The Art of the Book

On a Friday in April, MD called Matthew Rohrer on the phone while driving to Atlanta for the weekend. Having been introduced to Rohrer’s poetry by Andrew Weatherhead, MD was curious to hear Matthew’s thoughts on not only the birth of the poem, but more, the birth of the book. This interview is exactly as inspiring as MD hoped it would be. It’s for the person with something to say. It’s for the modern poet writing outside academia, and MD believes there are just as many, if not more, with poetry just as profound, if not more, to share with the world when it’s ready to listen. As Ray Cappo once said, “we’ve just got to learn to slow down.”

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First, tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Matthew Rohrer and I’ve lived in Brooklyn for over 30 years. I’m originally from Michigan, where my family’s from, where I was born. Then I moved to Oklahoma and grew up in Oklahoma, but I hated it and my parents hated it too while we were there. So there was this just understood thing that we should all get out as soon as we could. So when I graduated high school, I went back to Michigan for university and they’ve since moved out and everyone’s gone. So good riddance to Oklahoma. But yeah, I now live in Brooklyn and I’ve been teaching at NYU for like 16 years. I teach creative writing there, at every level, undergrad and grad. I’ve got a family, I have a son who’s graduated college and I have a daughter in high school and an awesome wife and two cats who are brothers.

Nice, so you said you’ve been teaching for 16 years, how long have you been a published poet? How long have you been writing books?

I was very lucky. I had my first book published right as I graduated with an MFA from Iowa. It was my thesis basically. And I mean, I recognize that was extremely lucky. That was in 1994. So yeah, it’s been like 31 years or whatever.

And that was A Hummock in the Malookas?

Yeah.

Since A Hummock in the Malookas, how many books have you published?

Army of Giants, which just came out in the fall, is my 11th book.

Nice. You may have answered this a second ago, but how old were you when your first book came out?

I was 24. Which, you know, seems super young. It was great. It was like the best thing that ever happened to me, basically. I was just leaving grad school because I had gone right after undergrad. So I was a baby.

If you can recall, I’d love for you to place yourself back in that time, do you remember what that was like when your book was selected by Mary Oliver for The National Poetry Series?

Oh my God, I remember vividly.

Tell us about it.

I had just been fired that day. I was fired from ACT, you know, the test like the SAT.

Oh yeah.

The ACT office was in Iowa City. So I was just doing data entry there in the summer to make money while waiting to move to New York. Like I’d graduated with my MFA and I was just killing time, I knew I was going to move to New York. The ACT was hiring basically anyone to do data entry. And it was terrible. You were in a basement all day long. It was a fluorescent light nightmare. They had bowls set out everywhere, these bowls of individually wrapped Tylenol. When I saw that, I was like, oh, that’s not good. So yeah, my wife and I, actually we weren’t married yet, we were about to get married in a couple of weeks, but we both had this job and I went in one day and my ID didn’t work. And they were just like, you’ve been fired. So I went home, all like, my life sucks, it feels pretty shitty to be fired from a data entry job. But I got home and there was a message on my machine from Dan Halpern, he just said, uh, Matthew Rohrer, Dan Halpern here, can you, uh, call me back? So I figured that was probably good. I called him back and he gave me the amazing news. To my shame, to my great shame, I didn’t know who Mary Oliver was.

Oh, wow. (laughs) That’s kind of badass to me.

Honestly, then I was just like, oh my God, I don’t know who Mary Oliver is. So I had to go find out. And you know, I have to say I was a little surprised because this is ‘94, especially when you were looking at Mary Oliver poems, I mean, they’re like nature poems, basically. I mean, I really liked them, but I was just like, I don’t understand what she saw because the world of A Hummock in the Malookas is all magical and surrealist and things are transforming into other things and there’s inanimate objects that have, you know, lives of their own. So I was just kind of surprised honestly, but, you know, not sad.

Damn, that’s amazing.

So, yeah, then my wife eventually comes home from work and I’m like half-drunk and say, I got fired but I just won The National Poetry Series. (laughs) So yeah, that was kind of fun.

Wow yeah, that’s amazing. I love that story. After that happened, did you ever speak with Mary Oliver about your book?

You know what? I never met her. One time, years later, after I was living in New York City where I had a bunch of crappy jobs and one of them was at the Poetry Society of America. We did this Poetry in Motion thing on the subways. They did all these sorts of programs. Anyway, we did something and I had to contact her for some reason and when I did, I just sort of slipped in a little personal message, saying, hey, I’m sure you can imagine how important this was to me, I just wanted to say thank you. And she wrote back, that’s great, thanks. It was nothing really but yeah I never met her. We had the most minimal contact.

Well that’s sweet you got to express that gratitude to her. Being selected for that, do you feel like that changed the trajectory of what you felt like you could do with your poetry?

It was everything. Like it meant everything, you know, being selected for that. I was just like everyone else writing poems and then suddenly you get a book and it’s hardcovered and Norton publishes it. I come to New York and go to 500 5th Avenue, which is right across the street from the public library on 42nd and 5th, to this massive building, the Norton offices, and you feel awesome. You feel famous, even though you’re not and they don’t care. But yeah, it makes you feel like, oh, now I can do this. It was the most important thing for me. Like this is great, they’re going to take this book. And that’s incredible. And now, I feel like I can do more. I can start to explore other things.

Oh yeah. And when that happened, did that make you feel, sort of like, the word settled isn’t right, but did it make you feel like, okay, this is where I’m meant to be, like as far as New York goes, like going there and having that whole experience, were you like, okay, I’m going to set up

camp here?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was great. Like going into that office and meeting with my editor at the time was this woman, Carol Houck Smith. She was pretty old at the time and she was like a firecracker and she was funny. And it was like old school New York, you know, it was like a world I’d never known about. And then it’s like, well, you know, once you have a first book, you feel like, oh, it’s the first book. It’s not the only book, like it’s the first of many, you hope. So it gives you permission. It gives you a sense of like, honestly, too, you know, you’re 24 and it’s like, oh, hey mom and dad, guess what, you thought I was crazy to study poetry, but look, look what happened, you’ve read Norton books and here’s me with a Norton book. It helps in a lot of ways like that too. Most of it is for yourself where you, you know, take yourself seriously. You have this external attention and it’s like, okay, great. Now it’s serious. Now we got it. Now it’s good. Now we’re going to take off.

Damn. Yeah, that’s amazing. So at that time, when you came to New York and everything, it’s 1994, it’s your first book, you’re 24, how long would it be from then til your next book came out?

Well, that’s actually a great question because that, that was like, that sucked. So, you know, it turns out with The National Poetry Series, these presses agree to sponsor a judge and be a part of publishing one of the books, but they don’t really care and they’re not necessarily signing on to publish you for the rest of your career. They just agreed to do it for that year. So yeah, it turns out she didn’t really like my stuff that much, but you know, she was like, you should show us a

new manuscript soon. And of course I had a ton of poems, so I submitted my second manuscript after hanging out with her for a while and she really did not like it. I would go to her office and she would show me edits and there would be, at the bottom of a poem, there would just be the word, SO? I mean, she was really harsh and she kept saying stuff to me like, I know you’re married, but I don’t see your wife in these poems and I don’t see you guys like living and loving and fighting and I was like, oh God, that’s the last thing I’m gonna do. Like, I don’t want to write that poem. She wanted this other thing for me and after a while it became clear that

Norton wasn’t going to do my next book and then nothing happened. My next book didn’t come out for seven years after that. So between my first book and second book, it was seven years of sending to contests and getting rejected and then kind of lowering, I mean, you know, this sounds a little shitty, but lowering my standards to the point where I would get rejected from places and I would think, thank God because I don’t even want to be published by that place.

But yeah, it was seven years, it was terrible. And on the one hand, it was terrible, but on the other hand, I didn’t stop writing and I had a crapload of poems, so by the time Satellite came out, I was happy with it and the truth is, it was an infinitely different book than if she had agreed to my second book, just out of some sense of obligation. To be frank, I would have been embarrassed by that book. So, I think everything happened for the right reason ultimately, although it was painful for those seven years, but the book Satellite that finally came out, the second book, I’m super proud of that one. And also it’s not even really the second book I’d given her. It took a long time to get there.

Totally. And this book Satellite, this started your relationship with Wave, right?

Yeah, exactly. At the time, they were this placed called Verse Press and they did a magazine, Verse, which was great. Matthew Zapruder joined forces with Brian Henry, who was the editor of the magazine, and they decided to do books. They started Verse Press which eventually sort of morphed into Wave.

Oh that’s sick. I really like Wave. You were the first author I knew of on Wave but I’ve been drawn to the house style for their books.

Yeah, I think Wave is really sick. I think they are doing cool things.

During those seven years, is this when you started teaching?

No, I didn’t start teaching until very late. Until I was like 32.

How did that come about?

It was a little different back then. You know, like nowadays people publish one book that gets some attention and they can get a job somewhere, but I don’t know, there weren’t that many jobs or I wasn’t, well, I wasn’t willing to leave New York because I had just moved here. That might be part of it. But yeah I applied for some jobs, but I didn’t get them. And I was like, fine, I was a temp, I worked in publishing, eventually I was a stay at home dad for five years. And that was the last thing I did until my boss at NYU, Deborah Landau, had just gotten this new job at NYU and was like, hey, why don't you come work for me? So you know, by that time I’m 32, that’s not necessarily really young. I’d just been writing constantly and I’d been publishing more books and doing whatever it took to pay the rent, basically. I have a very tolerant wife. She had a solid career at museums and was very understanding.

And I’m curious, so you were 32, this is the early 2000s. So you started teaching in 2001?

Yeah somewhere around there. I think 2002 or 2003.

Oh okay, cool. So how far into…

Oh wait, no, wait. You know what? That’s wrong. No, it was 2008 when I started teaching. So I was 38. So that’s even, erase everything I just said, it’s even less young. I was 38. (laughs)

So at that time, this places us in 2008, I’m curious what your relationship with the internet was like. Were online magazines and things on your radar? Can you speak to that a little?

The internet, it loves poetry and poetry loves the internet. And it was great. There was definitely a moment, when internet journals started out, there was this sort of hierarchy. And I think there probably still is. Like if you get published in a poetry magazine or something, if you’re in the paper edition, I think that’s probably cooler than being on a website. But it seemed like poets figured out right away that this is the best thing to ever happen to them. You disseminate your voice so much broader, so much wider, so much faster. There was this thing called Web Del Sol, and it was kind of like a clearinghouse link, like links to all these other things that a lot of people were really invested in trying to tie the internet together, you know, for you. So you could go to these sites and they were like, look at all these other poetry sites, which was really great because it kind of created this sense of community in this vast thing called the internet, which, you know, doesn’t feel that communal. And yeah, there were a lot of websites that came up really fast that became quite respectable really quickly. It was great, you know, and suddenly you can search people, search up a poet, and they’ve got their stuff everywhere about them online. It became a great thing. And so, I mean, I’m very skeptical of online culture in general, and I kind of hate the internet, honestly, except I understand that we’re all… it’s part of our DNA now. But yeah, it was great for poetry from a very early point. And there were a lot of really excellent early websites that really kind of helped people take it seriously, poetry.

Wow yeah, can you name a few that you remember from this time? Even from 2008 into the early 2010s. Places online you felt were doing something special as far as the writers and poets they were publishing.

Well, I mean, Web Del Sol was one that was like a great hub. There was this guy Daniel Nester. He oversaw and edited La Petite Zine that was excellent.

Do you specifically remember one called Bear Parade?

Oh yeah, Bear Parade. That was one I was trying to remember. Bear Parade was great. I think there was a lot of interest in the overlap between early internet journals and alt-lit people like Tao Lin and Gene Morgan. Those guys had this real clean aesthetic and they published weird stuff. And there was no length limit, which was new for people because it used to be that no one wanted long poems because they had to pay to print them, and now suddenly people would take your long poems. But yeah, I love Bear Parade. They did a lot of incredible stuff.

Oh yeah, I’ve never thought of the length thing like that. So at this time, who were some of your early students that you just knew… I don’t know how to say it exactly, but you just knew? Do you get what I’m saying?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I never had Tao Lin as a student because he was at NYU right before I started there but he hung around and would write in this little cubicle in the library after he graduated and we got to know each other. Andrew Weatherhead was an undergrad student of mine and it was very clear to me that guy was super talented. Then he went on to get his MFA at The New School which was like 2 blocks from NYU, so we stayed in touch. And there was David Fishkind who was another undergrad that was friends with Andrew and also knew Tao. So yeah, suddenly there were all these young kids who were really awesome and instantly doing really great stuff. And not much later, I had Morgan Parker as a student. You know, I had a lot of impressive people who were my students, but I have a soft spot for those earlier years. And I think Andrew in particular, I was like, oh, you guys are great. And something real is going to happen with you. And I want to stay in touch with you.

Yeah, that’s dope. OK, this is kind of one of the longer questions I have, and it does feel pretty scripted, but I think it also leads well into this last bit of stuff I’ve been wanting to get at with you. I’ve read a handful of your books, not all of them, but a good number, especially your more recent Wave books, as well as A Hummock in the Malookas. And I don’t know, when it comes to poetry, especially for me lately as a poet, I’ve been really interested in how a book comes together. And I know it sounds kind of cliché to put it this way, but I’ve been thinking about what I guess you could call the art of the book. Or more specifically, the art of the poetry book. Because I think a poetry book can do something that a novel can’t. I just do. That’s just something I believe in, and I feel like your books are part of what helped me realize that, like it made me really see how a poem can be doing something great on its own, but then when you put those poems together the way you do in your books, it becomes something else entirely. Something more. And I can say this about your books, there are just so many strong poems in them, it’s kind of uncountable. But for me, it’s less about how strong any single poem is and more about the way you’ve put the whole thing together. That’s what I really notice. So I wanted to ask, and I’m not even sure if this is a zoomed-in or a zoomed-out kind of question, but I’m interested in how a poem is born for you. And I mean that kind of beyond just process or practice, because everyone always asks that, like, “What’s your writing process?” But what I’m really curious about is how does a poem come to life for you? Like, does it hit you? Does it just show up? How does it begin? Does that make sense?

Yeah, of course, I totally get your question. Almost always, for me, it comes out of this kind of collision between seeing and trying to put that into language. You know, I’ll be walking around, I almost never write in my house, honestly. And especially as I’ve gotten older I mostly write while walking around, literally. New York’s a great place to do that. I do it wherever I am but that’s rarely at home. I don’t even have a desk. I don’t write at a desk. Sometimes I’ll write on the couch or something, but for the most part, I write out in the world. And almost always, a poem comes from that collision of seeing an image or something, and thinking, how do I put this into language? And that, I think that’s something I’ve been doing since I was a kid. I’ve always just been, you know, I’ve loved books since I was very little. And I read ridiculous amounts of books and I just love language. So I think everything I see and experience, I’m like, how do you say this? How do you put this into language? But the other thing is that almost all the time too, I’ve got some sense of structure that I’m trying to put it into. And that’s again, almost always made up on my part, but it’s still a constriction or a structure. Like a certain number of words per line, or I love syllabics, you know, and for some reason, seven syllables per line works really well for me. I don’t know why that is, maybe because it’s not really enough to finish a line so I just keep going and then suddenly I’ve written a lot. So yeah, there’s always a form in my head of what I’m working on. Then from there it’s trying to put my experience into language, I guess.

Yeah, that makes total sense to me, knowing your poetry. That’s amazing.

But also, I think that’s changed over time too, because obviously Hummock is much more imaginative. Like there’s a lot of stuff in Hummock that’s very surrealist and didn’t happen to me. And I think over time, I think this happened when I had kids honestly, you suddenly become more domestic because you have to be. And in that, you realize, wherever you look, there’s magic and there’s wonder. And that’s what I’ve always been interested in. And when I was young, I would look for wonder and I found it in my mind, or in paintings, or in books. But even if you’re sort of, you know, I don’t want to say parents are confined, but you know, yeah, I will. Parents are sort of confined to a smaller life. And when I got there, I was like, where’s the wonder here? And suddenly there’s wonder everywhere. Wherever you look, you know, it’s there. If you’re looking for it.

Wow yeah. Dude, I relate to that so much. It’s kind of like what you’re saying. Like I was always fascinated with books, or even more than that, with created worlds, at a super young age. And I felt I always had a lot of thoughts running through my head, as if I was creating something, I don’t know, I guess it could be chalked up to thinking poetically. But yeah, it wasn’t until I had a daughter that I actually started to write things down. I just relate super hard on that. Cause you know, once you have a kid in your life, it’s not necessarily filled with “action”, like you’re not doing stuff all the time. You start to actually slow down and be more aware, or better yet, attuned to the kind of wonder and the beauty of what’s right there in your immediate.

Oh, a hundred percent. Because before that, you could just do what you wanted all of the time and so nothing really mattered.

Exactly.

I mentioned Brian Henry with Verse earlier. He’s an old friend of mine and I forget which book this is, but he had this book that came out after his kids were born and it was all about surveillance, government surveillance, and stuff like that. But he told me, he was like, I wrote it because the kids were always around and you’re like trying to go to the bathroom and they’re busting in and there's like kids everywhere and you’re just like, leave me alone. And so, even though that domestic life becomes very tight knit and sort of inward focused, you know, the deeper you look into it, it can lead you anywhere basically.

Yeah for sure. So zooming in, having spoken on how the poem is born, how do you go from there? How is the poetry book born? What is the art of the book?

It’s interesting you ask that because right now I’ve got 6 thesis students at NYU and that’s a lot. That’s too many, frankly. These are students who are basically putting together a book. And I was lucky, you know my thesis became A Hummock in the Malookas, so these are people that are hoping something like that happens. I love working with them but six is a lot. So this is on my mind a lot right now, because I’m talking with all of them about, how do we take all of your poems and find the kind of shape for them? My allegiance is mostly toward the books that are just collections of poems, possibly with a sort of big theme, let’s say more like a concept album than a rock opera. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

But I am fully aware that I myself have published a couple books that are definitely project books. Books with a totally consistent form or ethos. So I get that, but I’m always trying to steer my students away from that. I’m like, if it’s not totally apparent and necessary to you, then I don’t recommend looking for some sort of totalizing idea for the book. I think books of poems, that’s what it is. It’s a book of poems. It’s a lot of poems and it’s great. Should you shape it? Should it have a rising and falling action? Yeah, absolutely. I guess I’m just pushing often against that idea of a project, a book that has like an elevator pitch or something for it. I don’t love that idea.

Although, like I said, I have definitely published a couple of books that are that. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but I just think most times people don’t actually have that in them and they feel like they need it. I think back to my book a couple of books ago, Destroyer and Preserver.

Oh yeah, I love that one. That’s one of my favorites.

Thank you. Well, so I wanted to call that book Army of Giants. I’ve had that title Army of Giants in my head for a while and I was going to use it several books ago and I just sort of imposed that on it. I was like, this book’s going to be called Army of Giants. And so when I was putting the book together, I printed it out. I literally printed out all the poems, moved my furniture in my living room, spread them all out on the floor so I could see all the poems at once. And I was like, what are these poems doing? How are they talking to each other? And that helped me, you know, sort of move poems around and it helped me see like, oh, these poems are sort of similar to each other. They should maybe not be so near each other, that kind of thing. And then I was like, what is going on in these poems? Like what’s going on here? And I realized, oh, all of these poems are about things that are both awesome and kind of bad for you at the same time. And largely those things were, frankly, childhood, like, I mean having kids. And also sort of like, you know, partying and drinking and, you know, being that kind of person. And I was like all these things, they’re good for you and they’re bad for you. Like having kids is great, as you know, but it’s like, it changes your life and it’s hard, it’s super hard. And all the things you love about being social and going out and drinking and hanging out and doing drugs, it’s like, that stuff's great, but it’s also, you know, not good for you. And I sort of had the, I’m standing on the back of my couch looking down on the floor, I realized, oh, yeah, these poems are all about things that are sort of two-sided. And I was like, these are like destroyers and preservers. And then I remembered the Shelley poem and I was like, this book is not called Army of Giants, this book is called Destroyer and Preserver. After coming up with that, then I could shuffle some poems out, bring some new ones in and realize that’s what this book is about. But I really didn’t know until I sort of put it all together. So I guess that’s what I try to tell my students too, like with the idea, what is the art of the book? How do you make it happen? Unless you really have a super solid thing, like Terrance Haye’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, that’s clearly a totally solid thing. That’s all one project, so of course, that’s great. But if you don’t have that, then maybe you don’t need a project. Maybe you let the poems kind of tell you what sort of shape the book is going to be.

Did you teach this method to Andrew Weatherhead? I’m just curious.

I’m not sure. I bet I told him this at some point when he was thinking about putting stuff together. He was in two or three of my classes. So I probably told him a lot of shit. (laughs)

Well it’s just funny, you know, it’s crazy to hear you say that because I recently made my first poetry book, it’s a collection of poems written over a span of time and—

Can you send it to me?

Of course, I’d love to mail you one. I will say this, it’s very much a first poetry book written by a dude that knows jack shit about poetry. Just being honest. But also honestly, I do like it. I think it’s doing and did exactly what it was meant to do. I know that as time goes on and I write more that I’ll get better at making poetry books, but yeah, I say that to say I am proud of it. And I’ll totally send it to you if you’d like one. This is another part of the story but I’m my own worst critic, as many are, but especially when I was putting this book together, I was working on them and getting feedback from other writers. I won’t say who, but I’d sent them, at this point early on, to a guy that basically responded and said, I see you’re writing about yourself a lot in these but I don’t actually feel like you are in any of these poems.

Hmm, that’s interesting.

Yeah it was very interesting and it took me a while to understand what he meant by it. And even still, I don’t know if I can put it into words what he meant, but at some point I felt like I just got it, if that makes sense.

And so what did you change about the poems then? What did you do?

I wrote a bunch of new poems. Took a lot of poems out of the thing I’d originally sent, kept the ones that I felt could be worked on, ones that felt like something was actually there. I worked on them and edited them. I did a workshop lead by a poet with a bunch of other poets, learned more about poetry and the process of editing, learned how to better say what I was really trying to say. I developed relationships with other poets and we’d workshop poems back and forth. And then they eventually got to a place where I was like, okay, this is it, this is it, this is it. These are all the poems. And at this time, in my head I’m struggling a bit on how do I actually get these all together in a book, but I go to my friends that had been doing a photo zine press and I was like, hey I want to make a poetry book, and they said, we’d love to. So yeah, back to the point I was making about how that’s funny and crazy you share that process of putting together a collection of poems into a book, I went to go put my book together and was like, how do I do this? How do I approach this thing? How do I make this into a book? And I was like you know what, this is the only way I could think to do this, I’m going to print all of my poems out. So what I did was shrink them to a size I felt like I could maneuver them cause it was kind of a lot of poems. I print them, I cut them into index card size, I laid them out on my bed and I just started moving them around, shuffling them, like okay, how does this work here, what about these, how does this form the arc of the book, which I don’t really know anything about, or didn’t at least, but I felt something doing that, and it felt right. Like if I took this approach then the book would come together a certain way, a way that felt right. So that’s ultimately how the book came together and in the order it’s in. And it’s all just funny to me because, you know, a couple of months later I saw Andrew doing the same thing on his Instagram story, in his basement shuffling printed poems around, and I was like, wait, are you doing what I think you’re doing? Cause I literally did the same thing a couple of months ago.

Yeah, I think it’s necessary. I think you have to before you can sign off for yourself on the book. Like before you can decide on the sense of the book for yourself, I think you got to see it all at once. And that’s the thing you can’t see by scrolling up and down on the screen. You know, you have to have everything, your eyeballs have to be able to see everything at once. Cause then you can see all the connections or the disconnections, you know, and the stuff, the way that one poem, you know, you have types of poems, you know, and you’re like, oh, here’s the, these types of poems that I need to spread them out thinner. I need to move them around, you know, but you’ve got to see it all at once. And you can’t do that on screens.

Yeah.

And, you know, I know it makes me sound like an old guy, but I just read this article today where they’re like, old people like to print shit out. And it’s like, well, okay, sure, you know, I don’t need to—

That’s literally me too. I print everything.

But at the same time, I do think there literally is a difference between having all your poems shrunk down and on your bed so you can see the whole book at once versus scrolling on the screen where you can’t, you literally can’t see it all at once. And I think it’s important.

Yeah and I feel like even just that sentiment alone speaks to the book, you know, like speaks to like a print book. A book can do something once you put it all in there.

It’s funny that you say that because I used to always tell people books are different than poems online. Like I tell a student, oh, you should go read some Larry Eigner poems. And then, they go and see some random poems online. But what I really want them to do is get a book of Larry Eigner’s, you know, and read the book. And I used to always tell students, think about an album, like a vinyl LP, you know, the first song had to be fire. But then the last song on the first side was like some statement of a song, like we’ve come to an end but it’s not the end, flip it over. And if you think about one of the greatest albums of all time, Synchronicity by The Police, Every Breath You Take is the first song on the second side. It’s the fucking biggest song they ever wrote, but it’s not, it’s the first song on the second side, it doesn’t have pole position. And so yeah, I think those arcs for physical objects are important. There’s a difference between the physical object of the book and oh, someone told me to read Carl Phillips so I’m going to read all his poems on the poetry foundation website. You know, that’s cool, you read a bunch of his poems, but I don’t think that’s how he thinks about them.

Yeah, dude, it’s so crazy, I literally think in such a similar way. And really, when I sat down to order my book, I didn’t know anything about poetry or know of any full collections of poetry really, but I knew music, I knew albums. I was a big album kid growing up. If I liked a band, it wasn’t because I liked a song by them, it was because I loved my CD I had of theirs or something. Like at a young age, this album, Carnavas by Silversun Pickups was perfect, still is to me, front to back, and towards the end of that album, there’s three songs that, stand alone they’re all good songs, but together, when those three songs play in secession, it’s a whole different thing, you know.

Yeah, I mean, you asked me earlier, like how is the poem made? And I think that’s a question you have to ask at the different levels of the singular poem, you know, you could also talk about how the line was made. There’s that discussion of how the poem is made but then also how the collection is made. I think it’s really important and I think it’s sort of disappeared with music because now stuff is streaming and it’s just like hit, hit, hit and the worst song at the back. But I still think in those physical terms, you know, like in the book, how’s this going to happen in the book? I definitely stream music but I mostly listen to vinyl. And you know, when you listen, you don’t keep getting up and taking it off. You put it on until it’s done, that’s how it’s meant to be, and I love that.

Yeah, same. And I stream music as well. But I’ve tried curating playlists and I just don’t know. I’m not really a playlist kind of person. Even still streaming music, I want to listen to the whole thing, the whole album, and I do. It’s funny because at the end of the year, you know when they do that Spotify Wrapped thing? Mine is just whichever artists I like put out the best albums. An album will come out and I’ll listen to it nonstop for months, until the next good album I like comes out. I say that to say I like the whole album, though not physical, in the same way that I like working on a book, whether it becomes physical or not. And lately I’m thinking more in terms of books, like I just want to make more books, and I’ll work on multiple book ideas at once because they’re all such different things to me.

I love that. I’m the same way. I have a bunch of prose poems that I think should be a book. I have a bunch of poems about people who died called ghosts that I think should be a book. I’ve got some other new poems I’m working on, but yeah, I definitely think of them in different categories, which I think is sick.

We’ve been talking for almost an hour, I’ll let you go. Thanks so much for being down to be interviewed. It’s really been such a pleasure to talk with you.

Hey MD, I really enjoyed this conversation a lot. Have fun in Atlanta.

Thanks, have a good weekend.

You too, bye.

Alright, bye.

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Matthew Rohrer lives in Brooklyn, NY. His book, Army of Giants, is available from Wave Poetry.