Matthew Carey Salyer : part five

Why is poetry important? 

The question’s a bit of a Rorschach test. Consider how Percy Bysshe Shelley might answer it: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” What grand, aphoristic nonsense. Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, was an MP for Horsham – and later Shoreham – who sent him to Eton and Oxford. We should not be surprised to see Sir Timothy’s son assuming a close correlation between imaginative speech and his right to legislate. Great privilege often assumes a promethean ethos, then as now. Compare this to John Clare: “I am – yet what I am none cares or knows.” There is something far more radical and more democratic in Clare’s line than in all of Shelley’s poetics. The speaker of “I Am!” – the self-described “self-consumer of my woes” – is not useful to others but neither can he be used or made useless to his own poetic act. “And yet I am,” Clare reflects, “and live.” So much of the commercial and political – and, yes, literary – language that we encounter on any given day, oriented to what Orwell called “the defense of the indefensible,” legislates us without our acknowledgement. We use it to self-legislate and legislate others without mutual recognition. A poem can be remarkable because it confronts us with the real choice of submission to language. In Clare’s case, for example, we grant brief precedence to a voice about which “none cares or knows,” but that nonetheless “is.” Otherwise, we cannot read Clare. In other words, reading frees us, it dignifies us as something other than consumers, when we decide to accept what for lack of a better word is the poem’s alternative “consciousness.” I have been thinking about this in terms of my own work. Some reviewers find it pugilistic or “inaccessible.” I am not sure what to make of this. The function of the lyric poet is to build a proper house for the speaker, not the reader. In that context, I assume the risk of determining the right relationship between the occasion of the poem and the world that occasioned it, but I would not presume to know anything about something as gnomic as “the reader.” Any actual reader is a guest in the speaker’s house. Wipe your feet at the door. Milk and two sugars, ta.     

Matthew Carey Salyer : part four

What are you working on?

A novel or whatever comes out of attempting one. I do think that there’s something to Laura Miller’s warning about writing a “poet’s novel” – something “replete with long passages of description, and scant of plot” – but that’s also a bit of a cliché. Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey made steel-trap plots. Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries is a straightforward growing-up tale. I think the secret is being willing to do something unfamiliar with familiar tools. Weightlifting’s the immediate analogue that comes to mind. Powerlifters and fighters, for example, push the same iron, but with different regimens suited to different outcomes. What I am working on is a historical novel, and the past has moved toward us in its unalterable course. Its plot exerts the constant forces of verisimilitude and change against my introspective tendencies. In this instance, I retrain myself for it.

One strand of plot follows the “missing” years of James Fenimore Cooper’s mythical Leather-Stocking during the American Revolution. A second strand takes place in New York’s infamous Five Points neighborhood during the 1830s. The frame narrative follows a twenty-four-hour period in the life of a suspended NYPD detective this past summer. I think of these like geological stratum. In the United States, there seems to be a heightened awareness of how institutions and civic mythologies mask forms of originating violence. René Girard would call these “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” For John Henry Newman, this is because the “human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint.” As a novelist, I pick a limited instance of this and cover it over with progressive times, situations, and descriptions. The poet in me is more aligned, though, with the characters I invent who must dig it up again through reflection. 

Matthew Carey Salyer : part three

How does a poem begin?

It begins with a line typed on the page and the line has a little tail that hangs down and curls halfway under itself until it becomes the line below. I cut that tail off and it regrows. I cut it off again. It regrows. When at last it winds across another line or two, I can see what kind of animal it is. Then I can begin to see what other kinds of animals it might be able to live around. For me, everything depends on husbanding the growth of that first line, its development into something approximating a stanza. I really do tend to think of it like some little animal that intrudes in the field of vision, a Pangur Bán, because it has nothing to do with my own intention for the page. I admit it to companionship. It comes from somewhere out in the real world – from anywhere, really – but it must be from the real world or I have no use for it. For the better part of this quarantined year, my world has been a ten-block radius, so now all my poems begin at the northernmost terminal of the Jerome Avenue Line. I know whether a particular poem is possible or not through the process of cajoling that line into an initial stanza. Whereas I need to see the first line on the page, the rest of the stanza happens first in the mind and the ear. When it appears in the page, it is pure transcription. I perform little revision of a poem after I draft it but a great deal of variation plays out in translation between the eye’s first line and the ear’s stanza.

Matthew Carey Salyer : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Earlier this year, I read about a sociologist who had managed to walk the length of every street in New York before his death. All five boroughs. Imagine spending a day perched in his ear, how syntactically complex that would be. In metrical terms, this is a trochee cab-hailing town. Queens is anapestic. Staten Island substitutes. Iambs live on the Upper East Side, but who goes there. I think back to F.R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit and elsewhere, his sense of an undercurrent in English poetry that emulates the strangeness, the roughness, of our language as it’s talked: Shakespeare’s “full fathom five,” Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm,” Eliot’s pub-talk about how “Lil’s husband got demobbed.” Those poets who influence my thinking about writing help me translate between the poem-as-occasion and how I talk and what I hear talked. Elizabethans, Jacobeans, Metaphysical Poets. Sir Philip Sidney pushing quantitative meter. I want to hear Method Man reading Astrophil and Stella on the Staten Island Ferry. Richard Howard’s syllabic poems do this for me at a slyer pace. Meghan Maguire Dahn. There are turns in Lucie Brock-Broido, when she talks you “a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit,” for example, that inflect this. Roger Reeves. Melissa Green’s Fifty-Two has what I want in a sequence of broken paragraphs. Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, his “Overlord of the M5.” I can hear it in the cadence of Timothy Donnelly reading Timothy Donnelly at an accelerated rate. I can see it in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno at mine. The prologue to Langland’s Piers Plowman. Asturo Riley’s Heard-Hoard and “Chord.”   

Matthew Carey Salyer : part one

Matthew Carey Salyer is an Associate Professor at West Point. He is the author of a chapbook, Lambkin, and a collection, Ravage & Snare. His work appears in Narrative, Plume, The Common, Massachusetts Review, Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, Beloit Poetry Journal and numerous other journals. He has been a Pushcart nominee, a two-time finalist for the Iowa Review Prize, and a semifinalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. 

Photo credit: Fadi Kheir

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

After Derek Mahon’s death, I discovered The Hudson Letter which has the sort of homeward, homeless paradox that marks a long acquaintance with New York. I am interested in those poems of his that run the page like long, tipped-over rectangles filled with thought and sensation. “Chinatown,” for example. I had not thought I’d be drawn to his work, but I am most often surprised by what I’ve overlooked. The same’s the case with Ted Hughes, who I’ve been reencountering. There’s something I’d want to do in a poem like “Dully Gumption’s Addendum” where he turns his hawk’s eye to the civil landscape. To be honest, I tend to read poetry books like first blows in a contention with certain turns of phrase or form, fresh tics of personae or situations. I enjoyed Regan Good’s The Needle, which reads like a cave painting drawn with a very fine bone, and that brought me back to Berryman. Umit Singh Dhuga – a wonderful poet himself – sent me Don Patterson’s incredible Nil Nil and that’s brought me to a certain kind of Michael Donaghy poem. I tend to read individual poems or clusters of poems more than books. I’ve been reading a lot of Welsh and Australian poets recently. I’m not sure how that came about. Perhaps it was David Jones. I’m reading “The Hunt” and The Sleeping Lord. There’s also a poet I keep hunting named Madge Herron. She never had a book, but I know how I came about to reading her: “where the burnt-out heel of the sky cocks a hind leg at God there He keeps me.” Have you ever heard a line like that?