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Photo © Alex Pieros.
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What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?
Often when people have some ability or inclination, they become aware of that or others might point it out to them. Then they’re well-advised to develop that ability. If you’re seven feet tall, try playing basketball. Unfortunately, there can be blocks against it. You might refuse to play basketball for the very reason that you’re seven feet tall. But if you’re a certain kind of person—let’s call it a creative person—and you don’t act upon that fact, there can be problems. In “Madmen” someone says of the main character, “This is what happens to an artistic personality who isn’t an artist.” So I have to give it a shot.
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?
When I was in middle school the girls learned to speak Pig Latin. They liked speaking it fast to each other, both for its own sake and because the boys couldn’t do that or understand it. As I remain a “boy” after all these years, much of academic criticism is like Pig Latin to me. Meanwhile, Auden wrote that negative criticism always turns into showing off, so it's best to skip it as a writer or as a reader. Sometimes wonderful critical insights appear spontaneously. My professor Angus Fletcher once casually remarked, “Freud is such a great writer. He can make you believe anything.” Negative and positive at the same time!
What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?
I have a few inspiring alter egos that can help me write. One of them is the “peckerwood”—a sort of backwoods man in the modern world who breeds dogs. But he's not a Trump person. He’s deeply apolitical and anti-materialist. He likes it when his car breaks down. He would see Trump as soft, materialistic, and frightened of dogs. Perhaps surprisingly, V.S. Naipaul shows real understanding of peckerwoods in his book on the American South. Other alter egos are the Torah scholar, the sorority girl of the 1950s, and the Chicago policeman. Maybe a common theme would be people who have passionate, unconventional interests that they desperately want to communicate, and they assume that the reader shares their interests. I identify with these people. I don't have to “get inside” them. They’re inside me.
Your new book of poems, Collected Poems, is rich with moments of delightful surprise, sudden twists beyond the mundane moment and into themes that feel vast and universal. How do you achieve this element of freshness? Was this volume’s unifying quality of surprise a conscious choice?
I like characters and voices that are hard to identify as either mundane or transcendent. If I can create that indeterminacy, whether in a short poem or in a whole book, I hope it brings the surprise and freshness you refer to. On the other hand, some readers find this unpleasantly confusing. I’ve gotten both of those responses to my writing and also in other areas of my life.
Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?
Kenneth Koch said that a poet is interested in the word “ashtray” while a prose writer is interested in all the people who have used the ashtray. Poets young and old should to be sensitive to words or phrases that catch their interest, that strike a spark, however slight. See what you can make of that. I recently came across the phrase “make cow eyes,” meaning to flirt, and I was able to write a poem from that starting point. Stuff like this can happen in wondrous ways. You may know that Lewis Carroll thought of the last line of his long poem “The Hunting of the Snark”—“For the snark was a boojum, you see”—before he wrote anything else.
What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?
I’ve done lots of ghostwriting with publishers large and small. After that experience, in my own work I’m much more comfortable with self-publishing. I don’t like soliciting people to take an interest in my writing and the snail’s pace of the whole thing can also be demoralizing. I’m getting ready to do a new book of poems that I want to call “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I like not having to consult with a publisher about the title or about the cover. I hope people like my work, but I want to have full responsibility, whether it succeeds or not. I find writing easier now than at earlier points in my life. That is certainly exciting, although it’s still not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be. As Emily Dickinson stated, it’s “all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.” Surf and turf. Nothing better than that.
Click here to listen to Mitch Sisskind on WKCR's "Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt, click here to read Mitch's blog posts. Order Sisskind's Collected Poems here.
Aspen Matis is the author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir (Little A, June 2020). Called “fearless…A beautifully written story of inspiration, courage, and ultimate transformation” by Booklist, the book was a #1 Amazon bestseller in memoirs. Author Deepak Chopra said the memoir “will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing.” Novelist Aimee Bender called Your Blue Is Not My Blue “gorgeous…a gripping read that wrestles honestly and sensitively with the ways we connect and the ways we miss one another.”
Matis's short-form writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Psychology Today, Salon, Bloomberg, and Marie Claire. Her first book, the critically acclaimed memoir Girl in the Woods, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Called “a powerful read” by O, The Oprah Magazine, the book made The Guardian's annual top 50 list. The New York Times named Matis “a hero.”
