BYP Profile: Introducing Matt Siegel

[We have started an exciting new project this fall: a series of June Poet Profiles! At least once a month, and hopefully more often, we'll profile former Bucknell Seminar poets with brief interviews, photos, and samples of their work.

The first profile in this new series is an interview with Matt Siegel, a 2006 Fellow in the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. This interview was conducted via e-mail in August 2006, just as Matt was preparing to start his graduate work at the University of Houston.]

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BIO: Matthew Siegel was born in 1984 in New York. He spent this past summer on fellowship at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. Recently transplanted to Houston, TX, he is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry at the University of Houston where he also teaches composition. He recently received a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and Global Literary Culture from Binghamton University (SUNY) where he was awarded the Andrew Bergman Prize in Creative Writing, the George R. Dunham Poetry Prize, two AWP Intro Journals Award nominations, and an Academy of American Poets Prize selected by Dorianne Laux. In 2005 he was chosen by Nikki Giovanni as the winner of the Cargoes National Undergraduate Competition in Poetry. He has had poems published in Lilies & Cannonballs Review, Clark Street Review, Ginger Hill, Susquehanna Review, and forthcoming in Passages North. He has also done extensive work with the spoken word community.

RM: How did you hear about the June Seminar? Did someone encourage you to apply?

MS: I heard about the program, initially, I think, from a flyer in the English department hall at Binghamton University, where I just earned my BA. But I also saw ads in the Writer’s Chronicle and places like that. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, my mentor at Binghamton, encouraged me to apply. In fact, she had published Terrance Hayes in one of her anthologies and thought I would work especially well with him.

I began working with Maria my first year at Binghamton as a sophomore. She took me under her wing and I was fortunate enough to work with her every semester since that first one. I find this kind of funny because I find myself writing this paragraph over and over trying to shorten it. I really cannot say enough about the impact this woman had on my life and writing. She saw something in me and just kept letting me come back to her with my work. Her workshops were two eight-hour sessions three weekends a semester. She had us writing a lot of poems that were difficult to write, and when I say write, I mean to face, to deal with. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an ulcer condition, when I was sixteen and she guided me through writing those poems. I had to write them but I was also running from them as they were coming out. I would close the book and say to myself No, I can’t do this, I can’t write this. But we had twenty minutes to have something or else risk embarrassment in front of a whole workshop full of people who just struggled with their own situations. So I wrote the poems and they ended up being some of my best. In fact, a decent portion of the manuscript that got me into graduate school was those poems.

RM: What are you doing now—what occupies your time?

MS: Right now I am at a Comfort Inn in Panama City, Florida on the Gulf Coast. Yes, I’m grinning. I’m with my friend Devon Branca, a poet in the PhD program at Binghamton, and we’re moving me to Houston. We figured since I have to drive, we might as well take the scenic route. So traveling has been taking up the most of my time. And preparing for graduate school and teaching composition (yikes!). Today I swam in the ocean for five hours and then cooked fish on a portable gas camping stove behind my car in the parking lot.

RM: What are you working on—writing?

MS: Right now I’m not really working on anything. I mean, I have a few poems that I’m tweaking slowly, but really so much else has been going on writing has sort of been moved to the rear burner. I jot a few lines down here and there but that’s it. I’m reading a little too.

RM: Can you talk about your writing process, and specifically, how reading and/or interacting with other forms of art triggers or informs your own work?

MS: My writing process feels sort of feels like a non-process, but maybe that’s just because it’s mine. I feel it sometimes and I sit down and it comes out. Sort of sounds like going to the bathroom, I know, but really, that’s what it comes down to most of the time. Sometimes I have to poke it a little with a stick. But really, it’s always changing, maybe because I’m changing. Usually I’ll start with an image or seed in my head and just jump on and ride it, see where it takes me. I revise a bunch, save my drafts (all on the computer), but like to have other poets whose work I respect go through it with a pen and make comments as well. Devon is a great editor of my work, as is Maria. Too much of that, though, can be annoying depending on the piece. I guess I would say I let the poem dictate the process.

RM: Any current obsessions?

MS: I’m always obsessed with finding new voices, new poets to sort of turn my world upside down. Lately, I’ve just been trying to keep my eyes open. There’s just so much to see right now and be affected by. I feel as if I am currently in the hinge of my life. Things are all very new and exciting/frightening. I’m in a brand new city and surrounded by all kinds of crazily intelligent and creative people. I just want to try and get all their stories. It might take awhile. Oh, and break dancing.

RM: Whose work inspires you right now?

MS: That’s always a big question. Right now there are a ton of people who are influencing not only how I write but how I look at the world. Dina Ben-Lev is probably my favorite contemporary poet. Olena Kalytiak Davis is a big one for me right now as well, especially that first book. I just met a personal hero of mine, Jeffrey McDaniel, at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, so I’ve been going back to his work. I’ve been corresponding with Clay Matthews some. I really like his work, and I see it all over the place so it gets me excited to be reading journals. Paul Guest is another one of those. Terrance Hayes, Lydia Melvin, the Wave Books crew, Bob Hicok (the new poems he has in Field are 100% BAD-ASS), I’m pretty excited for Patricia Smith’s new book…oh, and Larry Levis. He’s been kicking my ass all over the page. And of course the faculty here at Houston. I mean, shit, I drove over 2,400 miles for something! (On a side-note, I stood in front of Tony Hoagland’s closed office door yesterday and just stared for about a minute. Is that weird? I mean, it’s not like he was in there or anything…)

RM: It's been about two months since your June Seminar experience. How do you look back on it?

MS: I can’t say I don’t miss it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in such a supportive, kind, and open environment as I was at Bucknell. It was all about the poems there, a total love-fest. I met some incredible talents that will remain with me for the rest of my years as a poet. The faculty was just as excited as the fellows were and seemed to be always available to talk and go over poems. So I look back on it favorably. At orientation here at Houston someone asked me about the program and I just sighed, smiled, and said amazing.

RM: Describe your support network: do you share poem drafts with anyone, for instance? How does that work?

MS: My ‘support network’ is sort of in transition right now because of the move I just made. Generally, I would show in-progress to my former roommate and forever-friend Devon Branca, and he seemed to be a great reader for me. Cody Todd, a friend of mine starting the PhD at Southern Cal is also a great reader of my work. I find that it is important to show my work to people who are looking out for my/the poem’s best interests and not just making it how they want to see it, like I seem to do at times. Terrance Hayes was great with that. Maria Gillan, who I worked with at Binghamton, was also a great editor for me.

RM: What's next for you?

MS: Well, the next step is the current one. I start classes this Monday here at the University of Houston in the MFA program and I’m also going to be teaching TWO sections of composition (27 students per section) per semester which I’m simultaneously scared of and excited about. I’d like to try and do the Writers in the Schools program at some point. Working on Gulf Coast is also something I’m looking forward to. I’m just going to try and do all the right things here to make the most of the next three years. As for this semester, I’m taking Pedagogy, Modern Thought (with Jane Miller), and Writers on Literature: Writing the Body (with Mark Doty) and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Jane Miller is a wonderful poet and Mark Doty is…well, Mark Doty. He and I share an August 10th birthday. I sense good things coming from this semester.

RM: You've been kind enough to provide two poems to post along with this interview. Is there anything that we should know about them?

MS: ‘Back to This’ was written my senior year at Binghamton and ‘Southern Shores’ was written at Bucknell.

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Back To This

Today in my rearview I saw a tractor trailer demolish
a sedan, its plastic pieces exploding into the air
like dry ice in a glass bottle with the top screwed on.

One of these almost took my friend’s trachea
at twelve years old as his mother was dying,
lung cancer. I can’t forget the bandages

around his hands and his neck and his mother
with that rag around her small head, her hands.
I don’t know why I keep going back to this.

I just can’t seem to rub these things from my eyes:
a deer painted down a hundred foot stretch of highway,
ending as a pile of mush, no fur, no teeth to be seen.

But yesterday I saw a girl light a cigarette
and place it into the mouth of a quadriplegic
and how it hung loose from his lips, and I saw

a child, barely able to stand, with his arms full
of fresh leaves, still red on the ground throwing
them into a man’s face as they both shouted

with their hands in the air.



Southern Shores, North Carolina

So what’s wrong with me that I can’t walk into a boat shop
where a girl sits on her knees,
straddled over a jet ski pumping a nail gun into its sides?

The girl behind the counter looked at me, of course she could tell.
My skin became transparent, my teeth became soft.
What could I do but leave?

I walked along the tire blocks in the parking lot,
squinted at the sky, ran fingers through my hair.
I don’t care if she could have loved me or not.

And what could I have told my family? Mom, Bill, please
understand I am a fragment, a fracture without this stranger
I am so small, I don’t know if I can ever come home

but I want to believe I could have. And that lovers are not boulders
that tumble down mountains, colliding
and smashing each other to pieces.

She barely looked at me when I walked in.
She shot nails into a jet ski.
POPPOPPOP

[interview by Ron Mohring; photo of Matt Siegel by Betsy Wheeler]