Conversations: Matt Mauch and Mary Pacifico Curtis

Matt Mauch is the author of five books of prose and poetry, including A Northern Spring, We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., Bird~Brain, If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine, as well as the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow. He founded the Great Twin Cities Poetry Read and the journal Poetry City, and has organized and hosted many other poetry readings and events.

Mauch’s work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board and as a finalist for National Poetry Series and other national and international contests. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Conduit, The Journal, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. Mauch lives in Minneapolis and teaches in the AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College. He and his books can be found online at mauchmauch.com.

Mary Pacifico Curtis is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Between Rooms and The White Tree Quartet (WordTech’s Turning Point imprint), and has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Accolades include recognition as a 2012 Joy Harjo Poetry Finalist from Cutthroat Journal, 2019 Poetry Finalist in The Tiferet Journal, non-fiction finalist in The 48th New Millenium Writings contest and a 2021 non-fiction finalist in The Tupelo Quarterly Open.

After a successful career, Mary earned an MFA in 2012 in creative writing from Goddard College. She lives with her husband in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains on a terraced property where she grows vegetables and fends off gophers while admiring deer, coyotes, wild turkeys, and the occasional bobcat.

Mary Pacifico Curtis: I first read A Northern Spring like a reader, not like a writer. The simplicity of the title and the dedication to Minnesota made me wonder until I got to the Table of Contents. It really is, IMHO, a poem on its own. Yes, these are titles—but there is a story there. (My favorites are “May we have lessons from now apply STAT to climate change, and do so in memoriam,” “Now that we know our hands are sacred texts,” and “Reluctant and irresponsible ode to the new lawbreakers/one acquiesces one would likely be were one still their age.”)

The length of the titles is striking as is the story they tell—a reveal of sorts about the book to follow and the author. Is this a preview, a warning, or a hybrid essay in itself?

Matt Mauch: A poet-friend of mine from the Twin Cities, who read A Northern Spring in galleys, wrote to tell me that she wasn’t sure she, at first, after I’d described the book, whether she was ready yet to read—outside of journalism and magazine essays—about the pandemic, the George Floyd murder, the uprising, etcetera. In the next sentence she said, “But you had me at the table of contents.” You’ve now clarified, specified, what she was getting at—and have reinforced it.

I wish it were intentional. Truth be told, I never thought of the TOC as anything other than the front matter. But because of you and my friend, I’ve taken a longer look at it. And looking through the lenses that you’ve both provided me, I can say this: I believe—and teach—that if you fall in love with the process, the product will come.

A long time ago, I adopted what so many of my writing teachers—IRL and in book form—said was the way to go: I made my writing my most important job and dedicated myself to working on my writing every day. So, I’ve been doing that for decades. I made myself a kind of morning person, even though by circadian rhythm I am a night owl, in order to ensure that I work on my writing before I do anything else (aside from breakfast and a get-the-senses-going, make-sure-the-world’s-still-there walk). With A Northern Spring, that practice coincided with a confluence of events I never expected and never expect to see again. I wrote the book in real time, so the titles—that preview, warning, hybrid essay in itself—came from a responsiveness to the things as they were happening and evolving in the early days of COVID-19. 

It seems to me, now, to be a kind of found poem. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m going to make, I think, a cento of it, and print it out to distribute at readings. Thank you for that!

As for my tendency to write long titles: I don’t have a title philosophy as much as I have a title spirit guide, and that spirit guide is Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes. When I first read it, I thought something along the lines of, THESE TITLES ARE SO PERFECTLY FLESHED OUT IN THE PIECES THEMSELVES—ARE INDEED THE PERFECT TITLES AND THIS BOOK IN THAT REGARD SHOULD BE USED AS A TOUCHSTONE. WHILE NONE HENCE SHALL EVER MATCH THE BRILLIANCE ON DISPLAY, WE CAN HOPE TO EMULATE IT. Kafka’s titles in P and P are short AF—oftentimes a single word, something my poetry practice has proven me nearly incapable of. I think to myself, This title needs to be as good as Kafka’s in P and P, and eight out of ten times they end up being mini-poems in themselves.

So, Mary: Hawk’s Cry starts with a wide-focus lens, focusing on objects animate and inanimate and even art, before it zooms in on the personal. The zooming in is clearly intentional. How do you hope this will affect readers as they examine their own lives?

MPC: An interesting question, Matt, since I think of the reader more after the fact rather than when I am writing or assembling poems. As a writer of narrative poetry, I’m first focused on telling a story. 

I have always thought of this collection as a call to consciousness. While it is often tempting to turn the lens to the interior and talk about ourselves, there is plenty of evidence on a macro scale around us of our collective brokenness. My belief is that the unkind acts of each individual manifest and ripple into larger structures: families, governments, other nations, and planet earth. Since this was a collection of poems—some new and some written at earlier times—my examples were wide ranging. But the hawk was always with me during the period I was working on this during the lockdown, reminding, chiding, complaining, and hunting.

I do think you were courageous in A Northern Spring to take on such recent events in a time when (humane) readers were still reeling from the pandemic lockdown, police brutality sprinkled around the country, and a political environment that was not of/by/for the people. 

As for impact on the reader, thoughts about the reader come when I ask my nearest and dearest to take a look at individual poems and at the way I’m sequencing poems in a book. What I always wish for is that the reader is moved through some combination of words on a page and music running through them. 

I know a poet who once told me that she doesn’t write poems, but rather she writes books. My writerly question to you is about your process to get to this collection. Were you writing a book from the beginning, when you wondered what was happening around you, what it all meant, and how to get home from Ireland?  Was COVID a convenient throughline for poems of “…. a past life bubbling up into the present life of one who claims they are not singular but made of many things” as you foretell on page twenty-five? Given the multiple genres, how did it all come together—especially since you have said in an interview I read that you were the “receiver” of the words on these pages?

MM: The original title of the book was We’ll See What Tomorrow Brings. It had that title until the substantive-advice stage of the editing process (big-picture stuff, so early in the editing process). A Northern Spring, at the time, was part of lengthier subtitle. A Northern Spring was added (as was the subtitle itself) after I recognized that what I had on my hands seemed to be a book. But the original title—We’ll See What Tomorrow Brings—was the driver first for the prose and then the poetry. 

Literally from page one, when I write about us first learning of Trump’s travel ban “for everybody in Europe,” I didn’t know what the next day would bring, starting with whether we’d make it back to the States. As the pandemic unfolded, it’s almost as if a kind of strange carpe diem was imposed on . . . all of us? I wrote the prose portions of the book first (save for the CODA) from notes I’d taken on index cards I always carry around in my pocket, and also from memory, which was as fresh as it gets, given that I started the writing the day after we landed back in Minneapolis. And then I started writing the poems as I consumed the news of the day (from many perspectives) and lived it out. I just kept going and going and didn’t look back at the words from the day before. I trusted in every word that came next. Type, type, type, type, type. 

I didn’t know it was a book until the last week of May, when George Floyd was murdered and the uprising became a global phenomenon. We were all living through the early stages of the pandemic, but I recognized that I had (or thought I had) a couple of unique, bookend experiences with which to frame it. We’ll See What Tomorrow Brings, once I recognized it was a book, morphed as an idea from the micro in Northern Ireland to the macro. How will the pandemic play out? What about the Trump presidency and its threat to US-style representative democracy? What will be the legal fate of the MPD officers who had murdered/aided/abetted the murder of George Floyd? What about the MPD writ large? And will the promise of the local/national/international uprising be realized in any significant ways? 

We didn’t know the answers to those questions at the time. Some of them still don’t know the answer to (Trump, for example, could get elected again). Some seem like perennial questions we can ask of humanity over and over. I was hoping to capture a moment when the world was sharing in some of the same experiences and asking the same questions. A Northern Spring is a way better book title. It does so much more with less, so much better. I love my editors. WSWTB lives on as a motif. Long live WTSB!

Back to Hawk’s Cry: So many of the poems here are “on the precipice,” and this includes precipices of the present—precipices of the now—and precipices of the past, in memory. You say that you’re first focused, in writing poems, on telling a story. “Precipice” could be a synonym for “really kick ass in medias res.” How is “the precipice” as a construct—dramatic, physical, philosophical, artistic, etcetera—important to how you make sense of the world? Is there, perhaps beyond construct, a music one can only hear at such precipices?

MPC: Amazing how these questions make you look at your work differently! I guess the simple answer to the question of in media res has to do with the reader (who I implied was an afterthought in my process). My early drafts are disordered flows of thoughts on my topic. Everything is wherever it lands on the page. A little inner voice says to me, “just get on with it.” In media res seems to be my construct of choice. Music, which I tend to notice after the fact, probably orders me as I believe the musicality of poetry creates a through-line of subliminal understanding for the reader. Your concept of music as a construct is a learning for me, not something I would have come up with to consider.

As for the notion of the precipice, from the Latin praecipitium—“abrupt descent”—and precepts praecip(it)—“steep, headlong”— … perhaps this is my authorial single-mindedness on telling the story—and thus guiding the reader.

Matt, I have noted  your inventive use of hyphenated words, largely for human gestures and expressions, that taken together amplify those gestures and expressions beyond what a conventional structure would allow. Some examples “knife-and-eye-work,” “body stalk,” “possum-bowed,” “what-about-the-rest-of-them/oasis with my two cupped hands,” “ready-to-release-a-rehabilitated-bird/hands,” “chisel-thinking,” “stiff-stand,” “cupped-to-drink-water-hands,” “tears-like-paper-skin,” “mud-nesting hands,” “fuck-me-my-brains-in-my-tail/ look on our faces,” “mud-nesting hands,” and “ready-to-lather hand.” This device, coupled with the choice to include the prose excerpts of what I assume are emails, causes me to ask your views about how current day writers are served and limited by conventional forms of poetry before this moment in time. What do you tell your students about how to get to the new that speaks to now?

MM: When I look at the path I took to get at what you’re describing, I think about the years-long process one engages in to become a head sushi chef—an itamae. You work on cleanliness, knife skills, rice prep, etcetera, apprenticing yourself to the art of sushi for at least a decade. The path I took apprenticing myself to the art of poetry was like that. I worked and reworked my first book for over a decade—and that was after I finished grad school. The final versions of the poems don’t reveal the hundreds of ghosts and palimpsests that preceded them. 

If there is a way to write a poem—long lines, shorts lines, couplets, single-stanza, multi-stanza, you name it—those poems lived a life in each way. When I started writing that book, for example, I belonged to the school of thought that holds that a prose poem isn’t poetry—that it’s something else, which may be very beautiful, profound, or important, but that the line is central to what a poem is. By the time those poems in my first book had all played dress-up, I’d come to understand what a prose poem does, what it is and can be, and I switched camps. There are a few poems in that first book that needed to be prose poems—it was their final costume, which I was finally able to realize. 

So a part of me wants to tell students to apprentice themselves to the art of poetry for a decade or more, doing what I did … because it worked for me, was the path I took. But then I can imagine someone who apprenticed themselves to the alexandrine for a decade before realizing that prose poetry was a better way to express what they, during their times, needed to express. And I’ve never written an alexandrine in my life. 

I came to understand the prose poem as being a great and necessary thing, just as Baudelaire and Mallarmé did, but only after not believing it was so and then taking my own path to get there. I’m currently reading a biography on Jean Cocteau, who insisted he was working as a poet—was a poet—no matter whether he was creating poems, essays, novels, drawings, outfits, or films. I’ve grown into thinking of my work in the same way. I’m a poet and what I write is all poetry, no matter what other labels suit it.

Your question is timely: this summer I am teaching, for the second time, a class I designed in short and hybrid literary forms, one of them being prose poetry. Distinguishing prose poetry from flash CNF or flash fiction (both of which are also covered in the class) often is little more than a parlor game. But it’s a parlor game that is its own kind of apprenticeship to the art. I tell my students that artists respond to their times via the decisions they make about such things as form, whether they do so consciously or subconsciously (or both). My sense of the literary landscape is that there is a strong and rising current of literary hybridity. And my gut tells me that it’s part of a collective conscious or subconscious (or both) response by today’s artists to our times. 

That’s the premise I pose to my students. As they write and read model works and also each other’s work in hybrid forms, I have them respond to that premise. Am I right? Am I wrong? Both? Neither? How so? By the end of class they have to articulate their thoughts in a statement, position paper, essay, white paper, manifesto, what have you. I give them latitude to pick the form they are comfortable using to say what they end up having to say. And I can’t wait to read what they do say. I hope to learn a few things.

Mary, you have a spirit connection—a relationship—with the hawk, manifested beautifully in a number of poems. Across the arc of the book, in fact, that is the relationship that is the most abiding. Amidst so much human and ecological calamity, disaster, and injustice—also a focus of your poems—what can hawks teach us about enduring?

MPC: What a wonderful question. The hawk has been a touchstone for me even before I recognized that I was looking up, studying him as he flew overhead. There came a time of great sadness and loss in my own life when I could no longer function as I had before in my business and real world life. I had to pause, just look at what was in front of me, my next step, the sound and the fleeting shadow overhead. 

That’s when I focused on the hawk in a new way. Of course, there were many hawks over the years, but only in that time did I become conscious of them, begin to realize what had always been there, calling. Always calling. And always surviving. I watched the little birds gang up on the hawk and fight him off their nest. He flew low by my kitchen window hunting a little rabbit in the shrub outside. The hawk has a brutality and an elegance. He complains and soars on thermals. His dive rivals the Blue Angels. This is a creature who derives strength from simply living in the most instinctive way. Very different from our well-curated and considered human way.  That doesn’t mean that we should turn away from our own humanity. Rather we should embrace it with eyes newly opened to all that is around us. Heed the call to greater consciousness and conscience.  

I had a somewhat similar experience as you, Matt, with the titling of this book. I conceived it originally as What the Walls Heard with the idea that the transgressions of humans were often secrets heard only by and held by the walls—real and metaphorical—around us. When the collection of poems came together, a mentor quietly proclaimed the hawk the protagonist and suggested a different focus for the title. It was not obvious to me just as the hawk had been a shadow for so many years.

Just for the sake of clarity, we have a mated pair living in a large eucalyptus tree near our house. I never know if I’m seeing the male or female. They live far enough that we can watch them circle the canyon between our house and the tree. They hunt on the hill around us and complain endlessly until they find prey.

I find it useful and inspiring to look up the Native American meanings associated with creatures that touch us deeply. Even if you’re not into that, these creatures teach us to notice more, imagine more, feel something different and wonder. I think that’s the answer to your question. We do much more than endure if we really just open our eyes.

I find it ironic, Matt, that the sections of the book are organized into “Preludes” recording life in a time when many people died, we stopped, distanced, and there were many endings. Yet your preludes seem to create the expectation of something at work beneath the  shroud of COVID, something to come. Do you think the “what comes next” heralded by the preludes is unfolding now? Is it unfolding in your next project?

MM: Yes and yes. I suppose that in a literal, take-this-apart-like-a-writer sense, the preludes are, across the arc of the book, at base, flashbacks. But they were actively prelude in the sense that they were focusing, were focusers. I saw a meme on Instagram the other day that said, “Remember quarantine when everyone was making bread and dancing and making art and taking care of plants and just learning new useful skills and we got a small glimpse into what life is supposed to be like?” The poems in the sections between the preludes touch on and dwell in a lot of that. 

So in the book itself, the preludes continue to remind that the new reality of spring 2020 was an effect. The preludes continue to remind of the cause, like geysers. And in that same way—the first “yes” here—the book itself is prelude to what comes after it, to those big and perennial questions that are still hovering over us like clouds threatening inclement weather. I suppose every book tries to work like that, to live on that way. I think maybe the difference with the questions in A Northern Spring is that the pandemic made the questions more universal, more shared, which had nothing to do with intention, everything do with circumstance.

As for that second “yes”: I’ve been waiting for two years for a publisher I love that focuses on nontraditional, hybrid works to have an open reading period, which they are this summer. Well, waiting and revising. I’ve got this project looking for a home that I’ve called “a hybrid-on-black-market-ADHD-meds that looks at America and identity in a way that is a cross between Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, both film versions of Freaky Friday, anything by C. D. Wright, and a marathon of all of the Oscar-nominated short films ever—live action, animated, documentary.” 

One of the reasons I was in the North of Ireland in March 2020 was to conduct research on a study-abroad course I’ve created that uses the Troubles as a lens through which to better see conflicts, divisions, fractures, and violences in the US. Students will be required to choose an area of conflict, division, etcetera, in the US that they have an interest or investment in, or experience with, and they’ll have to create an artistic response that focuses on their chosen area. And this, in fact, is what I’ve been doing with this project I’ve been revising and waiting to submit. I grew up in very, very small towns in the rural Midwest. I’ve chosen as an adult to live in urban areas, in cities. I love things about both places, see good and bad in both. As rural/urban has morphed into red/blue, I can’t help but by nature wanting art to be a bridge. It’s one of my Achilles heels.

The rural/urban divide, as captured in literature, I tell my students, is as old as Madame Bovary at least, and I’m sure older—I just have to do more work finding it. My book prior to A Northern Spring is called We’re the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland., and while it focuses on this area of division, on urban/rural, it’s pre-COVID, for the most part pre-TRUMP, and so is more covert about it, and in form is poetry only. What I’ve loved about We’re the Flownover is that I know the roots of each poem, whether a poem’s genesis is urban or rural, but when people try to guess—Does this poem have urban roots or rural roots?—they only guess right half the time. 

I guess that’s how it tries to bridge-build, by showing both the urban and rural denizens of flyoverland that we’re a “we.” The new project isn’t trying to be as subtle as that as far as what it’s exploring and interrogating, and in form is hybrid as hell (although cue what I said earlier about Jean Cocteau). It tries to boldly build art bridges a la the five-year mission of the Starship Enterprise: to where no one has gone before. Some of them can’t even hold the weight of a single person. There may even be a bridge or two to nowhere.

Mary, in the poem “Curator”—a powerfully compact poem—you write as conclusion, “the once-complete now facets in a larger frame.” It’s a perfect ending to the poem in that it opens a final door for the reader to step through. It’s also a theme of the book itself. And I can’t stop from reading “facets” as both noun and verb, and I like the agency that it has as a verb. Can you speak to how your individual poems have that same sort of agency within the larger theme, how, along the lines of what the poet Melissa Studdard says of Hawk’s Cry, they are kintsukuroi?

MPC: My visual of Kintsukuroi, not the dictionary definition, is of shards of a bowl being returned to the form of the bowl with precious metals as the binding agent. It is a restoration. “Curator” was written as I ate dinner alone at my longish dining room table contemplating the artwork on the walls around me that I had collected with my late husband over many years. Bereavement and grief provide the dubious gift of deciding if and how one is to go on living. To live is to become someone new, almost unknown from what one has been. The frame has to become larger. New elements are introduced into the landscape of what was. Grief is also a shattering, a state of shards. The contemplation and its conclusion are the precious metal if one is to become whole and new.

I am grateful to Melissa Studdard for focusing her blurb on Kintsukuroi as it focused my thinking on the importance of what I regarded as a simple poem. And isn’t that the process of living and of writing? I know that a few poets write books with research, focus, and intention around a single topic, but I also know many poets who collect poems, moments or perhaps shards, into a whole. A book that enlarges the frame of a single poem putting it in dialogue with other poems in a frame that is ultimately expandable enough to welcome the perspectives of the reader who may see something that the writer did not surmise. 

So to your comment, faceting seems awkward as a verb to me. But yes, the idea of always adding, seeing, circling a reflection and finding something new. That is how to facet.

MM: Robert Hass says, “Often, when I go to poetry out of need, I don’t find what I want and can’t, usually, describe. But sometimes I do. A lens to clarify and focus inchoate feeling. Once, in a state of mute misery, I picked up Emily Dickinson, flipped around, and came across a couple of lines—”They say that Time assuages— / Time never did assuage”—and felt somewhat better, alive again.” Your poems, Mary, often bring a reader to what I’ll call stays—moments of suspension from. This gift that you are giving to readers like Hass and me: Is suffering a necessary precondition for the making of this gift? Is poetry—or your poetry—the retranslation of suffering into something that, as Hass says, makes us feel “somewhat better, alive again”?

MPC: The comment from Robert Hass resonates in all kinds of ways. Inchoate feeling for me lives deep and I am often happy resting in it, finding inspiration in its turbulence… It’s almost too easy to slip into the happy world of this-then-that. The former is a world of the spirit for me. The latter is necessary to survival, but an abandonment of the contemplative that leads to what I write. There’s a tightrope here, I think, to serve both parts of fulfilling who I am. 

Given that, inspiration to write does not necessarily come from suffering. In recent years, a sense of injustice, indignation, and the purest love have inspired me. Nature is a wellspring of beauty and metaphor. The thing is that none of these, or any other inspiration, can be tied up in a bow. Suffering, like joy, will morph. I guess I am interested in taking the thing and making it new with meaning that rewards the reader with something that wasn’t obvious before. For me it’s not a grand gotcha at the end of a poem but often something that happens within the poem (which is where the music lives).

As for writing out of need, yes, yes, yes. I am happiest when writing for hours each day. My current life doesn’t make the path to this obvious, but I will get back there. As we all know not everything you write is brilliant, but everything you write leads you to your brilliance.

Matt, I can’t help wondering if you have read Thomas McGrath. I ask this because there is something of your generosity, caring, and sprawling style on the page that reminded me of McGrath. Of course different generations, concerns and even poetic form. It’s just the qualities I’ve listed. And that leads me to ask: who are your favorite poets? Who would you like to be mentioned with in the same sentence?

MM: I have one last question for you about Hawk’s Cry. There’s a fair amount of Catholicism in the book that seems to me—a very, very lapsed Catholic—to be presented disinterestedly. But it is presented in a book that, on the whole, seems to plumb holiness in a lot of things—small human kindnesses, grand human dramas, nature, etcetera—things well outside of religion. If we were in a bar, I’d ask you, What gives, Mary?

MPC: If we were in your proverbial bar and you asked that question, I would answer that I’m a cafeteria Catholic. Certainly, there are things about every religion that I take issue with. But just as some people draw heavily on mythological figures in what they write, Catholicism is ingrained enough in me that it is an instinctive go-to framework for examining injustice, hypocrisy, and transgression against one another, our planet, the things we should hold sacred. 

There’s really nothing religious about that, just as there’s nothing religious about the cry of the hawk. All religions have some beauty and some ugliness. The problem with all religions is what some people do with them. That said, I have a deeply spiritual and intuitive side. It often leads me to a state of wonderment and reverence for this life that I’ve been given with all its gifts and disappointments. That is a wellspring of what I write. Oftentimes as I write it is the sounds and rhythms that emerge on the page that carry the poem (or essay) to a life of its own. And that is probably when the instinctive framework nudges in. I really have wanted to use mythology more in what I write but it turns into a research project and I get concerned about getting nuances wrong by not going deep enough. I sometimes remind myself how what we write takes on a life or lives beyond our authorial intentions at the moment it is read and interpreted by another person. So maybe you’re not the only person asking what gives.