Matthew Nienow is the author of the recently released collection, If Nothing, as well as House of Water (2016), both from Alice James Books. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.
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Celeste Lipkes: The title of your second collection, like much of my favorite language in the book, is a fragment: If Nothing. I thought immediately of the phrase often used in recovery circles: “if nothing changes, nothing changes.” Did the vocabulary of recovery affect the language you used to build these poems?
Matthew Nienow: That association is so interesting. While I was familiar with the phrase “if nothing changes, nothing changes,” I didn’t have a personal relationship with that expression. My path to recovery has been mostly independent; I’ve never gone to AA, so a lot of that language wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. I don’t even remember when the phrase “If Nothing” came to be part of the manuscript, but when I landed on that title, it felt very much about having no more excuses, facing regret, and wondering: If nothing enters my body, who am I? I was extremely lonely and isolated in a lot of the early stages of getting sober. There was a nothingness around me and inside me that I had to explore. Even if that recovery language wasn’t on my mind while writing the poems, it’s interesting to encounter it after the fact. That kind of ongoing conversation, of my writing brushing up against other language, is part of the living work of poetry.
CL: That emptiness you describe is so often the most difficult part of recovery for the patients I work with. There’s such an enormous focus on removing substances from one’s life without imagining what is going to fill that space. Your book is interested in the project of building a life without substances. Your first book was focused on a very different kind of building: constructing boats. Do you see any connections between these two types of production?
MN: The two books exist in very different eras of my life, though I still have a shop full of tools and build objects all the time! There are pressures and cultural forces that suggest an element of masculinity is defined by making things. Growing up, I struggled in school and thought I was dumb for much of my upbringing; I was pulled strongly toward that desire to “prove” my existence by producing things. When you’re building boats, there are so many interesting metaphors at play; you’re really building a new body—boats even have a skeleton. As I got sober, I stopped writing for a couple of years while I got my life together. When I came back to poetry, I was focused on trying to be present long enough to encounter truth. I started to take care of my own body and the poems became more than just a handful of pieces; I saw them gather and form a kind of new body, a new book. In that way, the making of this collection was physical.
CL: Your book is a physical object, and a beautiful one! The photograph of you carrying your son on the cover returns several times throughout the book as an increasingly exposed Polaroid that separates the book’s sections. At what point in the construction of If Nothing did you land on this visual structure and how do you see this image and its transformation functioning alongside the poems?
MN: First, I have to say, it’s amazing to work with Alice James because they give poets a lot of influence on their covers. We are invited to suggest between 10 and 20 images that they attempt to secure rights to. This time around, I felt so confused about what kind of image could represent what was inside this book. I was looking at a lot of modern abstract art; the press tried hard to get rights to one of them. In that waiting period, I kept having this memory pop up of this photograph of me and my son. At first it didn’t seem connected, but I kept getting pulled back to it. Finally, when the permissions for the modern art piece fell through, I said “Hey, I think this photograph might be a good fit.” There was something really haunting about the image, which is from 2010. There’s this temporary quality of holding up a child who will soon be bigger and different, almost as soon as the photograph is taken. It’s loving and heartbreaking at the same time. The press ended up liking it! I have to give full credit to Tiani Kennedy, who suggested that we use a Polaroid that becomes increasingly exposed as the book’s soft section breaks. I now can’t imagine the book without it, even though that addition happened very late. The images make the book so much more coherent; they immediately reveal how personal the poems are and really illustrate the state of being lost in addiction. With recovery, there is a greater sense of presence and coming into being. It shows an arriving into wholeness. I’m blown away with how it all came out.
CL: I kept thinking of the word “exposure” while reading If Nothing and how much of yourself you expose in this book. You speak clearly and devastatingly about the ways you have hurt others during your substance use. In the poem “Just Across the Wheel from You” you describe sending “letters to old friends turned strangers” in which you “[speak] of sobriety and struggle.” Many of the poems in this collection are themselves letters asking for forgiveness from the person you harmed the most: yourself. How has writing this collection moved you towards—or at times away—from that grace?
MN: I would start by saying that to expose oneself requires honesty. As I wrote these poems—and many others that didn’t make it into the book—there was an impulse to look back so I could move forward. As I wrote, I became more and more interested in a deeper honesty. How do we face something and not excuse it? That level of honesty is essential to me and often feels lacking in the wider world, especially for men. The idea of forgiveness is messy because while a lot of the poems speak towards that, I do not have any expectation of being forgiven. There are many poems in the book that are still very hard for me to be with. Asking for forgiveness is something I believe in, but there are things I did that I will never make peace with, that went against my core values. I carry a deep longing for forgiveness, but it’s most important for me to show up. That’s the daily work.
CL: Has engaging in that daily work of sobriety changed your relationship to reading and writing poetry?
MN: Absolutely. I was one of those people that really bought into the popular narrative that it was permissible for creatives to be alcoholics or addicts. I even believed that creativity was heightened or more available when using substances, even though I never wrote while intoxicated. Changing my relationship with that idea was so important. What would it actually be like to write and dream and be creative from a place of sobriety? That is likely why I didn’t write for a few years when I first became sober. Writing didn’t seem accessible; it wasn’t my main focus. And now, like many sober people, I am actually sharper and more resilient when I sit down to write and read. I now have a much greater capacity to be with things that are really challenging and uncomfortable—both in my life and my writing. I don’t fragment myself or require the aid of something else to be connected to my art. Because sobriety has changed everything in my life, it’s hard to isolate what it means for my writing and reading. It’s a question that I think is really important and I am going to keep paying attention to it over time.
CL: Your book is joining an increasingly large collection of illness narratives about the experience of addiction. Are there other volumes or authors on this shelf that you’ve found instructive and what do you hope your book adds to this collection?
MN: I’ve read a lot of books that touch on addiction, more often from the perspective of being affected by the addiction of a loved one, like Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf was one of the first books I read that really faced the lived addiction experience. Andrés Cerpa’s The Vault does something totally different, but is also reporting from inside addiction. There are a handful of other broader narratives like Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture, and more recently Lory Bedikian’s Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body and Megan Pinto’s Saints of Little Faith that grapple really meaningfully with illness. I read some of these after writing my own book and I wasn’t looking to any of them as guidance, per se. I was more interested in a broader undertaking of how to be honest about ugly things, particularly from the position of being a man. In our current public sphere, there are so few examples of healthy masculinity. That was something I was interested in writing against.
CL: It’s really interesting that you brought up Rasmussen’s book, as I thought immediately of his poem “Reverse Suicide” when reading your poem “No Painting Worth Its Paint” in which you describe a wound undoing itself (“undress the wound / and watch the blood run back / into the body, the jagged star closing / in on itself.”). Throughout If Nothing, you open up the “Matryoshka doll[s]” of words to reveal other words and sounds hidden inside (“undo” / “wound,” “hymn” / “hmmm,” and “curse” / “cure”). How does this playfulness with words affect your poetic process?
MN: For me, it’s less about the words inside the words and more about the sound. There’s something in that musicality that makes sense; the truth of the poem has to sound right. Sound is often how I find my way into poems—usually the sound of the first line. Saying the words aloud and hearing them spoken is a big driver to how my poems move along. While I can appreciate the playfulness of language, I am less interested in cleverness than in the music itself.
CL: Another place I saw your interest in sound was your fixation on the ghazal form. Sometimes for a particular period of writing, one frame can just feel right—for my first book, I obsessed over the villanelle. What was it about the structure of the ghazal that appealed to you and can you talk about some of the twists you made to the form?
MN: I haven’t written much in form over the last twenty years, but when I started writing again after getting sober, I found myself pulled to the ghazal over and over. I wrote many ghazals and ended up putting three in the book. At the time, I’m not sure if I was aware why I was so drawn to them. But I think the form’s repetition really spoke to the experience of addiction: the same drugs again and again, the same excuses, the same story. I was stuck in the same loop. I like how contemporary ghazals are more playful in their repetition of the word, and I wanted to turn that repeating word from a metronome into something new (for example, transforming “toke” to “token”). I wanted to deviate from the form in a meaningful way, and that often happened in the last few lines.
CL: I noticed in your three ghazals that your signature in the final couplet becomes more personal the further we get in the book. In the first ghazal you write, “Please don’t say my name,” which then becomes “Mateo” in the second ghazal, and finally “Papa” in the third poem. That unfolding level of intimacy reminded me of the progressively developing Polaroid of you and your son.
MN: That feels right to me. The first poem is closest to active addiction, the second is much more in the realm of regret. Then the final ghazal is based on a phrase my son said to me about being the last people on earth; it looks beyond time in a certain way. I knew that I wanted the poems to trace a narrative, but I also didn’t want the structure to be too linear, moving from addiction to health. Even as the sections hold a part of my experience, within each section there are poems that move outside of that time period, backwards and forwards. There is so much about memory and regret, longing and wonder. I kind of had to play with the book structure intuitively and allow the book to be lived-in. One of my deepest interests is in transformation and I’m grateful for all the support I’ve had in getting healthy; this book is just one version of what that looks like.
CL: I imagine your interest in transformation led to your new role as a mental health counselor. How do you see your poetry informing your practice?
MN: For me to get truly healthy, I had to be honest. And for me to be most honest, I had to write poems. They got me to an emotional truth and were essential for me to show up in the rest of my life. I really benefited from personal and relationship counseling and from men’s circles focused on intentional, healthy masculinity. My willingness to live with my loneliness helped me to become stronger and more available. I actually never looked into being a counselor previously. I had a conversation with a friend four years ago about him going back to school as a mental health counselor, and suddenly it lit up for me: that makes so much sense! Doing my own inner work makes it possible for me to support others in their greatest struggles. I think that really doubles back onto my love for poetry, that love of listening and reckoning.
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Celeste Lipkes’ first book of poems, Radium Girl, was published through the Wisconsin Poetry Series. Her prose has appeared in magazines such as Electric Lit, the Rumpus, and 32 Poems. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and has taught poetry workshops in academic and clinical settings. She is currently at work on a lyric memoir. She teaches and practices psychiatry in Asheville, North Carolina.