An Interview with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason

Matt Mason has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department and his poetry has appeared in The New York Times. Matt is the Nebraska State Poet and has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found on NPR’s Morning Edition, in American Life in Poetry, and in several hundred other publications. Mason’s 4th book, At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, was released by The Old Mill Press in 2022. Find more at: https://matt.midverse.com/

You’ve served as Nebraska State Poet since 2019 and the position is a five-year appointment. How have your efforts as the Nebraska State Poet shifted, evolved, or surprised you despite the challenges surrounding the pandemic?

Well, yes, the main challenge is right there: the pandemic. My plan as State Poet has been to bring poetry events physically into all 93 of Nebraska’s counties. That seemed reasonable at first and then a bit impractical. Even so, I’m catching up and still have a shot before I’m done. During lockdowns, I shifted a lot of what I do to online appearances, which was okay but I definitely prefer being in a room with people to talk about poetry: it’s much more rewarding and effective, but you do what you can. I also made a major life shift by leaving my salaried nonprofit position to try and make my living as a writer and speaker. One year in, that plan is still going but I’m not sure how far, ultimately, it can go. So wish me luck…

Are you looking forward to a second term as Nebraska State Poet and how do you see the Poetry Pen Pal Program evolving into your second term, or beyond?

Right now, I actually feel that I might only serve one term. This position has been good for me in terms of exposure and I feel more Nebraska poets should benefit from it. And even if I’m not a CURRENT State Poet, I’ll always have been one and have that credibility, so I feel it will still help me as I’m not about to stop this kind of work which I’ve been doing since way before being named State Poet. The Poetry Pen Pal Program is one I’d love to continue, but it will need a new funding source. The program allowed me to go into communities around the state for a couple days with 2 other poets traveling with me, and it existed thanks to funding from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation along with help from Humanities Nebraska, but it was part of a one-time fellowship.

How was it getting the opportunity to share the stage and have a conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón?

Oh, you know my answer: it was fantastic. It was my first time meeting Ada and she was nothing but wonderful. Add on to that how her event packed the Holland Center, a huge venue in Omaha. On this side of lockdowns, poetry audiences have struggled, so that was encouraging to see.

Since we published your poem “Mistranslating Neruda” back in the Fall of 2001 in vol. XXII no. 1, how has your relationship with submitting to literary magazines changed as your career has grown and evolved?

It’s really waxed and waned, mostly depending how organized I am in that particular month or year. I still do it about the same: getting poems out in bursts, then not sending anything out for stretches. One good thing now is that I get more requests from magazines to send them work in the first place. That’s a real honor (and the acceptance rate is a LOT higher that way as even State Poets still get plenty of rejections).

Your collections The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013), I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020), and At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros (The Old Mill Press, 2022) are all very focused on their respective themes: parenthood, Nebraska, and Disneyland. When you’re compiling a collection, do you approach it with themes in mind or do you discover those themes as the collection begins to take shape?

Yes, having a theme helps me organize the poems. My first book was much more scattered, but I still worked in a loose theme to help me select the poems and put them together. Those next three were much more centered and it helps me to work that way.

Will Rock Stars (Button Poetry, 2023) be a departure from such focused, themed collections?

Nope, it’s largely around the theme of “Rock Stars,” mainly with poems about 80s rockers, English Romantic poets, and others we might call a rock star.

You have had a fairly prolific few years having published three collections since 2020 and two back-to-back in 2022 and the forthcoming Rock Stars expected in September 2023. What effect does publishing so many collections so quickly have on your writing?

Actually, not a lot. For more than 30 years now, I’ve had a deadline to start at least one new poem each week, so I have a lot of poems. And when I type up the handwritten poems, I sort them into files based on themes, so books like Rock Stars and I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon have poems written over decades collected together in those folders. So I’m writing probably the same amount but I’m now benefiting from having more recognition as well as a large number of poems consistently written and worked on. It’s all in the poetry long game.

There was a gap between publishing your second full-length collection The Baby That Ate Cincinnati and your third full-length collection I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon. How did you spend the seven years between publishing those two manuscripts?

Like I said in the last question, the writing itself followed about the same schedule. In those years, though, I did a lot of poetry education work around the state with the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska and others as well as also seeing the nonprofit Nebraska Writers Collective, which I led until 2022, expand incredibly with the work it does in high schools, middle schools and correctional facilities. I also had a 2-week residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where, instead of writing new poems, my focus was to gather poems into manuscript shape. That’s where I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon came into shape as well as parts of Rock Stars and at least 2 others I’m working on now.

Your poems seem to be rooted in Nebraska in some way or another, has that been a conscious decision of yours throughout your career or has Nebraska just been a place that lets itself in while you’re writing?

Sort of, I tend to write about what’s around me, so Nebraska is what I tend to be swimming in. Even the Disneyland book has a good deal of Nebraska in it!

What advice might you have for emerging poets?

Let yourself reinvent what a poem is. Don’t worry too much about what you’ve been told poetry is supposed to be, let yourself write the poems you wish you read more of in classes or on your own (even if you’re not sure if those are even poems or not).

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––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

What We’re Reading, with MAR Blog Co-Editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

Maybe I‘ve been feeling a bit homesick, for lack of a better word, as of late. The semester ended and I’ve found myself with too much time on my hands. So, I picked up the copy of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (Vintage Classics, 1994) I had lying around in some unpacked boxes in my apartment and started reading. I always forget how much I love this novel by Cather who might arguably be Nebraska’s most famous author coming from the red grass fields she writes about in her novel, until I pick up the book again. I had the pleasure of visiting The National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, NE last June and got to see many of the places written about in the novel: the back door Jim runs from to go to the neighbor’s when his grandparents move into Black Hawk from the farmland outside of the town, mirroring from where Willa Cather once ran. Returning to this novel once again with a greater perspective of the influence of place and what Cather is giving us, is bringing more resonance to the work this countless read-through to truly feel the “…motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping….” (18). Cather’s novel is as close to this Nebraska as we can come to know; however, there’s still the same amount of sky blanketing a similar treeless prairie.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Mid-American Review

What We’re Reading: by associate editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

I’m currently sitting with Kwame Dawes’ collection Nebraska (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). I just love Dawes’ poem “Chadron” from this collection and looking at the poem as an interrogation of the myth of the frontier and the speaker’s place as “a strange statue in the wind” (25) of Chadron, NE. I find this collection to be a search of place discussed through the seasons of Nebraska and through history. As a native Nebraskan, I find the poems in this collection honestly cohesive while also being a formally restless exploration of a place I have known for the thirty years of my life. While I keep returning to this collection, it returns me to a home I’ve known most of my life. The speakers of Dawes’ poems try to walk carefully over icy driveways due to the winter freeze in the opening poem “How I became an Apostle” (3); they realize how you learn to ignore the sounds of yourself in the quiet vastness Nebraska surrounds one with in “Loneliness” (14). In “Prairie” Dawes reminds us of the enormous space between the towns of Nebraska, assuring us it all “stretches over / the open fields, mutates, pulses, breathes, / finds its own music” (61).

I’ve also been revisiting Mary Oliver’s work. In particular, House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990). In my undergraduate career, I stumbled upon a reading of “The Summer Day” by Oliver herself and the grasshopper she describes “…eating sugar out of [her] hand” (60), which always takes me back to my childhood sitting in the grass outside of my grandparent’s house under the birch tree in their front lawn while grasshoppers would fling themselves into my palms. This poem found its way to me again as I drove back to Ohio from Nebraska nearing the end of winter break. I was listening to On Being with Krista Tippett, revisiting the interview with Mary Oliver, when Tippett played an audio file of her daughter reciting Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” I found myself back in that innocence in the lawn as a young boy, much like I did in my undergrad, and when I returned home, I picked up Oliver’s book and found myself lost again in her poems, wanting “…to stroll through the fields” (60) rather than hiding from the cold of winter under a blanket in my Ohio apartment. I have this poem taped to my office door so I’m reminded of summer in these frigid months.

After moving to Ohio, I’ve kept a copy of Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) sitting on my office desk which I’ve returned to over and over throughout the fall semester and continue to do so. I find Kooser’s observations in Splitting an Order to be both incredibly familiar and quite deep in what lies behind the actions of the personae, as in the titular poem, which describes an elder couple, as the title suggests, splitting an order, “…and then to see him lift half / onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring, / and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife” (9). It’s a very vulnerable act of compassion and love and I find myself returning to this poem when, at times, life may feel bleak and void of these acts, as a reminder that such small moments of kindness and love do exist. Poems such as “Two Men on an Errand” (5) take me back to my childhood spent in the waiting room of mechanic shops while my father talked the mechanic’s ear off as I spun on those stools wrapped in duct tape only found in mechanic and autobody shops, and the scent of grease and metal where men in denim bibs and suspenders would chat over coffee in Styrofoam cups. Maybe there’s an air of nostalgia with Kooser, but I’m wary of reducing Kooser to pure nostalgia as the sole reason I’ve read and keep reading this collection of poems. I think, too, of poems like “Garrison, Nebraska” and how Kooser speaks of his town in winter with “its gardens of broken washing machines, / its empty rabbit hutches nailed to sheds, / cold and alone on the sea of the prairie” (47) speaking on the beauty, the normality of cluttered lawns, and Nebraska’s harsh seasons. Or how he explores the domestic intimacy of a lost life in “Mouse in a Trap,” in which Kooser eulogizes what we deem as a pest and how it comes to rest on “…the ship / of the rest of its life” (48). I keep returning to this book for the way Kooser captures a life, or a moment of a life, and the impact these seemingly fleeting happenings that surround us can have, which only poetry can put words to.

—Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR