Interview: Matthew Nienow

Matthew Nienow is the author of two chapbooks: The Smallest Working Pieces (Toadlily Press, 2009) and Two Sides of the Same Thing (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2007).  His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs and elsewhere.  He currently lives in Port Townsend, WA with his wife and son where he is attending the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.  You can find him at matthewnienow.com/blog.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for "Ode to Paul Bunyan"? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

Paul Bunyan was a mythical staple of my childhood.  I grew up on the West Coast, but spent summers in the Midwest with family.  It was there, in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, that I regularly encountered a 45-foot-high plywood likeness of the man and his ox.  I also attended, and later worked at, a camp that celebrated Paul Bunyan Day at the close of every three-week session.  The day began early and in silence as everyone donned their finest flannels.  We’d get a little half-sacred speech about the life of lumberjacks in the area before sitting down to a meal of pancakes and apple pies, sausages, eggs, loaves of bread—an excess to be consumed in the style of the long-gone lumberjacks: silently.  All the while Paul and Babe stared from the far wall of the lodge riding the line between a silly children’s story and that of serious legend. 

When I sat down to write the poem it was the product of a manifesto I fabricated in support of a fictitious movement called Paul Bunyanism.  The manifesto and movement were all about bounty and excess, which is why the poem is so insistent on repetition and naming.  It started out as a joke.  The problem is: I’m not that funny.  So my joke actually took on the tone of a sacred incantation.  

2. This ode is certainly far removed in terms of language, though it shares similar details, from the Paul Bunyan stories of my youth. This perspective adds a serious, sophisticated spin on the childhood hero. Can you talk about the balance in the poem, between that recognizable Paul Bunyan and the serious portrayal, between the familiar details and the sophisticated perspective?

Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes have a big hand in this.  When Neruda praises ordinary objects the language is far from ordinary.  That collision of “high” speech and “low” subject matter can produce a lot of energy.  I also love the task of trying to name something as accurately, and from as many angles, as possible.  I suppose all the base details and kitschy aspects of the Paul Bunyan story were in my head even when those details didn’t make it to the page. 

I wrote the poem as though it were to be printed on a forty-foot billboard—with a language of showy grandeur.  The final images and lines caught me by surprise, though, and made me actually think seriously about the poem’s own needs, which were more sincere than my own.  

3. Repetition is a powerful device in poetry, and this poem certainly capitalizes well on that idea, both in direct repetition and the furthering of an image or idea. The push in the image of “a sliver, a gleam,/the slit eye of a monster, a gash/in a silver creature’s side,/an opening to another world,/the crescent moon captured/and put to work” is just fantastic in its creation and wording. The second stanza completely owes itself to repetition, crafted well to really drive home the awe felt by the speaker for Bunyan. How do you view the use of repetition in this poem, and what are your thoughts on repetition in your work in general?

I love catalogs in poems as long as they provide the kind of momentum that sweeps the reader along without their permission.  As I started saying earlier, this piece was devoted to accurately naming the Truth of the Paul Bunyan story.  The thing is, the more one tries to name something holy, the clearer it becomes that all of those attempts will be inadequate.

I certainly favor repetition and riffing in many of my other poems.  The trick is knowing when repetition is doing a service to the poem and when it is slowing the piece down. 

4. I see that you are attending the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in preparation to own your own boat shop. Can you talk about the relationship between this craft and your work as a poet?

I see writing poems and building boats as very similar kinds of work.  You have to understand the characteristics of the material you are working with, whether that be words or wood.  You have to get a feel for it too, especially when that material has irregularities and a standard reaction won’t do.  You need some sense of a vision, but also the flexibility to follow the cues laid out before you.  I can take a rough sawn board and cut it to the length I need it, just as I can use lines and stanzas to make a rough shape.  When I use my chisels, especially for fine detail work, I’m really revising the wood.  The metaphors go on and on. 

 My ultimate goal is to build poems that float and boats that sing. 

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’ve been writing a lot about maps and the strange consequences of our current lovefest with digital maps and GPS.  On one hand these maps make getting around a lot easier.  On the other they offer a false sense of intimacy with the world.  We seem to think that if we can zoom in on a place from a satellite image we somehow know something about it.  And yet, we know even less than we did when we relied on the use of physical maps.  A physical map works through a person and requires that person participate in the making of meaning.  Digital maps and GPS units that talk at us require that we trust them, essentially asking us to stop paying attention to where we really are. 

Of course, that is one obsession among many.  My first full-length manuscript is making the rounds, with fingers and toes crossed.