Interview with Matt Guenette
Q: Your readings are phenomenal—you throw your whole body into it, your voice compels the audience to listen, and we’re swept up not just by your words but by your presentation. This is, unfortunately, unusual for practitioners of contemporary poetry. How do you see readings as a function of a poet’s art? Who or what has influenced your reading style?
A practical aspect to readings is the opportunity they offer for an audience to connect with a voice. (… Which could help sell books, if that’s something you care about …)
But …
My sense of what’s possible at a reading has been shaped in part by performance and spoken word poets. Jeffrey McDaniel and Matt Cook—two Manic D poets—come to mind. And the amazing Robbie Q. Telfer, who co-hosts the hilarious, very entertaining Encyclopedia Show in Chicago. These poets—any performance poet, really—are deeply invested in the energy between the poem and its audience. It’s a rhetorical concern—an act of persuasion, I guess—as old as Aristotle.
There’s an idea—maybe it’s still popular—that stage and page poets are two vastly different animals. From page poets in particular, I’ve sensed a condescending attitude (sometimes, not always) that the stage poets are less sophisticated, less literary. I bought into it for a while myself in grad school, when I believed what mattered most was a poet’s intellectual agenda, no matter how obscure or esoteric.
Of course there’s a middle space. I almost want to say a hybrid space, with all the attending complications that word implies. I don’t care about performance or presentation when I’m making a poem, but it becomes a guiding principle in those final editing pages, for what and how I want my poems to say.
Q: American Busboy is a book that centers on a busboy, or all busboys, or the ideal Platonic busboy. Why a busboy, and why is the figure of a busboy particularly apt for our present day situation as Americans?
As a matter of authenticity (if it matters) I was a busboy all through my undergraduate years. Worked in a giant, fast-fried seafood restaurant. A human trough (really!). So…
A busboy—an unskilled laborer, in a job nobody wants—isn’t someone you think about. Being a busboy plugged me in to some socio-economic realities my mother had tried very hard to protect me from. She was a single mother, on essentially a secretary’s salary, doing everything she could to make our family feel like everything—including our finances, our social status—was okay. I wanted to write a book of busboy persona poems not necessarily to transform that character’s reality, but to undermine its authorities: the managers, the tourists whose money the locals both need and resent, the environmental disaster of the restaurant itself, the artery-clogging food … American Busboy is one busboy’s attempt to fire his arrows at all of that …
Q: Many of the poems in American Busboy are funny, and to some extent narrative, though not always realistic and never straightforward. Yet there are other poems like "The Other Side of Summer" and "33 Busboy Proverbs" which seem to have very different aims. How do you see those poems working inside the manuscript, and what other writers or poems do you see them in conversation with?
I don’t know if anyone will be able to tell or not, but Language Poetry and the Post-Avant, particularly Lyn Hejinian’s writings on meanings and context, plays a part in my process. Parataxis and collage are important for my composition. So too the use of the rhetoric of one text—say, a menu—to shape my inquiry into something seemingly unrelated, an idea demonstrated beautifully I think in Benjamin Friedlander’s book Simulcast. I also use some radical line-breaking early on in drafts, to see what meanings might arise from alternate constructions and interruptions. I think all the poems in American Busboy narrate to the idea of a certain busboy’s experience. Poems like "The Other Side of Summer" and "33 Busboy Proverbs" are no different in that regard; they just happen to enact certain aesthetic concerns that foreground issues of poetics and making …
Q: Two poets get together, fall in love and/or lust, and have a baby. That baby is you. Who are your parents? Explain your answer. Feel free to use images or dialogue.
I would have to say Mallarme might be a grandaddy, since the only time I ever dreamed of God was after close reading his poem "A Throw of the Dice…" Like any American poet aware of tradition, my aesthetics owe quite a bit to both Whitman and Dickinson. Still, I didn’t really come alive as a poet until I read O’Hara’s "Why I’m Not a Painter" and Bishop’s great poem on seeing, "The Fish." And then there’s Dean Young… The first book of his that I read, Strike Anywhere, completely changed my thinking about what can go into a poem. Actually, if I call Dean Young my mommy/daddy poet (something tells me he would appreciate being called "mommy"), then it allows me to let in an extended familiy of comics and musicians and other pop-cultural goodies as possible parents to my style… And of course, I would have to cite the teachers I had at SIU—Allison Joseph, Rodney Jones, and Lucia Perillo—who pushed me hard to work on narrative writing skills at a time when I believed in all that bullshit critics accused the narrative of …
Q: What are you working on now?
The Unquiet … Poems about domesticity and fatherhood. They’re not as boring as that sounds. Promise …
MATT GUENETTE’s most recent book, American Busboy, was a finalist and editor’s choice of the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Sudden Anthem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.