I feel like there’s not much I can say about Matthew Rohrer that hasn’t been said already.  He is a poet.  He is the author of several books.  He teaches at NYU.  His poems are funny and sad and familiar and strange.  There’s a liveliness in their voice and a deep reverence in their construction.  They take place outside and inside, in the city and nature, alone and with others,  somewhere where the imagination and concrete reality intersect.  Despite all of Matt’s experience and worldliness, his poems also have this remarkable ability of never seeming  “above the reader,” while at the same time never resorting to familiar tropes.  His poems always level with you and remind you what’s good about poetry.

His new book, Destroyer and Preserver, was released this year by Wave.  You can read poems from it here, here, and here.  We emailed over the past few days to talk about the new book, other people’s books, punctuation, and hurricane Irene gets a shout out too.

I want to start with a relatively surface-level observation of your poetry that this new book has revealed to me: you describe motion a lot.  And when you do so it’s in these vivid and wonderful lines like: “I move through the days remarkably sinuously” and “I glide without edges / through the rooms / like the smell of cooking” and “My love / hurtling toward me through vast subway / tunnels”.  Do you feel like you pay special attention to movement, either when writing or in everyday life?

That’s a funny question – I never would have noticed that in the poems, but I’m glad you did. Honestly I can’t say I think about that while writing them. It would be cool if I could say that I take Olson’s essay PROJECTIVE VERSE to heart and that my poems are all about forward motion, but the truth is that I love the ancient Chinese poems too much, and they’re often so static. And right now I’m hunkering down as this purported hurricane approaches so I don’t feel that considering motion is high on my list of things to do while writing. But as you noticed, there it is. Maybe it’s just that I’ve perhaps been more affected than I thought by all the years of people saying in workshops “nice verbs!”

Do you think your poems have changed rhythmically as a result of doing away with unnecessary punctuation?  Do you read your poems aloud when editing them?

Yes they have changed rhythmically a little. When you move from using what are basically sentences to shorter phrases that have to work as lines also (or hopefully do), then the rhythm changes. I think it’s gotten slinkier.

Yes I definitely sometimes wrote poems with punctuation and then decided to make the line breaks do the work. I write by hand in a notebook so the line breaks that I start with are more or less arbitrary to fit the little pages, and I usually just use punctuation so I remember what I meant to say.

Do you find the poems come out differently when writing first drafts with or without punctuation?  That is, do you think the presence or absence of punctuation affects content at all?
I wish I could say “definitely” but if I’m being honest, I think the difference is slight. I think the absence of punctuation, if done well, like in those Merwin books from the 1970s, can produce another ghost-layer of meaning that the reader creates through his or her reading of the poem. But that’s the thing that makes it poetry or not: you could obviously punctuate Eileen Myles poems and they’d still say the same thing but not be as poetic. So does the reverse hold true? Is the removal of punctuation something that adds a kind of content— or more like a textual content? I think what’s much more interesting than this is whether or not UFOs are real.

Well, I don’t know that I actively try to do that. But I do like to think about putting a lot of different types of experiences in a poem, maybe even especially in a poem that on the surface seems meditative or overly domestic. If I actively worked to do anything like this in the poems I think I actively worked to replicate the experience of the mindset of writing the poems. I mean, sitting around, none of us are just thinking of one thing for any extended period of time. Whether that’s love or poems or why are the kids so annoying, all of these things are constantly knocked into by other thoughts: what a failure capitalism is, for example. So it seemed to me that a poem that wanted to be true to life (which is something I really want them to be, like the Lyrical Ballads or Williams’ poems) would have to include as many of these different registers of thinking as possible.

That was a line I heard on NPR and suggested some other poets and I all use to begin a poem. His book came out first. And his title THE PAVILION OF VAGUE BLUES was one I suggested we all use — it is my mis-or half-translation of a spot in the Jardin de Atlantique in Paris. My PAVILION OF VAGUE BLUES was just a terrible poem. So yes, we (he, Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann and Noelle Kocot and I) often do this kind of thing — come up with a title or idea or prompt and share it and see who can do it the most interestingly.  Usually it doesn’t amount to anything for any of us, but this time he and I both got poems out of this line. I guess I ended up getting two.

I know you guys work pretty closely together – you and Matthew and Joshua Beckman and Anthony McCann – sometimes collaborating on poems or books, but usually, it seems, reading similar things.  Could you talk about your collaborative/collective reading, if that’s an accurate description of it?

It’s just more fun to read something knowing that your friends are reading it to. Not like a book club. Just that you’re all engaged in the same kind of thinking, or are immersed in the same kind of world, together, though you live all over the country.  And with those people, if they tell me to read something, I know it’s worth reading. Joshua once raved to me about  Cowper’s THE TASK, which is a couple hundred pages long, written in the 1700s. It begins as a poem about his couch, and wanders from there. But it was Joshua so I sat down and read it.