La Literati Interviews: Anthony Madrid

I first noticed Chicago-based poet Anthony Madrid in AGNI online. His poem "If I Am a Total Washout as a Lover (and I Am)" lured me in with its playfulness and tongue-and-cheek wit; but it was his latest manuscript, The 580 Strophes that set the hook deep in my throat.

Can I get an amen for trite-but-otherwise-apt fishing metaphors? Amen. Forget it. You'll amen me after you spend some time with his poetry. Read on, take notes:

Q: One of the things that initially struck me about your poems was this sense of highbrow finesse that was accessible to the "common" reader—a reader perhaps not initially aware of some of the allusions you incorporate. It seems to me that many poets pander to either academia or the plainspoken, whereas your poems have the potential to please both, aesthetically. Is this a conscience effort? Do you consider who will receive your poems when you write them?

You're talking about all those literary allusions. I'll tell you what that is. That's my having been fucked up for life by reading T.S. Eliot when I was a junior in high school. All those footnotes, back of The Wasteland—? That stuff looked to me like this great big heap of unbetterable awesomeness. And still pretty much does. I—don't really expect to recover.

So, no, I'm not conscious of any balancing act. I just write what I like. Like every other good little twit out there.

Q: You've got an impressive list of publication credits—snagging coveted spots in AGNI, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Copper Nickel among others. Do you have any wisdom to impart for poets attempting to break into the world of these competitive journals?

Ha. Copper Nickel looks funny in that list.

Do I have any wisdom to impart. I don't. Every one of those acceptances was a Slush Pile Special. Nobody had heard of me. I was nothing. Which I still pretty much am.

I can tell you what I did, though. It's stupid. I wrote the whole book first, and then sent all those poems out at once. Theory was that I would suddenly be everywhere. "Who is this guy?" and so on. Classic naive shit. That was 2008.

But then good things started happening. I got picked up at Web Conjunctions early. That's good visibility. It's how Robert and Mary found me. And then there was AGNI Online. I think Chris saw me there. Poetry was maybe a year later.

All this is irrelevant. There are gazillions of people who have been in all those places and it doesn't mean jack.

Q: Why poetry? Why you? And why do you refer to yourself in the 3rd person so frequently?

Ay ay ay.

Why poetry/why me. The real reason I got into poetry is 'cuz I was very, very vain about the expressiveness of my talk, all through my childhood. I liked that, and I liked my handwriting—but that's it. I had no other sources of satisfaction. I looked like shit; I didn't have an idea in my skull; I was perpetually excusing myself so I could go into the bathroom and cry with rage. Need I say more? Anyone answering this description would become a poet.

Now, why third person. Oh, that's just this good thing I got from the Urdu poetry I worship. All those guys with their ghazals, they end their poems with these sudden shifts into third person. Berryman of course does this too, and everybody goes into total bliss. I don't know why it's so good, but it is. And so I do it.

Q: You've said previously that poets should consider, if not rely on, being read and experienced aloud. Some people might disagree with this, as the majority of poetry's consumption happens between a solitary reader and the printed word. Why do you think it's important to construct a poem with oration in mind?

Oh, I don't want to insist on this point. There's all kinds of perfectly good stuff that would never in a million years work at a reading, and that's fine. All I'm saying is I know ALL THESE PEOPLE who are so fun and exciting in real life, and will write you emails crackling w/wit and drama and opinion and all the rest of it, and then you turn to their poetry and it's like this soup of evenly-distributed hydrogen atoms. No fun, no drama, no opinion, no one's talking, and nothing is being said. But I think if these poets would just take the presentation-before-a-live-audience thing seriously, and write as if the idea was that you have to get out there and kick the ball down the field and then fffooompf put it in the net, maybe this whole poetry operation wouldn't look like such a drag half the time.

Q: Your latest work is called The 580 Strophes. For the non-English majors, explain what a strophe is, and why you want to change modern poetic form with it?

Part 1. What is a strophe. Strophes are when the poem is made out of a buncha same-sized scoops of talk, all in a row. Think verses in a song. Verse, verse, chorus, verse—this kind of thing. The verses are strophes.

A strophe is not the same thing as a stanza, though. 'Cuz you can have a poem where the stanzas are all totally irregular in length. The point of "strophic structure" is you get a rhythm going:

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

and so on. The whole point is the rhythm. Once you get it going, it actually seems annoying to break with it. This is somehow the nature of rhythm.


Part 2. Why do I think strophic structure is going to save the world. Basically? because people secretly want poetry to be rhythmic. That is my sincere belief. I'm not saying metrical; I'm saying rhythmic. They want the poet to jump in the hole and start shoveling out same-sized scoops of neat talk. It's just good to do that. But people are ashamed of it. They think, Oh well that's boring, that's monotonous. Yeah, well, if it is, how come songs are all like that, and it's not a problem there?

Rhyme too! People love that shit; they just don't know it. And since they're all terrified that they might be doing something their MFA guru would sneer at, they write these poems that look like blackboards at MIT. Oh boy, aren't we all having fun being "interesting"—! Except it sucks.

(I hate every last one of the "New Formalists," by the way, so don't start getting ideas. My la-la here has nothing to do with "participating in a tradition" or "proving you're a disciplined craftsman" or any of that. It's all about rhythm and rhyme as drugs. That's their justification; that's their glory. Anything beyond that issues directly from the Devil's anus.)

Q: You get to take credit for having written one poem in history. What is it, and tell us why.

That's easy. I'd like to have written Ecclesiastes. King James Version, babe. There's stuff in there that causes me to squirt tears, virtually every time I look at it. And I look at it all the time. That and Revelation are like favorite CDs I take down and play whenever I need a lift.

(Better mention: I have no religion.)

Q: What should Madrid fans keep their eyes on, going forward? What's your next move/project/piece?

"Madrid fans." That's rich. (Hi, Mom! How did you find this blog?)

Actually, I'll tell ya, my "next project" is → I want that book out. The 580 Strophes. I need that thing published, and I need to get the hell out of grad school. If I could have those two wishes, I don't need a third.

Madrid, as I have come to call him, is quite modest considering what he is doing with his poetry. In a poetic climate where writers tend to either rebel from the perceived pompousness of the high-brow, or run to impress/outdo other career writers without pausing to welcome the unwashed masses, Madrid's poetry offers something savory to both the ultra-violet academic and the unschooled lover of words. Something that is exciting, fresh, and within the confines of a consistent poetic form. Something that is, at times, simultaneously campy and high art. My advice? Keep your eye on Madrid. You won't be disappointed.

La Literati Interviews: Mathias Nelson

Somehow interviewing Wisconsin-based poet Mathias Nelson seemed to be the most appropriate next step after I reviewed his most recent chapbook, They May Try to Kill Me for This (see post below). Despite his humility, I'm still putting my money on a bright, blazing literary future somewhere in his horizon--if not presently, then posthumously. Read on, take notes:

Q: You make no effort to conceal your literary influences in this chapbook. From the metaphorical cannibalism of Bukowski, to the iconic Sylvia Plath rescuing you, literally, from a grave in "Digging Up Sexton," it almost seems in some ways that this collection is as memorable for its imaginings of the literary elite as it is for the chronicling of your own personal experiences. Where do you see yourself within that continuum? Do you hope be aligned with these poets (or others) in some way?

A: I just hope, with a distinct tone, to cut my own place on bookshelves, and the more I write the more I see the possibility of it happening. The nice thing is that it's happening all on its own. I hear of other writers struggling to find their voice, but that doesn't sound right to me. Why would you struggle? Let yourself come out. That's your voice. If you're struggling because you haven't found out who you are as a person, then go find that out before you write. As for me, I know too much about myself. And I'm terrified.

Q: There is a strong undercurrent of, and sometimes a collision between, the tender observer and the brutal participant; this dichotomy of tone elicits incredibly strong emotional responses in your readers and provides much of the joie de vivre behind your confessional poems. Can you relate any personal instances when these two distinct urges melded together?

A: Well, I often desire to be tender. I think I'm most tender with nature, to the point that it plagues me. I avoid stepping on ants. I feel bad when trees are cut down. Nothing is misplaced to me; it's just there. But with humans I can be rather harsh, and since you asked, I'll tell you I shoved a man through a window once for smacking the ass of my brother's wife. The man broke through the glass, could have fallen and died, and for what? A little ass smack! I don't even believe in marriage. I guess I was thinking about my brother. So in that sense I was harsh throwing that man, but also tender with my brother in mind because he gets very upset and hurt about people messing with his wife. And that man was embarrassed. It was even his window, right in the middle of a party. That makes me feel bad. See how tender I can be? His face looked like a squeezed scrotum, really red and in need of a shave.

Q: In a previous interview you discussed your view that empathy and intuition are the two most critical elements for successful writers. Explain that to me more fully:

Empathy is the most important thing in life, and of course if you want to write it's important there too. Feeling your character, and why they do what they do. Without empathy, what do you have? A jackass. Is that all you 're going to write about?

Intuition: you gotta know when to stop and go. It's like sex, you use empathy to feel your mate (reader) out, then you use intuition to know when to penetrate and finish and get the hell out of there. Unfortunately I haven't had sex for quite some time. Misplaced empathy.

Q: This is like asking a parent which child is their favorite, but, for the sake of being honest: what poem(s) in particular from this chapbook are the most significant to you?

A: I like the first poem, "A Bumble Bee Sting...", because it confronts religion with a little humor, and I was lying in bed when I heard the words come out of my fan.

Q: Are there any guiding principles for you when you write (stylistically, morally, etc)? If so, what are they, or how do you know when a poem is finished, optimal, "Mathias-approved," etc...?

A: I don't like to complicate things. I don't sit down and think about rules when writing. When I was younger I wasted a whole lot of time contemplating that bullshit. There aren't any rules, just make it clear, though sometimes it's okay if different readers derive different meanings from it, I just try to use a language that they'll understand.

I'm finished with a poem when it makes me want to puke. Not that I'm constantly picking it apart and changing it (though sometimes that is the case), but that I'm rereading it to the point of sickness because I simply like what I write.