Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of BOA Editions, Ltd.’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He is also the author of a chapbook, Night Logic, selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press’s 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Award. Matthew has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Poets, Adroit’s Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight and other publications. He is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
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Jim Whiteside: I’m so excited to talk to you about this beautiful collection, Beforelight. Congrats on such a moving debut! I loved the poems on my first read, and have really enjoyed revisiting them over the past couple of months. I’m always happy to see a poet who’s doing the important work of re-centering queerness away from urban centers and depicting queer stories in rural or suburban spaces. I was reading the book on the train yesterday and came across the seemingly simple statement “I am somehow back / in the rippling dark / of August in Pennsylvania.” This is, really, a theme. The speaker often finds himself returning to various landscapes—fields, forests, the social landscapes of peers and family—in decidedly queer ways. How do you feel your poems bring together queerness and place?
Matthew Gellman: It’s a gift to be read so thoughtfully. It’s true—nature shows up persistently throughout the collection, and so much of this tendency, I think, has to do with turning away. I was, like so many queer kids, uncomfortable in my skin for really all of my childhood, and nature functioned as a place I could turn to when the people around me did not feel safe. As you mentioned, I grew up in Pennsylvania, which was full of a natural lushness that still feels like it’s in my bloodstream. I remember so many walks I would take by myself, by streams and little patches of woods, mostly to avoid being perceived. I think in revisiting those landscapes of my childhood in Beforelight, I was searching for a sense of belonging in my hometown that I did not feel at the time—going back to the origin to reclaim it, so to speak. I was also trying to focus on the beauty that was inherent to those years—natural and otherwise—perhaps as a way of making queer childhood more tolerable in retrospect.
JW: Wonderful––yes, for so many of us, poetry is a balm for the past. It’s interesting to hear you say that the poems make it more tolerable in retrospect, not just making peace with that pain in the speaker’s present. Refuge takes many forms in the book, and oftentimes a person provides refuge. The speaker’s brothers, the mother, and an imagined sister all make significant appearances––the mother often as a foil to the gender-policing father. How does gender manifest in these poems, especially as it relates to the mother-son and father-son relationships, and how did the imagined sister come about?
MG: I think I was always uncomfortable with the idea of exerting power over other people, and that’s mostly what I saw the men around me doing when I was a kid. So it makes sense, maybe, that I associate femininity in the book—especially my mother’s version of it—with safety, warmth, and refuge, and why I sought to emulate that energy. The imagined sister poems are very much a part of this attempt to experience the full disclosure a relationship with a sister would allow me, even if I have to imagine it in the poems. I remember my brothers and I often play-acted femininity, first in front of adults, and then alone when we got slightly older and realized that it was considered shameful. The poem “Brother, Age Six” discusses this in detail—the searching for an alternative to masculinity, the solidarity in doing so as brothers, and the secrecy of this effort.
JW: I’m glad you bring up “Brother, Age Six.” It’s a fascinating poem about gender exploration taking place between two young brothers, trying on their mother’s shoes. I love that ending:
You looked and said, Do you sometimes
wanna go someplace else. I said, Where.
Then you stood up in your heels and practiced.
I love how the poem gestures to possibilities that are being practiced for in ways the children don’t even fully comprehend. The brother’s indication that there must be something else, something more, and the speaker’s very childlike response of “Where,”—what else could there be beyond our small town, beyond our family? How do gender and sexuality exist in these poems as practiced things, as moments of small but meaningful exploration? I’m also thinking of poems like “Homecoming,” “Connor,” and “Echo Lake,” even “Tyler,” which takes place a little later in the speaker’s life. I’m an only child, so my experience of family life and of queer adolescence is somewhat different, but how does having a queer twin with his own unique journey with gender and sexuality come into play?
MG: Such a good question—it’s amazing to be read so carefully! Definitely, all of the poems you just mentioned engage in this form of childhood gender play—more specifically, gender deviance—through which a different life can be imagined. And so many of the poems in the book study how that imagining is enabled by the presence of the brother as a sort of co-conspirator and mirror image. My brother did not come out until we were in our twenties, but there was always a kind of unspoken understanding between us about who we both were. I presented as feminine from a younger age and in a more overt way, so I overall had a much harder time concealing my queerness at school, on sports teams, at home, etc. While that secrecy was of course painful, I don’t know how I could have handled so much secrecy if I didn’t have at least one person—my brother—to witness me in that state. The poems where we are trying on our mother’s shoes—or, on the flip side, trying to hide from homophobia in similar ways—hopefully convey a kind of solidarity between us, even if it was unspoken at the time.
And yet, because he was still a part of the family that I was trying to hide from, I also still tried to avoid being fully seen by him, as the poem “Brother in E Flat” discusses. That poem is really how I envision my brother as a kid: at the piano, mastering something, completely in command of what he presented to the world, always capable, while I was upstairs trying on lipstick in secret. He resisted his urges to express his queerness much more decisively than I did. We were both hiding, but he was better at it. Perhaps I envied him for that.
JW: I’ve heard about so many of these coping and concealing strategies from queer friends. I remember hearing you recently talk about how queer children are forced to “make themselves small” in order to successfully navigate heteronormative situations. I thought that was such a succinct but powerful way of describing how, in childhood, queerness is stifled, discouraged, concealed. How is this sense of smallness in these poems or in your new work? Another coping strategy I often hear about is this sense of mastery you mentioned in regards to your brother. So many of my queer friends have told me about how they channeled their energies into some external activity or art as a sort of distraction to others—a sort of “I won’t be known as the gay kid, people will know me as the great singer,” or pianist or school leader or soccer player or quiz bowl champion or whatever. In my own experience, I feel like I stayed busy and active in lots of extracurricular activities to distract myself and others from my queerness. For the brother in “Brother in E Flat,” perhaps the piano serves this purpose for sure, but writing also often serves as a way of coping and healing. How did you find your way to poetry?
MG: I discovered early that I felt ill at ease with the world around me, and that writing poems alone in my room was one of the few experiences that made me feel calm. I loved being able to have my own private conversation with myself, to let my mind wander, to say things that nobody could overhear or judge. I think, in a way, a queer childhood provides painful but valuable instruction on how to be a poet: we learn early the power—and often necessity—of solitude. It’s an art form that, while deeply communal, also requires a lot of soul-searching and problem-solving on our own when we sit down to write.
You make such a good point about the urge to distract from our queer identities, specifically by piling up achievements and activities that (hopefully) make us notable for something else. I have done that, and I am sure my brother has too. And I think it applies to other marginalized groups as well: the desire to always do more and be more to negate an ingrained feeling of unworthiness. I am still very much in this trap: I never feel quite satisfied with what I’ve done. I wrote one book, so now I need another, and I have a compulsive drive to keep moving. Maybe this is good in some ways, but I am also trying to consciously slow down and smell the flowers.
JW: “An ingrained feeling of unworthiness”—wow. It’s true, we’re not only taught shame as children, but also how to make appearances to seem less shameful to others. So much of adulthood is learning to identify these behaviors and investigate their roots before we can even set about that process of healing, growing, changing. What sorts of flower-sniffing have you been trying to do lately? I can only hope a literal trip to the botanical garden has been on the docket. Do you feel like the new poems are changing or benefitting from this sense of slowing down?
MG: Yes—you nailed it! So much of adulthood for queer people, I think, is looking at our behaviors and figuring out which ones are really coming from us or from things we’ve internalized that no longer serve us (or never have). This is a problem I thought I would address fully in just one book, but my new poems are definitely engaging with it all over again. I have been writing a lot of poems with longer lines, bordering on prose, that meditate on the nature of friendship, aging, the challenges of intimacy, queerness, etc., all interspersed with meditations on the power of the ocean. I started working on these new poems in Fire Island, where all of these topics were coming up, and I just started collaging together these disparate thoughts, observations, and pieces of conversations I was having with my friends. I’m trying to be looser and more intuitive in how I draft, to let the poems be a little less tidy, less pre-determined. I haven’t been able to explore too many of the flowers in LA yet, but soon!
JW: I’ll never forget, when I was in her workshop, Louise Glück saying, “Tidiness is the enemy of all of our poetry.” I do appreciate, though, the measured tone in so many of the poems in Beforelight, how deftly they balance that tone with surprise, revelation, confession, etc. Can you point to a poem that felt like a breakthrough for you, that represented the start of something––whether formally, tonally, thematically?
MG: Louise the queen! I absolutely am trying to be messier in my work going forward—or if not “messier,” more risky and surprising with the field of action I develop in my poems. A breakthrough poem in the book was definitely the title poem. I remember how freeing it was to just let myself talk on the page, how little permission I’d given myself to do so before writing that poem. Maybe that’s why I named the book after it—I want to remember that feeling of unrestraint.
JW: I always love hearing about how books find their titles, and naming the collection after the poem that represents a kind of liberation is so beautiful. I’m also drawn to the poem that gave its title to your chapbook Night Logic (Tupelo Press, 2023). “Night Logic” is on my list of dear poems in memory of Matthew Shepard––along with Bruce Snider’s “Fabric” and, of course, Richie Hofmann’s “Book of Statues.” In a book so focused on family and personal history, how do you see other forms of lineage, specifically queer lineage or queer history, as informing your work?
MG: Yes! I love Richie’s poem about Matthew—the amount of emotion the poem achieves with so few brushstrokes. And this is a question I think about often: how to embrace a confessional mode while also connecting the micro life of the speaker to the macro (usually political) issues that shape that life. I felt that the book needed at least one poem that dealt with queer history in order to raise the stakes of the speaker’s own personal, more localized experiences of homophobia. And the case of Matthew Shepherd—such a touchstone when discussing hate crimes—spoke to me as a fitting analog for the speaker, not only due to his queerness but also his neurodivergence.
The new Fire Island poems I mentioned try to achieve this same combination of micro and macro, personal and socio-political.
JW: Ooh! I’m excited to see some of those poems! Contemporary reckoning with a relatively deeper queer past is such a vital part of contemporary American poetry––Jacques J. Rancourt’s second book, Brocken Spectre, comes to mind. We started this conversation with a discussion of place as it pertains to Beforelight, and I’m always interested in how place forms us as poets, how we in turn form a place by our presence in it, through our writing about it. I know you love a trip to Fire Island, so I’m happy to hear about these fascinating collage poems. We see some variation in place in Beforelight––I’m fascinated by the furthest deviation in place, “Grand Island, Nebraska”––but I’m curious how travel or moving about informs your writing. How have the places you’ve visited for residencies shaped your writing? How about your recent move from New York to Los Angeles?
MG: Yes! I love Jacques’ book for that too. For me—maybe for all of us—travel dislodges me from my sense of how my life “needs” to be, and thus how I am “supposed to” represent myself on the page. I feel most aware of the many “selves” that we really all are, rather than just one fixed, monolithic self, when I’m away from wherever I’m living, and I feel this really no matter where I’m traveling. None of the usual obligations (including self-imposed ones) are there to limit you! And I feel like this happens on the page when I’m writing in a new place, too. California is starting to make its way into my poems—longer lines, more breath—and I’m excited about that. This move has really made me question the habits, creative and otherwise, that I thought I “needed.”
JW: That is exciting! I always love that moment when you realize you’re finding new footing in a new form, a new voice or tone. Those moments are rare but crucial, when we can sense ourselves growing and evolving as poets. We’re all constantly finding ourselves and our places within a larger context, a conversation with ourselves and with other poets. That leads me to my last question––what excites you about contemporary American poetry? What current conversations do you see as vital or particularly interesting, and whose work are you excited to see out in the world? As maybe a Part B to this, any advice for poets who are just starting, whether for how to find their voice/place in poetry or in general?
MG: So many things excite me in poetry right now. I feel constantly stunned by the work I see my students at Brooklyn Poets writing. Teaching poetry is probably the thing that brings me the most joy and connection. I always want to see more space created in the poetry world for outsiders, non-conventional students, the people who, due to age or class or race or ability traditionally wouldn’t or couldn’t be there. Brooklyn Poets does a great job on that front. I went to Bread Loaf this summer and was blown away by the Fellowship group I was part of: James Allen Hall, Paul Tran, Jenny Johnson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Erin Lynch, Jesse Nathan, Robert Wood Lynn. I am always excited by the work of other queer poets: Christian Gullette, Richie Hoffman, Derrick Austin, Joshua Garcia, and so on. And, of course, you.
JW: Ahh, you’re too kind, Matthew. I’d certainly second the other names on the list. And what a delightful group of Bread Loaf fellows! Thanks, again, for taking the time to answer these questions!
MG: Thanks so much, Jim. See you soon I hope!
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Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019). He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and Best New Poets. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.