Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in creative writing at NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Utah. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published by Four Way Books. His second collection will be published by Four Way in 2028. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.
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Nicholas Pierce: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins outside the Getty, in the aftermath of another California wildfire. Later, a Cy Twombly painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art conjures images of Rome’s destruction. In an extended sequence in the collection’s final third, the speaker considers Damien Hirst’s controversial displays of animal anatomy. Can you talk about this ekphrastic impulse? What does Decline and Fall have to say about the role of the artist at a time like the present, when we are staring down political and ecological catastrophes on a daily basis? And finally, how do you see your work in relation to the works under consideration in the collection?
Matthew Tuckner: First off, I have to thank you for your terrific questions regarding the book. And it seems fitting to me to begin with a question about ekphrasis, as I increasingly feel that I am (inescapably) an “ekphrastic poet.”
Ekphrasis is the main topic of my reading list for my qualifying exams here at the University of Utah where I am pursuing my PhD, and it seems that every time I sit down to write a poem these days, there is some object (a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, etc.) that is spurring me on. In that sense, the finished poem is always, ultimately, an attempt to immortalize that momentary aesthetic experience, to trap it in a box. I should also say that I have the sneaking suspicion that the fundamental work of any poem is a kind of extended ekphrasis and that all the best poems rely on the sustained attention and observation that ekphrasis provides a useful name or term. But that’s a bit beside the point. When it came to writing Decline and Fall, bringing visual artists like Damien Hirst and Cy Twombly into the fold felt intuitive. These are two artists I’ve had a longstanding fascination with / revulsion to. But more importantly, these are two artists who have found fascinating and controversial methods to figure violence and death. Whether it’s the display of an animal corpse petrified in formaldehyde, or conflagrations of crayon and graphite on canvas, both artists attempt to give form to that which defies description.
While not intending to put myself and my work on the same tier as these artists, I felt that my collection was trying to ask a lot of the same questions. What is the appropriate / ethical way to figure the sick or dying body? How far can description go before it becomes extractive?
And to answer your question regarding the responsibility of the artist in a time of ecological devastation, I think the same questions apply. To paraphrase the great theorist Caroline Levine, how can we write about a sick or “dying” environment that doesn’t move immediately to a false or easy display of grotesque “mourning”? Although my book doesn’t provide any answers to these difficult questions, I turn to artists like Twombly and Hirst to work through them together.
NP: In one of the collection’s more fascinating decisions, each poem shares the same title—which also happens to be the book’s title and the title of a famous (if outdated) work of Roman history. I’m interested to hear about what prompted this decision. How early in the writing process, for example, did you begin to use this title? Were there versions of the book in which the poems were untitled, or in which they were numbered as part of a larger sequence? Do you see this book in a lineage with Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which similarly recycles a single title across its many poems?
MT: Titles are tough, but in my mind, titles are also the first line of a poem. They are the first words that a reader encounters when they look down at your poem on the page, so like most poets I know, I (frustratingly) exert a lot of energy in my writing process selecting titles that associatively speak to all the different thematic nodes I’m trying to balance at any given time in a piece. I also often feel when I finish a poem that I’m never quite through with the associative or creative potential that a good title offers me. Thus, I often find myself working in sequences or series, plumbing the depths of a title until I feel I’m through with it.
With the title The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the canonical work itself that I was referencing had very little to do with the decision (I still haven’t even read the thing in its entirety—sorry, Edward Gibbon!). Rather, I was interested in the title on a semantic level. Where is the line between “decline” and “fall,” and how could one portray those distinct processes? I was also interested in the permission the title gave to vacillate between different scales. The personal and the political. The individual and the national. Thus, the way the title operates in the book (how the reader is forced to confront it at the beginning of every poem) never changed. I was fascinated by the repetition of it, the idea of making the reader confront these entropic cycles of fortification and collapse, again and again.
As to your question about Terrance, I wasn’t actively thinking about American Sonnets when I wrote this book, but during my time at NYU, Terrance was actively involved in helping me shape the project so I’m sure he must’ve had the same thought as you . . . Regardless, when I was writing and revising this book, there did seem to be a slew of series-oriented collections in the air: Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss, The Galleons by Rick Barot, etc. But the books / projects I was thinking most about when devising the structure of the collection were John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Shakespeare’s sonnets, believe it or not. Both sequences make use of somewhat stable rhetorical situations that develop and degrade as the sequences progress. Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular, considering their ambivalent obsession with the capacity for a poem to “preserve” its subject, were such a deeply important wellspring for me in working on this collection.
NP: At its heart, Decline and Fall is about the death of a close friend, but in a brilliant stroke, it places that loss within the context of a diseased and declining empire. In other words, a personal tragedy prefigures a national (or global) one. As readers, we feel the speaker’s grief profoundly—it is both ours and not ours; it is the feeling of being alive in America today. As anyone who has written about grief can attest, it is a challenging subject; for grief is, in some sense, the end of language, of reason. How, then, did you approach writing about and through your grief? Were there any models that helped you find language for the experience? Did you receive any useful advice from teachers or peers?
MT: Thank you for this question, as it gives me some vital language to hold onto as I try to make sense of what I accomplished in writing this book. Truthfully, I only began writing these poems to gain some clarity on my best friend’s illness, and his eventual passing. They originated for the very private purpose of trying to encapsulate my experience in language, in an almost diaristic fashion. More than half of these poems were written in a single year, and sometimes it simply felt as if the poems were helping me keep a grasp on time as it sifted through my fingers like so much sand. At some point in that process, the decision to address the poems to a “you” felt like a necessity. It was rather intuitive. It was the only rhetorical figure I could think of that would be intimate enough.
I was (and am still) quite worried about this use of apostrophe. As the great lyric theorist Jonathan Culler writes, apostrophe is lyric poetry’s most “embarrassing” rhetorical feature because it takes “absent, dead, or inanimate entities” and makes them “present, vital, and humanlike.” As opposed to turning away from that embarrassment, from the inherent reanimation of the apostrophic address, I began writing into it, hoping that the “you” would grow capacious enough to contain whatever or whomever the reader projected onto it, and that the grief I was expressing in the poems could stand in for a larger national or communal grief, because that’s what I experience when I read Tennyson, Mary Jo Bang, or any of my favorite elegists. The personal grief they are encapsulating in their poems is empathic enough to broach the historical, the societal, the ecological.
To answer your question about advice from peers and teachers, I found that grief is a jungle one must hack their way through on their own, so I kept these poems close to my chest until I felt a certain amount of distance from the events they were depicting. But once I began sharing the poems, I received a huge amount of encouragement and assistance from my MFA thesis advisor Catherine Barnett and the great Terrance Hayes who said (and I will never forget this) that I should focus on honoring the ecstatic aspect of grief through my poems, the garment-rending aspect. This unlocked a kind of feral energy in me that a lot of the poems in the final iteration of the book seem to embody.
NP: A vein of absurdist humor runs throughout Decline and Fall. A father and son converse “over a dinner of boiled flamingo.” The speaker’s senile grandfather begs a surveillance robot “for his mind back.” A cancer patient is sent home with his removed tumors “as souvenirs in little pink vials / of formaldehyde.” How do you see humor operating within the collection? Was it important to you that the book struck a balance between the comedic and the tragic? Are there any particularly funny poets from whom you took inspiration?
MT: I love this question because I am still rather shocked that anybody finds this book funny, despite this being a feature of the book that a lot of people have mentioned as essential to their enjoyment of it. In fact, when I was working on the book, I often expressed my concern to Catherine that the book lacked any kind of levity, a concern that she tried very hard to dissuade me from feeling, stressing the book’s humorous qualities. All that to say, the lines that you point to strike me as “funny” in the sense that they contain surprise, disjunction, or defamiliarization, all things that I aim for when crafting an image, a sentence, a poem. Secondly, so much of what the book concerns itself with—ecological devastation, illness, loss—has an inherent existential absurdity to it. It is absolutely absurd, the damage we are doing to this planet. It is absolutely absurd that we must lose the people we love. Empire itself is an absurd, increasingly damaging notion. By trying to speak to these experiences from a place of personal truth, I think I just brought out the innate absurdity, the innate silliness of it all. As Beethoven is rumored to have said from his deathbed, “applaud, my friends, the comedy is over!”
As for influences, I think a lot of the poets I love are funny—Natalie Shapero, Timothy Donnelly, John Ashbery, Mary Ruefle, etc.—but then again, when I think of what I truly love in the work of these poets, it is their capacity to surprise me again and again, surprising me to the point where all I can do is chuckle.
NP: In the collection’s final section, the subject of figurative language—and of representation more broadly—takes center stage. About his recently deceased friend, the speaker claims, “I can / remake you into anything here” and follows suit, comparing him to, among other things, “an itchy soul,” “a conch shell,” and “a sack of yesterdays.” In the next stanzas, “the bald dome of a nuclear reactor” becomes “a radiated head robbed of its hair.” These are surprising connections, but perhaps surprise is the point; after all, the alternative, cliché, would only take us further from the truth of the matter. Why was poetry, I wonder, the right vehicle to consider the limits of language?
MT: It’s interesting that you ask this question because prior to working on Decline and Fall, I was trying to complete a now-abandoned collection titled Figurative Language, another sequence that used a revolving title format (“Grief, with Figurative Language,” “Ghosts, with Figurative Language,” etc.) that was, in some way, taking aim at the dogmatic relationship with metaphor that one encounters in the contemporary poetry world. I have always found figurative language to be rather strange. The very concept of it is predicated on evasion, turning away from the thing you are looking at in the paradoxical hope that it will help you describe the thing more successfully.
Yet, metaphor is also the stuff poetry is made of. It is what gives certain poets their delusion of grandeur. I can’t think of any definition of the lyric disposition that is more accurate than Dickinson’s claim that “the brain—is wider than the Sky.” In poems, such as the final poem in the book that you quote from, I am trying to think through this potential latency in figurative language. Metaphor allows us to reanimate the dead, to describe anything as anything else. But what are the ethics of this? Especially when writing about anthropogenic ecological devastation, or our dead, what are the ramifications of the evasion that metaphor represents? My second collection, Cloud Chamber (forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2028), faces these questions head-on, but in writing Decline and Fall these ethical questions surrounding poetry and language kept arising, so I decided to use the genre (the only tool I know how to use in these moments of moral quandary) to interrogate the genre itself.
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