ends up spinning around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
M.O.: Putting together Mezzanines was a Ship-of-Theseus-like process. Over many years, it had different titles and poems were frequently replaced with newer poems which were later replaced by other poems. Additionally, when I consider that it’s more of a loose collection than a tightly focused project, I’m not sure if the book has a single axle or launch point. But there are a few poems that standout as important in the process. Something like “Notes Regarding Happiness” felt like a leap forward for me when I wrote it in terms of pacing and its quickly shifting sense of focus—and a similar type of movement shows up (to a lesser degree) in poems written after that that made it into the collection, and (to an equal or greater degree) in poems written after that collection.
F.P.: What lesson(s) did writing and publishing your previous work such as Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design teach you that you applied to your third collection?
M.O.: Leaving poems out of the book if they feel like they could be the start of a new project. In Mezzanines, I left a few poems out that felt like they spoke to one another in interesting ways. They could have easily fit into the book, but I had a vague sense that they might evolve into something bigger. That didn’t happen; those poems didn’t grow into their own “project,” and that’s fine. Some of them ended up in Contradictions in the Design, but I’m glad I waited to see if there was more there to explore. Sometime before Contradictions came out, I noticed that I use the direct address a lot. Normally, when I notice an unconscious habit, I try to stop doing it. This time, I went in the other direction and asked, “What would happen if I only did that exact thing for a while?” And I began only writing epistolary poems for several months. It wasn’t initially to make a book; I just wanted to see how that voice might develop. But I had a couple poems in this mode that I held out of Contradictions in the Design thinking they might belong to something else. They did.
F.P.: In terms of the evolution of your collection, Constellation Route, at what point did the letters from Cathy Linh Che, Jessica Jacobs, Ross White, Mike Scalise, Vievee Francis, and a bunch of pigeons enter the picture? What were your conversations with these writers like (namely, the human ones, though you’re welcome to share about the pigeons, too) regarding the inclusion of their poems in your collection?
M.O.: I just asked them to write a letter to me but not about me. Some of those conversations came up organically in the way that might happen when a writer is discussing their work with another writer. A couple times, the conversation began with me directly soliciting their participation. You mentioned the pigeons, so I’ll note that that one (along with similar letters by a flying saucer, the Roman Empire, and a traffic light) was written before the letters from other poets entered the collection. Initially the book was all letters from me (or a fictional version of me) to other people, ideas, things, etc. And a challenge was “how do I create variation when so many poems are using a similar approach”? So, reversing the epistolary correspondence and having letters to me rather than from me felt like a natural extension of the book’s framework. The first attempts were persona, but I quickly thought it might be more interesting to include other letters by other poets, and that’s how that next batch of letters came about.
F.P.: Finally, as you prepare to judge our Myths & Fables Contest, what is something related to the contest theme—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, mythical creature, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
M.O.: I’m a little enchanted or obsessed with the mysterious staying power of myths and fables, the way many of these have been with us for hundreds or thousands of years—and yet they continue to capture our imagination, evolve with us over time, and ask questions that feel just as relevant now as they did back when Gods were throwing lightning bolts from the peaks of mountains. But I don’t want to create a narrow lane for anyone thinking of sending in their work; I think myths and fables contain limitless possibilities—and the modern can be equally or more mythic than those handed down across centuries. I’m excited to see what’s out there.
