Mark your calendars: this Wednesday evening, November 14th, at 7:30 pm in the UP bookstore, Portland poet and Adjunct Instructor Matthew Minicucci will treat us to a selection of his prize-winning poetry. Minicucci is the third and final visiting author of our Fall Reading and Lecture series here on the Bluff, and you won’t want to miss him! His most recent collection, Small Gods, was a finalist for the 2016 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press. Minicucci has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, testaments to the poignancy of his poetry. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, the Gettysburg Review, Oregon Humanities, The Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.
Can you tell us about how Small Gods, your most recent collection of poetry, came to be?
Small Gods was a collection I was writing at the same time I was working on my first book, Translation. At one time, they were this massive tome of a book, but some sage advice from some wonderful teachers in grad school and right after grad school convinced me to make two manuscripts out of it, which was definitely the right call.
The real focus of Small Gods is the intersection between faith and science. For me, a Catholic school kid growing up in Massachusetts, I found that intersection at loss. That when we suffer great loss, in our family, in our personal life, we seek out answers in some very specific places, and two of those places (for me) were faith and science.
The hope of the collection is that it can take these concepts that might seem disparate on the surface and bring them closer together. Perhaps in an effort to bring all of us closer together.
What do you like most about poetry and about being a poet? How do you think your role as a poet differs from writers of other genres?
I think what I like most about being a poet is the embracing of a way of looking at the world outside of narrative. And perhaps this connects to the second part of your question. One of the biggest things a poet can do is show people that narrative is only one way of interacting with subjects and concepts in our daily life. I think it’s the most common way we interact with those things, because so much of our lives is narrative (I woke up, I drank coffee, I graded papers, I went to class, I had dinner, etc.) All of these things imply a linear order to things, when I think there are things outside of that order.
Poetry allows us to embrace sound, meter, metaphor, etc. in an effort to understand the world. And I think those methods of interaction are just as effective and important as character and plot.
Which authors and poets inspire you?
A difficult question, as so many authors inspire me. I feel lucky to be able to reach back to authors from the ancient past, like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius, or St. Paul. But I’m also lucky to have trained under amazing authors, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Tyehimba Jess: poets whose work not only inspired me, but trained me how to be a poet. And I’m also lucky to be a part of a community of current authors changing the landscape of poetry right now. People like Jericho Brown, and Traci Brimhall, and Illya Kaminsky. There are so many more, of course, like Carl Phillips and Kevin Young and Jane Hirshfield, but I don’t want to ramble on forever.
I think it’s often easy to think that poems just come to a poet in a moment of epiphanic revelation, as if the poem we read on the page just appeared in the poet’s mind in an instant. Could you talk about your own process of crafting poems?
That’s a really great question. Thanks for asking. I think, like music or acting, a poem is designed to create that very response: the illusion of ease. If we could borrow a word from the Italian Renaissance, we would call this sprezzatura: that concept of something the audience knows is very difficult, but it’s accomplished with such apparent ease.
In poetry, all the way back to a Petrarchan sonnet, the audience knows (somewhere deep down) it wasn’t that easy, but appreciates the ease with which the piece comes forward to them, as a reader.
For my personal style, I consider myself a sort of “sculptor.” I generally write quite a lot, and I write it (generally) without form. So most of my craft process is a process of cutting away what isn’t the poem (which is its own complicated thought), and finding the proper form for what remains. These two things generally happen simultaneously. Or, at least, they do now, many years after I began writing poems. But it’s still an arduous process where a lot of things are left on the cutting room floor.
If you could bring one person back from the dead, who would that be and why?
Wow. That’s quite the question. I’m not really sure how to answer. There’s a lot of people I’d like to bring back to sit one afternoon and just talk their ear off. But, my real answer, the answer in my heart, is probably my grandfather, who passed away a few years ago. He was a kind and brilliant man who made furniture and homemade tomato sauces. It would be nice to help with either of those activities just once more.
What advice would you give to aspiring poets?
First, don’t stop writing. Paul Silva wrote a book called How to Write a Lot which had a quoted study about writers who write “when they feel inspired” and writers who (for the study) have been told not to write at all. The data suggests that those two groups basically write the same amount: nothing. The only way to get better as a writer is to keep writing, and the only way to keep writing is to, well, keep writing, no matter what.
Second, be mindful of your literary community and the voices you can turn to for help or to help. Sometimes, it’s the voice of a friend that can unlock what a piece of writing is capable of, and sometimes you’re that voice. Helping friends, loved ones, students, etc. through their pieces can teach you more about your own writing than you ever thought possible.
Last, if you want to move forward into publishing in magazines and/or books, recognize that rejection is a massive part of that. A lot of the best MFA programs take 1% of applicants, and the percentage of those writers who will go on to write books is also in the single digits. This is a hard thing. It’s hard to be a writer. You have to be ready for rejection, and you have to be able to rise above it. Does the piece need revision? Work on that. Does it not work? Would it be better to work on the next thing? Do that. Is the magazine the wrong place for it, and it’s a very good piece? That’s a possibility too, and you have to believe in yourself and the work.
(Photo courtesy of Mother Foucault’s Bookshop)