Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (2024), is published by Four Way Books. His previous collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize.
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Diane Gottlieb: Congratulations on your gorgeous and truly magical collection We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On. So many of your poems, including the title poem, are rich with childhood memory, joy, angst, and discovery. We feel the warmth and love you have for those memories, for kids in general, and for the way they move through the world— whether on the playground, city streets, or in candy stores—all body and confusion, knowing and not knowing and learning. You capture the hunger, that sense of both belonging and longing to belong. It’s so tender what you do, how you reach back in time in your poems with appreciation and an eye for what children can tell us. Can you talk a bit about what is so meaningful to you about that crazy beautiful time and how childhood’s essence informs how you currently look at the world and your poetry?
Matthew Lippman: I don’t mean for this to be a therapy session, but what is coming up for me right now, listening to what your question is asking, is a memory of childhood. I was at my grandfather’s house, who was not a nice man, and I was sitting on his piano bench. I had been writing poems for a long time already. I must have been fourteen or fifteen. He had asked to see some of them. This was before computers or the internet, and I had brought him a package of poems—horrible poems. And he said to me in his not-nice way, “Why does everything in your poems blow up and explode?” As a fourteen-year-old kid, you want praise from your family members. He had aspired to be a writer and he was terrible at it. He was also abusive.
I think from that legacy, that badness, I’ve always been somebody who’s embraced tenderness and kindness as a pushback against those kinds of statements and that kind of sentiment, especially when they’re coming from somebody who should have been loving and warm. So, from a very early age, love has been at the center of everything I do. My childhood was filled with love, rich with love, at school, camp—I had a really great group of friends—and in my crazy household. I’m always trying to hold onto that and to be close to it.
Whenever I write, I harken back, pulling and exaggerating and tweaking the past, because so much of that love originated from that space, from that tenderness. You called it tenderness. I had a very rich childhood as it pertained to emotions and feelings and love, so I draw from that all the time.
DG: You mentioned at fourteen you had already written a bunch of poems, had been writing for years. What drew you to writing poetry at such a young age?
ML: I used to say that I’d read something Alan Dugan once said about how poetry was the only place he felt comfortable, where he found a voice to resonate with the world and the people around him. And I was like, “That’s a cool answer. I like that answer. I’m going to use that answer.” But that’s a lie. That’s not true. I think I was just born with this thing, I don’t even know what to call it. Because I was writing in kindergarten, in first grade, and I always loved it. It was like playing baseball or going swimming. It was just another thing that I did, like playing guitar and falling in love. It was just part of my DNA, my makeup, the way I’m wired, the electricity in me. So, I had to do it, like I had to eat a sandwich every day or a piece of fruit. But the real honest answer, too, is that it’s a mystery. It’s mysterious. Any language or words that I put to it don’t do it justice.
DG: One of the many things I love about your poems is the tension between the fear-based need we use to protect ourselves and our deep desire to be vulnerable. You often poke fun at pop culture, starting with the very first and very delicious poem in the collection “As Natural as Finland.” How even in a naked exhibition of performance art, we still find ourselves longing to be naked: “We are not exhibitionists or performers, we just want this to be Finland / the way people in Finland / get naked and get in the sauna / like they take the dog out for a walk.” Your poems are funny and irreverent, and with great compassion and a wink, you call it like it is. How much fun did you have writing this poem, and how much fun do you have calling out pop culture and our resistance to truly getting naked?
ML: Oh, it’s all fun. That’s the driving force behind all of it. I’m trying to remember when I wrote that poem. I think what happened was I found an old postcard. Pia Lindman, the artist had made these postcards … Because before you went into the sauna, you got naked in the middle of the square or whatever it is at P.S.1.
You walk past these huge walls—it’s like a prison—and there’s this big open courtyard, and then you go into the museum. She had this sauna in the middle of this courtyard, and you had to get naked, that was part of it. And then she asked folks’ permission to take their picture for her promotional stuff. So, I found this postcard she created from that day, and I was like, “Oh my God, that was intense. That was amazing.” I got naked in the middle of Queens in New York City in 1990, whenever it was, or the early 2000s! That was fun, remembering that. I had a blast writing the poem. I have fun every time I sit down to write a poem, no matter how dark and depressing the subject matter might turn out to be, because it’s just play. Writing is play. I can’t do that on the playground anymore. My knees are shot. Pop culture is everything to me.
DG: What is the hunger for pop culture?
ML: Well, part of it’s just about staying young or youthful. And really the pop culture that I’m most interested in is music. I have an eighteen-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old daughter, so Taylor Swift invades our lives daily.
My older daughter’s also really into jazz, like Pat Metheny and bands like The 1975 and singer-songwriters like Sufjan Stevens. It keeps me youthful and it’s fun. Getting old sucks, so you’ve got to stay in a place where you can have fun. Also, there’s another thing. In terms of my poems and getting pop culture in there—I really want to connect with an audience. One way you can do that is to connect with people who recognize what’s going on in the same space that you’re living in. So, part of why there’s so much pop culture in my poems is about accessibility and generosity.
DG: There are really fun poems in the collection but there are also harder ones that point to how divisions in our society cause harm. You write poignantly about racism in several of the poems, about Adam Toledo in “Dog Zone,” about Jackie Robinson and our long history of racism in “Safe Home,” about complicity in “The Big White American Segregation Machine.” But in “We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On,” you also question the culture that has created rules about race, what we’re allowed to share, how the language and labels we use put people into boxes when it’s never that simple, how we’re not just one thing. I’d love to hear how Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America informed this poem, about how you’re always saying your prayer “at the wrong time of day,” about the challenge of “…trying to / figure it out,” and about “lifting off a bit from thinking we know anyone else before we can / talk to them.”
ML: That’s a big question. Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite contemporary authors. He’s also a poet. And there’s an essay in A Little Devil in America about Soul Train, which was a television show in the ’70s. Soul Train was the brainchild of Don Cornelius. I used to watch it all the time in my bedroom late at night, and I was just mesmerized by the whole thing. Abdurraqib writes about that and dance culture. I think I wrote that poem soon after George Floyd was murdered, and so there were all these conversations in schools and the culture about DEI and white privilege. Everybody had something to say. I have a lot of feelings about that, but I didn’t know how to say anything about any of that. Even now, it’s all so confusing. My default is, well, I truly believe that we can all find a space together that is born out of kindness and acceptance. I like to go to love, the love space, but people don’t like to hear that.
Then again, who am I to talk? I am some white Jewish kid from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so I don’t really know anything except I know everything, just because I don’t know anything.
That poem came out of all of these small little interactions. Like with the woman in the poem who I wanted to buy the book for before I realized, “Wait a minute, why do I want to buy the book for her? Because she’s Black and we’re the same age?” It really came out of that desire, but then I’m like, “Oh, but then people might think I’m being a racist and maybe she thinks that I’m being a racist.”
I called her one day; I told her what I was feeling, and she was like, “Nah, it’s cool. We talk.” So, all of that is real. And then there was always the tension and the love when I grew up in the ’70s between the Black kids and the Jewish kids. But there’s nothing really that I have to say about any of it except that it’s a mess. I think anybody who’s got a heart and soul is just really trying to do the best they can, hopefully. And that was a fun poem to write.
DG: Well, I love Chaka Khan. I love “Tell Me Something Good” and your references to the song in your poem. Tell me something good in all this, right?
ML: Right, there’s got to be some kind of good. I don’t write much about race anymore. I have a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance, who once said that he tells his students that writing is a way to discovery. I feel like some of those poems were that for me. I want to be cool with people, and I think that in order to be cool with people, you have to do a lot of work inside.
DG: Another tension I really appreciate in your poems is your willingness to let your mind wander, sometimes into chaos, and then in the next breath—or line or stanza—you honor the gifts of discipline. I love all the wild surprises here, the turns, and also when you go to rein it back in. One example of this is “Fuck Poems,” which starts with a rejection note from a literary journal you received at 4:00 a.m.: “They said, ‘Get out of here with your crazy poems,’” which made me laugh out loud, I have to say. You write that after the rejection, you no longer felt relevant, and “The rejection was like the core of a rotten orange being extracted / from a different time zone.” Then your mind takes off even further, as you imagine the many reasons and ways you and your writing were “not enough” for that editor. What brings you back into the poem and, I imagine, to that night, is your daughter. You were awake at 4:00 a.m. because she had an allergic reaction to peanuts. And she was afraid that her throat would close up and she wouldn’t be able to breathe. So first, I have to say that your poems about your daughters are just filled with so much love and tenderness. I can’t help but keep coming back to the word tenderness. In this poem, you juxtapose the spiraling of your mind in the face of rejection with the realities of the body, and of love. So, of course, fuck poems, right? I mean, how else can you spin it?
It’s often the body in your poems that end up bringing clarity to the mind. I also think of “Emergency Room” where you believed you wanted solitude as you drove yourself and your swollen toe to the ER. But it took a fellow ER patient-in-waiting who was in great emotional distress, “Elsa or Sarah or Mrs. Eisenberg,” to help you realize “I had found what I had wanted all along—the dark, beautiful spirit / of humanity—.” Can you say something about the mind and body and your poems and the chaos and the discipline?
ML: When I read a poem, I want to feel the poem in my body, whether I’m reading your poem or Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem or David Daniels’ poem. A poem is such a singular cerebral act. If it can ruin me, in my body, then I feel like that’s a miracle. So, when I sit down to write a poem, I always have that in my head. One way I make that happen is by being wild and surprising, and at the same time recognizing that the body is the engine for all of it. I’m a very sensual dude. My cat’s sitting here right now, and I just have to touch him, Sammy. I want to achieve a balance between what the mind can do and what the body is capable of. I’m very aware of my body in my poems and other people’s bodies in theirs.
Again, what’s coming up for me is that I feel like every poem I write is a love poem, and so there has to be a recognition of that, a celebration of all things sensual and wild. It’s really important to be surprising or make those unexpected leaps because I think readers really appreciate that. I really appreciate that, both as a reader and a writer. I want you as a reader to feel like something is happening in your guts, that you might feel the urge to laugh or cry, or to go get a sandwich afterward, or a piece of fruit.
DG: You want us to want your crazy poems, want more of those “crazy poems.” We do! So, on the topic of “every poem is a love poem,” tell us about baseball, which makes its appearance in a bunch of the poems in the collection.
ML: Baseball. That’s my sport. New York Met fan. My dad was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Baseball’s that game, which is both all head and all body at the same time. There’s a lot of downtime, just a lot of time. My best friend, Michael Morse, who’s also a poet, and I take pride in going to Mets games and taking naps during the game. Little cat naps. That’s just part of the experience for us. When I was a kid, I wanted to be two things: I wanted to be a baseball player, and I wanted to be a musician, and I didn’t have the skills for either of those things. So, I find that sometimes in my poems, I’m a musician and a baseball player: the shortstop for the New York Mets.
DG: I want to come back to “—the dark / beautiful spirit of humanity—” that you capture so beautifully in this collection. I must mention “There Is a World Outside That Wants to Go Up in Flames.” That one just did me in. It moved me–deeply. As hard a poem as that is, it’s full of hope, and it’s so needed at this point in time that we’re living:
At some point in my life, I wanted to be a firefighter
So did the person next door and the stock broker
and the kid who punched the other kid on the playground.
I am sure of it.
It has to be true
because wanting to be a firefighter
is the only thing that keeps the world
from not being torn asunder
by flame, and ash, and an impossible, raging
heat.
Do you believe that somewhere in each of us lies the desire to be good and brave? And do you have hope for our times?
ML: I used to. I still believe that everybody wants to be a firefighter or has the capacity to be brave and to step outside of themselves and be helpful and supportive. I do. I believe that. The other part of your question? I don’t know anymore. I think about this a lot lately. I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and my parents were very left, progressive, Upper West Side Jews involved in the Anti-War Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement. I went to a total hippie summer camp that was very political in its gestalt and philosophy. We sang protest songs—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez. It was that thing.
Then I became a teenager, and my friends and I were all No Nukes and divestment. It feels to me that despite all the effort of these people to make the world a better place, we’re still in the shit hole. It’s worse than it was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. I have less hope in humanity, but still a lot of hope in individuals. I will always be hopeful. I will always be positive. I will always go to the loving, kind, decent space. That’s very important to me because I feel it.
DG: One last question, Matthew: what’s next?
ML: I’m so glad you asked. I am working on a collection of poems about crying.
The way it works is I ask people to send me a sentence or two about crying—anything that comes to mind—and then I write a poem based on their sentence.
For the past four or five months, I’ve been working on these poems about crying, specifically how it can be a pathway to joy—even in the worst, saddest circumstances. So that’s my next thing. That’s where I am right now, where I’m headed.
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Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions) and the Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. Her work appears in River Teeth, The Florida Review, Witness, SmokeLong Quarterly, Best Microfiction, Huff Post, and The Rumpus, among many other lovely places. You can find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and @DianeGotAuthor.