Interview by Annick MacAskill
If memory serves me correctly, I first met fellow Halifax poet and Gaspereau Press author Matt Robinson in the spring of 2018, when he showed up for the launch of my debut collection, No Meeting Without Body. I already knew his own writing, having pulled his Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work off the shelves of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, where I then worked. At the time, I was most struck by the energy behind Matt’s poetry, his obvious delight in language producing a stylistic copiousness that propelled me through his text. Matt’s latest collection, Tangled & Cleft, is another densely packed volume of poetry, a taut forty-eight pages rich in sound and metaphor—attentive, lively, and precise in its articulation of grief, love, and the wonder of our banal everyday.
Annick MacAskill: Your poetry strikes me as particularly attentive to sound, and this is certainly the case with your most recent collection, Tangled & Cleft. There’s a real music to your lines, with recurring use of assonance, alliteration, and other sonic effects. Can you tell me a bit more about the place of sound in your writing?
Matt Robinson: To start, I’ll say hindsight is a funny thing. In looking back at poems of mine across the years, it’s more evident than it was at the time that there was a kind of fledgling concern with the sonic aspect of my poems. Not well-developed, but there. Fast-forwarding to the poems in Tangled & Cleft feels like an echo-y sort of déjà vu, in a way?
But to return to your question: the sonic experience of the poems I write now is absolutely something I’ve been thinking about more deliberately. With the poems in my latest couple of collections (Tangled & Cleft and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some other Nights Just Work), I like to think that purposeful intention shows up and begs for attention.
With regards to the poems in Tangled & Cleft, there was a specific choice I made, in addition to my usual interest in metaphor as the main engine that acts as driving force behind the lyric. The idea was to pay closer attention to the sonic and the aural—the possibility of the music—of these pieces. I wanted the rhythms and rhymes and echoes or assonances that were occurring to be centrally involved, at the forefront. In terms of the overall experience of engaging with these poems, I wanted the sounds—whether read aloud or in one’s head—to be as much of a driver and central concern as the metaphors. That’s something I appreciate in other poems and poets.
But, truthfully, the biggest influence on the sounds of these poems were the songs and records I was listening to while I was reading and writing and revising over the course of the last few years. Ben Nichols (and his band, Lucero), Matt Mays, Adam Baldwin, and early Uncle Tupelo. These are poems that owe as much to dirty ol’ alt country songs and rootsy garage rock as they do Hopkins and Thompson and other poets.
I’m not a songwriter, at all, but the breath work and delivery of these poems (when I read and perform them aloud), their use of juggling slant rhymes and clunky echoes, is more Texas & Tennessee and No Depression and 1372 Overton Park and That Much Further West than it is At the Edge of The Chopping There Are No Secrets. I can’t play any instruments or sing to save my life, but maybe I just subconsciously want to be in a band.
AM: Thanks, Matt. I can definitely relate to a lot of this. Maybe I also want to be in a band? Maybe we should start a band? Just throwing that out there…
Another thing that I sensed in this collection, which I’ve also noticed elsewhere in your work, is an interest in occasional poems, in poems that are written for specific, fleeting moments. Speaking more broadly, there’s a lot of the ephemeral in this collection—death of a family member, death of a dog, even a poem titled “First Snow,” meditating on the meaning of a first snowfall. Was this something you were writing towards in this book, or just something that happened?
MR: That’s an interesting observation, Annick. And, yes: we should start a band. I will design the t-shirts.
I’ve come to realize that I’m a poet of individual poems, as opposed to a poet of larger collections. By that I mean that aside from a couple of my earlier collections, where I was specifically writing about memory as a poetic or intensely about hockey, I don’t ever start with a grander project or type of collection in mind—I simply write individual poems. Most of my writing is like that, where I come up with a poem here and there and gradually a critical mass starts to accrue. I think that sort of thought process and the nature of my writing is occasional in at least one sense of the word. After a while, I find there’s some kind of unifying theme or aspect of a certain group of poems that at least loosely holds them together as a “collection.” But, and I think this a key distinction, that architecture is more loosely-stacked, dry stone wall than it is well-masoned brickwork. To mix metaphors, it’s curation as herding cats.
This is all connected to how my poems start, I think. And to finally get to your actual question, they almost always start with a fleeting moment or image or sound or idea. That’s often a darker version of those things, too. I tend to write sad or brooding more naturally than happy or celebratory. But it’s almost always haphazard, at least in the initial instant. While it didn’t take too long to realize that the grouping of poems that became Tangled & Cleft was going to—in one way or another—be about, and dance around, and interrogate themes and ideas of loss and brokenness and fracture and decay, it wasn’t a deliberate initial choice per se. After a certain number of poems, maybe my attention to instances and events that fell into that realm was piqued. I’m not very good at organizing these kinds of things until after that fact, almost. So: it just happened, until it didn’t, in a way.
AM: Speaking of grouping, you have a number of poems in this collection written “against” something (“Against the Dog’s Passing,” “Against the Opposable Thumb,” “Against the AR-15”). These poems were previously collected in your chapbook, Against, which was also published with Gaspereau. What drew you to writing “against” certain topics?
MR: First and foremost, I’m simply not that great with titles. It’s not that I don’t appreciate titles and the various sorts of work they can do in and for a poem, but I’ve never been able to get into a personal groove where I feel as if mine are noteworthy or stars of the show. I’m just as likely to have poem titles like “Dog” or “Yardwork” or “Cat” as I am to have poems against something. I think maybe I want the titles in my poems to almost be misleading in a way—ossibly to undersell things.
Having written a couple of “Against” poems, I did like how they allowed me to create a kind of tension between what was happening and being provided in the lyrical body of the poems and the overall framing of them. It was like turning up the volume on that dissonance. It might be a bit too cute by half or even contrived, but I like the idea of the initial frame of a poem being “against” a thing, but then having a reader work their way through and ultimately question whether that’s really even the case, or if the initially-presented titular opposition is really, truly the thing being explored in the lines that follow.
On a basic level, in Tangled & Cleft, I also liked the way some poems being “against” something and others then not—in a back and forth, back and forth kind of cadence—created a sort of organization after that fact as well.
AM: I definitely felt that cadence as I moved through this book. Tangled & Cleft is your second full-length collection with Gaspereau Press. You’ve also put out a couple of chapbooks with them, not to mention a number of limited-edition broadsides. What’s it like sticking with the same publisher (and editor) for so many projects?
MR: Working with Gaspereau has been fantastic. Andrew and Gary run an amazing operation. Like many, I always admired the work that Gaspereau Press was putting out. I like books as objects, and that’s what they seemingly specialize in. Having published a few poems in their Gaspereau Review lit journal a while back, I always thought that it would be cool to have a book out with them. But I was with other publishers for my first few collections.
I then got to a point in 2006 or so where I wanted to start doing an annual poetry broadside to give to friends and family (and to maybe sell a few, too), so I reached out to Andrew to see whether he would be interested in doing that kind of hired/commission work. He was keen, and that resulted in a great broadside of my poem “heart.” That was the beginning of what’s now been a seventeen-year run of broadsides. I give Andrew a few possible poems to read through and consider, and then he gets complete freedom to choose the one he wants to do and how to do it. The words are mine, but the setting and type and colours and paper are all him. And he always blows me away. Maybe at some point once we hit twenty or twenty-five years, I’ll bug him about collecting them all in a book version with photos of the broadsides or something. In any case, that creative collaboration has been fun. And it led to a chapbook in 2013, then a trade book, another chap, and my latest with Gaspereau. It’s also led to a friendship and an ongoing correspondence (mostly via email) about type and typefaces and printing, and a sharing of quirky printing/literary stories.
AM: The press is certainly known for this attention to design. On that note, I wanted to ask about a typographical aspect of your collection—the recurring ampersand. Why use that logogram? What effect do you think it has in your poetry?
MR: Ah, the ampersands! That’s a complicated question. Or maybe just a fraught, long-winded answer. First off: I love them. There’s something about the curvilinear, loopy, graphical nature of that character that seems to suggest a living in dual/dueling realms. It’s not a letter, per se, but it’s not fully a punctuation mark to my mind either. It’s like a weird shape-shifter. An odd, shadowy character who slides in and out of definition. I love that ambiguity and tension. I think I’m recalling correctly that up until the 1800s it was considered a twenty-seventh character in the alphabet. I love the idiosyncrasies of type and typefaces, so this oddball is right up my alley. As I ramble on, you can likely see how I ended up writing a whole poem about them.
I hope the use of it is a bit arresting and catches the eye; it maybe gets you thinking a bit or gets someone guessing or backtracking. It maybe slows the reader and forces a renewed attention while also being playful and a bit weird. Maybe it even augments a kind of tension or uncertainty.
A little Easter egg for you: Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau is well aware of my fondness for the ampersand, and he and I always go back and forth while editing poems on whether my usage “belongs.” He’s in favour of a straightforward “and,” so he flags the ampersands for me all the time, and then I have to justify why I’m using the squiggle sign instead of a basic three-letter conjunction. Most times he acquiesces to my somewhat ridiculous justifications. Sometimes not so much. But, he indulges me—so much so that in my first trade collection with Gaspereau, Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work, he used a bunch of different versions of ampersands throughout the book. I have always loved that sort of generous playfulness.
Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).
Annick MacAskill is the author of three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), won the Governor General’s Award for English-language Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. She is a member of Room Magazine‘s editorial collective and recently served as Arc Poetry Magazine‘s Poet-in-Residence. She lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.