An Interview with Poetry Editor Jessica Cuello and TLR contributor Matthew Lippman. 

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, is published by Four Way Books. His previous collection, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020, Four Way Books) received the 2018 Levis Prize. Matthew’s “Conflagration of Joy” appeared in TLR Issue 26.

JC: There is an outsider perspective in your work. Can you talk about how it features in your poems, or contributes to their creation?

ML: Once, a long time ago, somewhere in the 90s, maybe, I was walking down 6^th street, maybe 10^th street, between Ave. B and C in New York City. There were two guys ahead of me, 20 yards or so. In my recollection they were kinda tough guys, whatever that means. One guy, on the right, put his hand in his pocket and quickly pulled it out. When he pulled it out, his wallet, or maybe it was some money, came out with the hand. He was oblivious. I picked it up and went running towards them, quietly shouting, ‘Hey. Hey.’ They both turned around like they were ready to kick my ass, all flex and muscle and growl, into the nearby lamppost because they were kinda tough guys, maybe. ‘You dropped this,’ I said, and all of a sudden, we were best of friends and they were giving me five or shaking my hand or fist pumping, whatever people did back in the early 90s. Doing the right thing is always about the other person, the situation that has nothing to do with me. I am most interested in figuring out ways to get those two guys into a poem and much less interested in my own figures and feelings. If I can’t get those two guys into a poem then I have let the poem down and I believe that this is what I must work towards in every composition. Those kinda tough guys, maybe.

JC: “Emergency Room” is my favorite poem in the book. I like the simultaneous awareness of the dark, banal nature of suffering and the full acceptance of it. This is a pretty rare perspective. Does it belong to you? Does it belong to the poem?

ML: No. It does not belong to me or the poem. It is just nature. I remember, so clearly, that night, and wanting some kind of dark humanity. Not existential darkness. Just the raw, physical darkness and raw body of the world. My toe was infected and I probably did not need to go to the ER. I think the ER doctor kind of laughed at me when she cut my toe to relieve the pressure. But being there was great because it was everything and everyone. All the suffering that is not spectacular or romanticized. Just people in their pain stuck together waiting for care. Isn’t that the banality of everyday life in all of its different manifestations? I think, yes. Oh, and I am glad you like that poem. That makes me feel good.

JC: You often address personal friends, teachers, or even people you meet on the street in your poems. Could you speak about this intimate approach?

ML: I believe that the best thing a poem can do is make you feel something in your body, like a song. So, every poem I write longs for intimacy, desires to be an intimate experience….as I write it and then when it goes out into the world. My people, I love them very much. I love them tremendously. I want to love them through my poems in the same way that I want to love them at the dinner table or in the classroom or in their crying or in singing a song. So, that is why all these folks are in the poems. Peopled poems. Because being loved, to love, is naming and acknowledging and praising and sharing. Again, another sentimental idea but one that is very dear to me.

JC: There is also homage to your childhood, and, in the daughter poems, a reverence for the child in a person. How does childhood affect your poetry?

ML: Well, I suppose I am a child. Once, you told me you like doing adult things. That has stayed with me ever since you said it. It resonates with me now because I think a lot about being an adult. It’s hard for me. Disastrously hard but, when it comes to the emotional part of being grown up, I can be decent. I don’t think, if I am being honest, that I ever really wanted to be an adult but if you have kids you have to be a grown up. My poems allow me to stay close to childhood and my kids allow me to be close to their youth in my poems. I hope that does not come across as selfish. Being a teacher has never been a grown up profession for me. Being a poet has never been a grown up profession for me, either. That’s a joke. More than anything, subject matter aside, I think that the most childlike element to my poetry is the voice and the music and tone that comes with that voice. There is a playfulness that I am going for, no matter how dark, that is like being a kid in the neighborhood running up one block and down another.

JC: There’s a way that your poems are very much in the world…musicians, cultural figures, songs, and shows. What’s the role of pop culture in your poems?

ML: It’s really the musician and the music. I always wanted to be a musician for the collaborative piece of being in a band and making cool shit with other people. I suck at writing songs, always have, and God knows I tried. So, I write about music. Also, the thing about music is this: it’s actual sustenance for me. I need it and I need to celebrate it and I believe in relevancy and the contemporary world and music is always the most contemporary and relevant because it’s infinite. It’s outer space. It offers up so much mystery and beauty and it is unimaginable in the way it makes people feel. I want my poems to be unimaginable in the way they make people feel but they are poems, not songs, so I am working at a deficit and I need to do everything to compensate. Hence: Beethoven or Sly and the Family Stone or Kate Bush show up in the poems. Also, I want the poem to be a part of the world in the most banal way, which means, of course, that it has to be wildly and wonderfully surprising and creative. I think if anything, if there is one thing that I have worked at, tirelessly, is figuring out how to make a poem wildly and wonderfully surprising and creative in order for it be part of the world, in order for it to have the same stature as a glass of water because a glass of water, really, is magnificent on so many levels. Its affirmation of life, its simplicity and clarity, its healing power, its role in birth, in death, in sex and love and cooking and cleaning and all the while  it’s just a glass of water.

JC: More than any other contemporary poet, I find that I read your poems aloud to my family often. Once on a road trip I read your poems aloud to my husband. It’s funny because I am a silent reader in general. I like to be inside my head, but your poems make me want to engage with others and say things aloud. Maybe you could talk about your composition process, your lines, your music?

ML: Thank you for doing that. For reading the poems out loud to your crew. That is so cool. Let’s see. I don’t know if this is of interest to anyone but the composition process goes like this: I will put some music on the Spotify, it might get me in a space or not. I will be thinking about something or someone and then I will just riff off of the mood in my heart and the mood that the sounds are giving me and see where things go. Like, the other day I had eye surgery and they gave me five different eye drops to put in my eye and all of the eye drops had cool names like Azolam and Doxycycline  and I was listening to some trippy David Sylvian and the light coming through the shades was soft and my left eye felt like someone was sifting sand through it and that was it, I was off and running. It’s always what is in the immediate moment and I always have no idea where the poem is going but I have 45 years of working like this so there is a tool box that I have created, which, I hope, serves me well. The lines, the music, that’s all part of the blood, which is different from the toolbox. Somehow I have figured out how to make it work, if just a bit.

JC: What is next for you?

ML: I just completed a book entitled Cry Baby Cry. It’s a book of poems about crying. Currently, I have no specific poetry project in mind. Just to write poems every day.