Excuse Me, Your Boutonniere Looks More Like a Loofah
Excuse Me, Your Boutonniere Looks More Like a Loofah
A discussion on Matthew Schmidt's "Matter to Make the Blue Matter"
Audio recording is Matthew Schmidt reading “Matter to Make the Blue Matter”.
“Matter to Make the Blue Matter” situates the reader in a windstorm. Wind gusts are so loud that only every other word is heard. While reading Schmidt’s work, my mind tracked back to a cognitive linguistics class. The professor showed a way that bees use dancing to communicate. Someone in the front row asked if that’s how bees liked to twerk.
“Matter to Make the Blue Matter” is more interested in creating emotion through memory.
Stuck in this associative daydream of a windstorm, the speaker remembers or misremembers things about summers in backyards with family. Summers spent chasing fireflies and barbecued chicken thighs. Running in the backyard until more oxygen is needed in the muscles. The body enters an anaerobic state, which results in the production of lactic acid or muscle burn in the thighs. Either way, the speaker is racing to the backyard patio, where mothers knit sweaters and talk about darling too much.
In some manner the brain is trying to make connections and I’ll roll with that if it feels right. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it will work, but if it doesn’t feel right, it almost certainly won’t. - Matthew Schmidt on poetic imagery
When asked how Matthew Schmidt would teach this class to a group of first-year creative writing students, Schmidt stated the poem catalogues snippets of memory from the speaker’s mind. In this way the poem/speaker tries to make meaning of what has happened (or thought to have happened) in their life. Sense-making that leaves it up to the reader to fill in the literal gaps or negative space on the page.
two twigs in a field
don't know it's a field
known to feel
how time kneltThose four lines descend in register, or at least the rhythm slows down. Gives a concreteness to the genuflection that follows. Solemnity places us in a muzzle. Someone once argued that Adam and Eve leaving the garden might’ve been a good thing. The sky gurgles off in the distance the same as which stomachs grumble.
There’s a sense of despair in the final moments of the poem. A frown dressed-down and fist-banging the gurgling sky evokes silly phrases which read as a departure from chasing fireflies and listening to family members chit-chatting.
The silly phrases are dismissive, especially as the speaker attempts to locate themselves. Maybe on earth or maybe somewhere as distant as the redness of the desert on Mars. Maybe there’s an atmosphere, but who knows.
Everything in the poem’s first half is now alien to the speaker.
The speaker eats limbs rather than chicken thighs.
The speaker releases the moths instead of fireflies.
Calloused hands that attempt to free the mind. Hands over hands that have abstracted the speaker from the backyard cookout of foregone days.
Matthew Schmidt Interviews Conor Bracken
On March 26, 2024, Matthew Schmidt conducted an interview with Conor Bracken. They discuss his translation of Jean D'Amérique's collection No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). Translational techniques, Haiti, and the body in tandem with poetics are among their topics of conversation.
No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace can be purchased through Ugly Duckling Presse. To learn more about the translator Conor Bracken, please visit his website.
Matthew Schmidt’s “Matter to Make the Blue Matter” and other poems are online.
To read Matthew Schmidt’s work, visit OsmanthusTV to read Schmidt’s poetry suite.
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