Author Interview: Airea D. Matthews
The author of Simulacra on the inescapability of the past, the pleasures of remixing, and poetry as an exploration of sickness
Conducted by Bennet Johnson for The Ribbon
Upon reading Airea D. Matthew’s debut collection, Simulacra, I found myself in a fearless mood. I don’t exactly know how to explain it. There’s something about this collection: its diverse speakers, intricate mythologies, and unique ferocity, which will force you into a sublime state of confidence.
As one might witness upon reading “Meeting Want (Again)” or “Rebel Opera,” Matthews approaches form as an endless exercise in experimentation. Poems are written as a series of text messages shared between various personas and Anne Sexton, or they become a series of letters, or a twitter account, or a play. But with each alteration comes an even more fascinating revelation. As the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Carl Phillips, suggested, “The particular thrill of Simulacra is Matthews’s resistance to an easy confessional mode; instead, she offers us nothing less than an extended meditation on the multifariousness of desire.”
Simulacra was the recipient of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Airea will be reading from Simulacra at 7 PM on Wednesday, April 5th at Literati Bookstore. I was lucky enough to exchange a few emails with her in the days leading up to the event.
One of the many things your collection forced me to do was to consider the antagonistic and/or sympathetic relationship often shared between that of poetry and its various forms of simulacra. I’m primarily thinking about your usage of mythology and playfulness as they relate to, and maybe even act as, a copy that has no original. As both a poet and a reader of poetry, how do you understand the capacity by which poetry might involve certain literary practices in order to construct a duplicate from something that may have never existed?
Myths and archetypes give me a structure that I can creatively remix. I grew up on hip-hop in the 80s when beats were often sampled and reimagined. There was a simple beauty in listening to a song and trying to locate it on someone else’s track; it was, and still is, as lovely as tracing one’s ancestral DNA, the markers of ones’ literary lineage, which, of course, plays into the overall theme of the book.
It’s sort of comforting to hear Lyn Collins’ 1972 “Think (About It)” on any track — from Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock’s “It Takes Two” to “Ash Rockin” by J Dilla. There’s a oft-sampled hook in Collin’s song that repeats “use what you got to get what you want…”; that’s exactly what the myth remixes allowed me to do.
What ultimately fascinates me about simulacra is that the duplicate is nothing like the original; yet, the duplicate is everything like the original. I find that dichotomy compelling.
I adored meeting all the different personalities and characters who inhabit this collection. Were there any of them which you found difficult to work with? Similarly, we spend a great deal of time with Anne Sexton. Were there any Anne Sexton poems that you found challenging to write/revise?
The Sexton texts took place over the course of a year, and I revised them for about two years. I wanted to make sure that they were sublimely iterative and not banal repetitions. The challenge was to resist nostalgia in favor of thoughtful exchange while ensuring that the reader gradually accretes more information about the mysterious interactions. To that end, the texts were incredibly difficult to revise. There are a lot of moving pieces in those poems, and each one is intentional and necessary.
“Confessions From Here” is a poem that has yet to stop haunting me. The second block of text is where I find myself unable to fully escape the clutches of the speaker. Where did the idea to structure confessions as questions posed to a recently abandoned beloved come from?
The questions struck me as an opportunity to suggest how inescapable the past is. At the point the questions arise, the speaker is elsewhere (presumably wherever they wanted to be). However, they can’t stop asking questions as it relates to their former life. Imagine a speaker who was carried in the crook of a God’s elbow to a different realm, and yet still insists on interrogating the movements of their abandoned past.
Perhaps, we carry our histories and our memories with us, and we remain curious about our past no matter how far we flee from it.
While looking at those poems that adapt the form of text messages, I find myself flipping to the poems which are formatted as letters, and eventually I land on the poem “Narcissus Tweets.” In using these different formats — one traditional, the other two of the twenty-first Century — how did the different senses of urgency and levels of intimacy effect your development of the speaker(s)?
For me, the lure of the traditional letter was that it offered a semi-private form; it’s a space where one can tell a secret to a friend. Conversely, social media conveys the mask that you want to reveal to the public; it’s a constructed persona. In a way, the written letter is a platform for unveiling truths, while social media is a platform for obscuring truths.
Sickness: whether it be mental, physical, emotional, or the result of an addiction, weighs heavy throughout this collection. Do you think there might be certain facets of poetry that allot for a different, one might even suggest, unique, exploration of these multiple forms of illness?
I think it would be difficult to write poetry about the human condition without accounting for myriad forms of sickness, or at least the possibility of it. The way that my mind is constructed is different than the way some other minds are constructed — neurodiversity I believe it’s called.
There are some subjects, like mental illness and addiction, which seem more navigable through the poem. If entire swaths of memory have been wiped clean due to illness, one relies on fragmentary memory. When the middle is murky, the beginning might be recalled or the conclusion, or any number of events in the sequence. Poems manage time in a way that makes allowance for forgetting, for erasures, for puzzling through, for creating one’s own history. In the absence of facts, one can rely on image and language to represent a close facsimile of truth. In this, the poem welcomes temporal and cognitive fractures.
Simulacra was released this past Tuesday, March 28th. Following some readings for the release, in addition to what I assume for you is an already packed National Poetry Month schedule, what are you most looking forward to about spring and the soon-to-be summer?
One of the many benefits of winning the Yale is a month-long stay in June at James Merrill’s apartment in Stonington, CT. I welcome the rest and uninterrupted writing, but I am also excited about the opportunity to be off the grid for a while.
