Interviews — The Rupture

Matt Sadler is the author of The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio (March Street) and Tiny Tsunami (Flying Guillotine). He is a poetry editor at Versal and lives in the suburbs of Detroit with his wife and kids.

His poem, "Jaws," appeared in Issue Eighty-Two of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks with interviewer Angela Redmond-Theodore about movies, philosophy, and his multi-faceted writing life.

The descriptions you present in “Jaws” are so detailed and precise. At the same time, each stanza offers the poem a layer of mystery, similar to the passes made by the great white shark in the movie Jaws. How did this poem come about?

I was writing a series of poems trying to pull themes out of classic and contemporary film and examine the themes in the bare light of day, but explore them using imagery specific to the film. I had a lot of fun watching movies each night for a couple months and writing as I watched. The resulting manuscript produced quite a few published poems, and I’m glad the Collagist took this one!

I’m intrigued by the widening shifts in perspective between the personal characterizations—you, we, and the living—that lead the reader through the poem. This creative move is as philosophical as it is literary. Would you speak to the place of philosophy in your work and in the work of poets and poetry, generally speaking?

To me, philosophy is central to poetry. I’m always looking for the perspectives and ideals present underneath the poems I’m reading, beyond the initial sonic and emotional experience of reading the poem (perhaps this is a symptom of teaching English and philosophy in a high school?). When I write, I sometimes start with the philosophical ideal, but just as often I let it develop organically as I write, then hone it in revision.

Parables are instructions passed on by means of story, leading the hearer/reader from a starting point to a surprise destination. The structure of “Jaws” is parabolic: we begin in the sun and end up in the dark. What lesson(s) has this poem taught you?

For this poem, I was fascinated by the idea that we literally travel to the places we fear and drop fishing lines into the depths, that we’re dependent on those very depths that haunt us in both imagination and reality, that our “light” exists side by side with our “darkness”. This happens in the movie on the fishing boats and beaches, and it exists with every institution humans manage to create. And I tried to leave this poem vague as to whether the end is going to be happy, so we just have to accept that we exist in that space.

What is your guilty pleasure reading? Does it have any influence on how or what you write?

I don’t feel guilty about anything I read! At least that I’m willing to admit to you! I guess to answer this question, I’ve recently begun to seek out YA and Middle Grade fiction for its brevity, clarity, and frankness. And it did influence my writing! I just finished my first Middle Grade novel(la). I like the general idea to simplify and clarify more and more the older I get.

Please tell us what you’re working on these days.

As I mentioned, the middle grade novel is in final draft editing stage. The poetry manuscript I mentioned above was scrapped, and some if its pieces were incorporated into a new manuscript that I just finished and started circulating (including Jaws). I’m working on an ongoing collaborative project, writing a whole season of a television show with some friends. And I’m at square one for my next manuscript project, trying to figure out what book to write next. It’s exciting

Holly Iglesias’s works include Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, Souvenirs of a Shrunken World, and Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. She teaches at the University of Miami in the Creative Writing MFA Program, focusing on documentary and archival poetry.

Her poem, "Epic of the Material World," appeared in Issue Eighty-One of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Angela Redmond-Theodore about the faith of children, working with history, and her mother’s friendships.

You use the third person in “Epic of the Material World,” but the poem is strikingly personal in tone. Please tell us what led you to write it?

For me as a child, being in a church was a flood sensual experience. In order to access memories of that time of my life, all I need is the slightest trigger—a flickering flame, whiff of myrrh, rattle of beads. So this poem is looking at myself (the personal) from a distance of many decades and much knowledge of the context of the Cold War (the epic) as it played out in Catholic school in the 50s and 60s. I’m always striving to find the sweeping historical story in the little, intimate story.

While appreciating the stretching of the text across the page in the form of a prose poem, epic is a surprising title choice, given that the poem is only a few lines long. Can you tell us what led you to use this word, and not story, say, or narrative?

I chose epic because it’s a highfalutin and heavily freighted word that provides a contrast to the condition of children, who are usually considered powerless and less than full citizens of the “real world.” Also, children encounter nearly everything as huge and enthralling and ponderous. Besides, the word narrative evokes literary theory and rhetoric, and I was going for the opposite effect—up close and physical, not distant and abstract. (Just as a side note, all of my poems are prose poems.)

Bracketed by the image of the Infant of Prague at the beginning of the poem and “children…always children” at the end, this poem offers crash course in Catholicism—images, litanies, jargon. Can you talk a little about your choice to place the lens of criticism in the “dark eyes” of children?

In Catholic school during the Cold War we were told tales of pious children (always peasants, always in Europe, well sometimes in Latin America) to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, offering hope to an embattled world if only we would pray the rosary. But there was also, in the news, a constant stream of stories about imperiled children persecuted for their faith behind the Iron Curtain, children for whom we were to pray without ceasing to help bring about an end to their suffering and torment. I was shaped by Catholicism not through the study of arcane doctrine but through legends of saints and martyrs, exemplars of faith past and present, and through the annual cycle of rites and spiritual practices. All of this formation endowed me with a vision of the world in which heaven and earth were reconciled, not alienated, and where all realms and roles were sacred.

Is there a work of literature that you turn to for inspiration, or out of necessity, from time to time? What are you reading these days?

I read Joan Didion and W.B. Yeats again and again, Didion for her steely eye and clean, razor-edged sentences, Yeats for his thundering lyricism and acute yearning. Right now I’m reading Elisabeth Asbrink’s 1947: Where Now Begins (for research on a collection of letters my mother wrote that year) and (re)reading C.D. Wright’s One Big Self (for her mighty mind and huge heart).

In your approach to writing, do you have a particular project in mind, or do you build up a body of poems before determining what form they will take? What are you currently working on?

I’m a historian at heart and am always researching, so most of my work is sparked by a project. My first book was about the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, my home place, and the third looks at a childhood in the Midwest and at the Cuban exile community in Miami in the 70s. Right now I’m working with a collection of letters written in 1947 and 1948 by my mother and eight friends who worked with her at a defense plant during World War II. She initiated the correspondence out of a desire to maintain their connection as their post-war lives began to change quite radically—getting married to G.I.’s seeking jobs and education, dealing with the housing shortage, fearful and optimistic about the economy and politics of a post-war world. These women did in fact remain very close for the rest of their lives. Their letters show us young women responding to the challenges of rapidly changing world and determined to maintain their friendship through it all.