Photo by Margarita Corporan.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Constellation Route. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. Zócalo’s poetry curator for September, Olzmann chatted with us in the green room about New Year’s Eve, karaoke, and Filipino food.
Beside the poets you’ve curated for us, who is one poet you’re currently reading?
A poet that I return to fairly frequently is the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, 1996 Nobel Laureate. She’s a poet that I feel I learned a lot from about defamiliarization, irony, wit, approaching serious topics with a sense of wonder, humor, and grace.
How has the pandemic affected how you think about or write poetry?
COVID is still with us, and I think maybe it’ll be a few more years before I can say for sure. But I think one thing that changed is that poetry started to feel accessible in a different way. Because there were suddenly all these Zoom readings, and that hasn’t entirely gone away. I feel that might have been a very specific pandemic-related change in poetry, and how we interact with the poetry world.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
There was a time I wanted to be Spider-Man or an astronaut. I was really intrigued by the guys who’d come and take the garbage from our block because I liked the truck—this massive, hulking thing that would barrel down the street. Those were some of the early dreams. A little bit later, I wanted to be a basketball player, but I entered high school being like 4 feet, 10 inches, and also devoid of talent, so that wasn’t necessarily in the cards. There was a time when I thought I was going to be a doctor because I saw a psychic at a fair when I was maybe six or seven years old. You could ask the psychic any question about the future for a dollar. I paid the dollar: “What am I going to be when I grow up?” And she said, “You’re going to enter the medical profession,” and so I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be a doctor,” despite not really being great at science, and kind of being grossed out by blood. Because I was a kid, I was just like, this person knows the future, and so I thought I was going to be a doctor for probably five or six years.
Where is a favorite place you go to decompress?
I’m kind of a homebody, so home. It’s funny, being originally from Detroit. I feel like I’m more of a city person. I’m in Vermont now, in a place that’s somewhat isolated and kind of quiet. I’ve gotten used to that. So, I look forward to just being able to retreat here. It’s myself, my partner here, and we can just close the door and shut out the rest of the world to a degree.
What’s your favorite comfort food?
Filipino food, adobo and pancit. I’m half Filipino, so it’s stuff my mom and grandma used to make sometimes.
What’s your favorite holiday?
I like New Year’s Eve because it’s my wife’s birthday also, and we have created our own traditions for that over the years. We’ll either go someplace together, or we’ll just stay home and make dinner. She’s a writer also, and so we’ll spend some time just reading. We kind of keep it quiet. It feels like we’ve sort of made the celebrations to the holiday uniquely our own.
What’s your go-to karaoke song?
I’m not a very good singer, but if I was going to do karaoke, I would be searching for something that would have a very narrow vocal range. Maybe something almost spoken, something that you could shout your way through. Possibly something that enough people knew, that if you had a crowd there, they could sing along and sort of drown you out. Maybe like “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by the Proclaimers. I do think, with karaoke, there’s a sort of understanding that you’re not supposed to be a great singer anyway. Part of it is just having fun and not taking it too seriously.
In an alternate universe, what would you be doing right now?
Thinking about earlier in our conversation about what I wanted to do growing up, there’s probably an alternate universe where those things happen. But in an alternate universe that more closely resembles ours, if I wasn’t a poet, I think I would probably do something where I was making something. Maybe making candles or rocking chairs.
What’s your advice for someone interested in writing poetry, but don’t know how to start?
Try to have fun. I think it’s easy to forget about that as you move through the poetry world. There are lots of parts of the writing world that can feel kind of lonely. Writing is just you sitting alone at a desk and no matter how good you are at it, that’s going to be most of the writing life. Moments of publication or applause, money or awards—those are the tiniest fraction of amount of time of what you write. The writing life is mostly just you alone at a desk. And so, if you’re not enjoying that, then it stops feeling like a worthwhile endeavor. But if you enjoy the actual act of writing itself, then most of the time, the life of a writer is something that can feel really rewarding if the process is part of its own reward.