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Friday, February 19, 2010
Author Interview: Matthew Ward on the Art of Poetry
11th place in NonfictionMatthew (Matt) Ward lives & writes in Newcastle Australia. He has had three books published: Jake - a novella (Australia, 2004); Her Mouth Looked Like a Cat’s Bum - short stories (USA, 2006); and Cats Creep the Fire To Art - poetry (USA, 2008). His short stories have appeared in several magazines, printed as well as online. Ditto, his articles – both serious & satirical. He dreams of writing the great Australian novel; failing that, the great American one. He is also the publisher of Skive Magazine (2003-2009). Following is a brief conversation with Matt on his poetry collection Cats Creep the Fire To Art.
Ernest: Matt, the first thing I’d like to ask is the meaning of your book’s title ‘Cats Creep The Fire To Art’. What does it signify?
Matt: The title was a stick it to former university friends. I was still at university when I wrote the long, cryptic poem, ‘Expression of Formality’. The cat was me, as an artist, willing to walk through fire, or pain, to get to that artistic ‘place’, something those former friends, who lacked my artistic pursuits at the time, wouldn’t know how to do. I saw myself as a pioneer, writing whatever style I took notice of, and at this stage, it was more of a stream of consciousness with a jazzy beat. The poem was mean, full of vitriol and I wanted to cause them anguish. I showed a nastier version of the poem to one of these ‘friends’, knowing he would tell the others. It was a real ‘high school spat’ period of time - less time spent studying subjects than gossiping about the mores of relationships.
Ernest: Death, depression, and aging/past are the motifs repeating in different sections of your book. But there is little humor to cheer up the reader. Do you think you tend to be a part of serious and contemplative topics?
Matt: The book deals with these topics, yes. I hardly ever wrote about humorous topics (although years after, in short stories, I did). Maybe only 2 or 3 poems max. Poetry was serious for me. It was drama. It was pain. It was blackness. It was pathos. It was like: ‘here I am, all serious like.’ I would sit down at the same time every night, add to my journal and then write a poem or 2. I had topics or a starting sentence / stanza, whatever. I wrote history poems, attempting to capturing political or sociological moments. I also wrote a lot of love/erotic poetry, but those were not part of Cats Creep; they were self-published back in 1995 in book form. I wanted none of that romantic stuff in this book because in that other book, that’s all there was. The love book did have some lighter, more humorous moments in it, but it was also, mainly, dripping in animal lust, love, and the thoughts of a poet trying to understand and swim with the universe.
Ernest: Metaphor and allusions are frequent in your poems, reflecting in the book’s title too. How do you opine on simpler forms of poetry for conveying the message more readily?
Matt: The earlier, usually longer poems have more allusion, metaphor, simile in them, mainly because I am trying to write in code. The later poems are much shorter, maybe half a page - excluding sonnets which I wrote just to see if I could. I occasionally wrote using metaphor to make a grand, artistic point but most of the time, I was writing deceptively so I could say, ‘No that’s not about you, it’s about so-and-so.’ The later poems are more honest and I like them more - well, I think they are better distilled than the longer ones. The history poems, like the Catholic school ones occasionally have metaphor, like the one with the kids at Communion, and the girls dressed like brides so they can ‘marry’ Christ. Both plain/simple and metaphorical poems serve a purpose, however.
Ernest: What is characteristically Australian about your poems, besides the ever-bright sun we read of in the section Australia of the book?
Matt: Good question. Australians are proud of their land, but they - at least I am - are also embarrassed about the politics of the place, the attitudes - racist and otherwise - of too great a number than most of us want to admit to. The poems reflect this double edged sword, this pride and embarrassment. We say that we believe in ‘a fair go for all’ but a lot of the time that’s not true. Most are not willing to step forward and be more of an individual unless it’s part of a sporting team. We will be proud of a person if they become famous, but we are wary. If someone famous comes to my city, we see the person, wonder why they are here, say ‘hi’ if they are a few meters away, but not chase them to say hello. Then we can say to others later, ‘Hey, I saw Joe Bloggs and he was nice/a good bloke’ but if they cause a scene, drive a fancy car, have hot women hanging off them, we hate them, saying they should go back to Sydney/Melbourne, or the big cities. Australia is on the whole an egalitarian nation, and my poems reflect this, whether it’s the Church (in my case, Catholic), police force, teachers, politicians, or other authority figures.
Ernest: In many places, your poems sound like approaching the intended topic quite indirectly, like the poems in the sections Women and Self. What generally comes first to you during the creative process of a poem, the title or the theme?
Matt: Depends. Firstly I don’t write poems anymore. I have written 3 in three years and before that not since 1996; that’s 14 years ago! Here they are, don’t worry, they’re short:
OUR PRIME MINISTER
Our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are friends
Which is unusual as they’re supposed to be enemies
They wear fake moustaches to hide in the cafe
Actually one does and the other
Who really does have a moustache
Shaves his off
No-one is the wiser
Except the college age parrot who sits in the corner
Sipping tepid coffee
Squawking
And smoking a bummed cigarette
Polly put the kettle on.
HOLE IN ONE HAIKU
Tiger’s eagle eye
for birdies is his weakness
and his albatross
MIGRAINE HAIKU
Migraine precludes haiku thought
Taken paracetemol
Sleep won’t help
Our PM is silly and closer to the flash stories I write. The haiku(s?), about Tiger Woods as serial sex fiend, and one about migraine, that I suffer now and then, were written because they are short, and also because I like puzzles, and haikus are puzzles with definite beats etc…
Back to your question: the difference might be when they were written. The earlier poem, from 1992-93, were written with a topic in mind, like the Catholic school/Ireland ones, while the later ones started usually with a word or a line that I would incorporate into a poem. With the later poems, the topic came last. The dreams one, the long poem, was a real (?) dream about swimming in the ocean. It is long because the dream was vivid and I didn’t want to lose any of it. I think I took notes from the dream and turned it into the poem, breaking it up into more ‘natural’ stanzas.
Ernest: Quite a few of your poems in this collection are long, like Pietas, Expression of Formality, and Dreams: the Illusions of Night. What do you prefer in general – longer or shorter poems, and why?
Matt: Answered earlier I believe. When I reread the longer poems, they weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. They had some clever phrasing that I might not want to do now, as I am lazier now (maybe).
Ernest: The last poem in the book, called Mortality, voices the confusion or uncertainty about afterlife. You mind telling about your take on the topic and the interest in it for creating poetry.
Matt: Look, I am a different person now. I had a feeling of equality for all, BUT thought that anyone who wasn’t following Jesus or more importantly Roman (or Irish) Catholicism was destined to never see the face of God and therefore be doomed to a dark, eternal dark sadness. ‘Look at me and my ilk, we are privileged!’ I thought. Now however, I think much differently. I am more or less atheistic in my outlook, believe that people can be kind to their fellow (wo)men without going to church/temple, whatever, and not that I want to quote my one time hero John Lennon, but I will, when he said a lot of the wars and other trouble in the world have been done in the name of religion, that a man can go to his own house to think peaceful thoughts, go to his own ‘church’, in his own head. I do like the topic of embarrassment in the poem ‘Mortality’ as we all feel embarrassed now and again, and Catholicism thrives on that as almost a teaching
Ernest: Skive is there as a quarterly magazine of short fiction for quite some time. Any reason why you did not leave any room for poetry in the magazine you produce?
Matt: I abandoned poetry; my own and others’ as well, because a LOT of it was awful. Poets often write self-indulgent, cathartic poetry. It’s self-centered and boring. When I co-edited HEIST! Magazine in 1998-2002, we occasionally published poetry, but it had to be good by our standards and it rarely was. My poetic heroes at the time were John Donne, Seamus Heaney, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Spenser, Ginsberg, Whitman, and we seldom received anything that came anywhere near the poetry of the greats. For the bad poets, poems are written quickly and never re-written, they believe that the words cannot be fiddled with, they are nearly always auto-biographical so they are loath to leave anything out, even thought they should be. There are exceptions, but, still, it’s rare. I published poetry in my 1999 online emag insomAniac, but not in early Skive (2003 - 2008). I wanted only short stories because of the above frustrations with poetry, but also with poets themselves who were and are more precious, more likely to tell me to fuck off, and then send me something else next week! Fewer mental cases in the ranks of the short story writers. The poets I have dealt with in the last year or so are the poets I want to publish; nothing pretentious about them; they will take rejection as a badge of honor and send me something else without quibbling. Poetry is still used as filler, with the short stories remaining as the stars, but that filler is a more interesting break from a story, an intermission if you will.
Ernest: Thank you Matt for your time and thoughts!
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