Quickie interview # 23: Matthew Rohrer

Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books, most recently Rise Up, published by Wave Books. A former poetry editor for Fence, he lives in Brooklyn.

I think male poets dress better than men in many other "professions." Do you like shopping? Where/how do you shop?

No, I’m a terrible shopper. Right now I’m wearing some tan corduroy shorts that were supposedly size 34, but are clearly not, because I can pull them on without unzipping or unbuttoning them. And I have to say, this rankles. Because “34” is not just a number like with women’s clothes, you know, that are size 0 or 2. “34” means the waist is 34 inches. Which, in this case, is obviously not true.

But I do think my father unconsciously taught me the one important dressing lesson I know: how to dress down well. I can dress down like a motherfucker. It’s always so embarrassing to see those guys who obviously work on Wall Street and they’re out there in the park on the weekends trying to be weekend daddy and they have their shirts tucked in, and tassel loafers on, and shorts with pleats. Please.

I love your book Nice Hat. Thanks. written collaboratively with Joshua Beckman. Are you guys still collaborating? If so has your process changed at all over time? Are there things you can do in collaboration that you can't do in your solo poetry?

We still do collaborate, though he lives most of the time in Seattle so it’s much less frequent. What’s happened is that we feel we’ve pretty much reached the limits of what the word-by-word collaboration can teach us. At least in that form. So we’ve been doing ones that are more narrative, trying to do stories — and we’ve allowed ourselves to say, rather than one word, as much as we feel like we can say. Sometimes it’s a long sentence, sometimes just a word. Those feel fun now because they feel so different. We’ve also given these to Matthew Zapruder who has then worked on them and the resulting poems have been through three people’s heads, and are pretty interesting — and surprisingly, much more readable than we thought. They read more like “real” poems, I think because Matthew is such a good, natural born editor. We also recently did some collaborations with Anthony McCann — erasures of some of the main texts of the Romantics, which we then traded around and altered. So that might be the answer to the question about things you can and can’t do in collaboration versus solo poetry: frankly, I like collaborating with these guys so much because they’re so good, so graceful, and getting their help just makes my writing better. Sometimes I feel lonely and inept sitting down by myself afterwards to write one of my own poems.

I caught the Wave Books poetry bus tour in both Boston and New York. How was that experience for you? Did you meet a lot of poets you hadn't been in touch with before? What was your favorite stop on the tour?

I only did eight or nine days I think — and that was plenty. I loved it, it was great, and I think it lived up to its expectations, in that it was often out of control and unexpected things happened. The camaraderie on the bus was by far the best part, which is what everyone who was on it will tell you. My first night on was at Providence, and then driving through the night down to NYC and stopping over in a truck stop. Major Jackson and I were both giddy with the newness of it and we drank a lot of terrible whiskey which was not such a good idea but the absolutely giddy feeling sitting at the table there on a bus full of poets rolling down the highway was unforgettable. And yes, I got to meet so many people I’d only read before, or people I’d never read before but am now very into, like Jon Woodward who was on that same leg. So maybe that was my favorite night since it was the first. But Las Vegas was pretty funny.

Are there any words or phrases or moves that really grate on you in poems? I'm sick of poems that begin "Dear [such and such concept or inanimate object]."

Yeah that sucks. I hate that too. I hate the completely greedy and sophomoric use of parentheses in order to pretend to say two things at once. Like when people say “(re)vision” -- once I apparently went on a rant in a class at the New School (which I don’t remember but a student reminded me of later) calling this greedy and “totally 80s.” It seems to me to come from the same excessive and grasping era that brought us Reaganomics and cocaine abuse and the heyday of theory for theory’s sake and the utter selfishness of the NeoCons — because that was, of course, when they were all hatched from their evil serpents’ eggs.

What contemporary poets are you reading? Favorite journals?

I am extremely taken with Eileen Myles’s poems right now. She was on the Poetry Bus too, and was such a great presence. I think her lines are intuitively brilliant and I’ve been really influenced by them recently. I’ve also been reading a hilariously good book by David Cameron called Flowers of Bad, which is a mistranslation of the entire Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. The process, which he goes into extreme detail about at the end, is pretty ridiculous and inspiring. My all-time favorite journal is Fence because, you know....I also love Conduit. And 6x6, which Ugly Duckling Presse does. I have a subscription to Ugly Duckling and get everything they publish, which is the best poetry money I’ve ever spent, no question.

Seen any good movies lately, if you watch movies?

Uh, I saw Knocked Up, which was really funny. I mean, relentlessly funny. But I have to say, though it will make me sound like a kind of Marxist grouch, that ultimately it was just a fancied-up reification of capitalist hegemony. I mean — he didn’t have to stop smoking pot to be a good dad.

What did you read/listen to in high school?

I didn’t read any poetry in high school — I wanted to be a sci-fi writer. I read a lot of the heavies of modernism. I listened to Robyn Hitchcock and the Smiths and the Talking Heads and stuff like that. But I think it was Robyn Hitchcock’s lyrics that opened the door for me to a way of writing that I later learned was heavily Surrealist and Symbolist influenced.

What are you working on these days?

I just wrote a 38-page poem that is a long uninterrupted narrative about a guy who gets caught up in an anti-government rebellion in an unnamed country. I’m also working on a series of poems called THE TERRORISTS, which looks at terrorists as just regular people who happen to also be terrorists. But I do mean regular people — I’ve been thinking about the way the word “terrorist” is wielded now against anyone who doesn’t do what they’re told — the Verhoeven movie Black Book is great for this — have you seen it? It’s the 2nd best World War 2 movie ever made! Anyway, the Nazis called the Dutch resistance “terrorists” and so I imagine all of these regular people, parents, white people (gasp!) who are furtively involved in something terrible.

What's the best writing advice you've gotten?

Matthew Zapruder has consistently given me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. He’s edited four of my books and he’s really changed them, done seriously intuitive and brilliant and sometimes drastic things to the poems and to the books as a whole, and he’s always right.

Have you ever been in a fist fight?

No. I wish. I was weak when I was a kid but now I’ve been doing 100 push-ups a day and just looking for a fight.

When was the last time you cried?

I cried when I heard a Paul Simon song the other day because it was a song my parents always listened to at home when I was growing up.

Favorite recipe? Please be as specific as possible so readers can make it at home if they dare.

Well I love spicy black beans. Here’s what you do. You get a can of black beans — Goya are the best. You mince 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and fry them, along with a medium onion, in oil in a pot. Then you add the beans. Add 1 or 2, if you dare, chopped up chipotle peppers, the kind in adobo sauce. Then add a pinch, just a pinch, of cinnamon, and salt, pepper, a little oregano. Juice of half a lime. Cilantro if you like it. Cook on low until it’s mushy.

Porn name? (first pet's name + first street you lived on)

hmm....Squeaky Cinderella.