Contemporary Authors

• Mezzanines Alice James Books (Farmington, ME), 2013
• Contradictions in the Design: Poems Alice James Books (Farmington, ME), 2016

1. Contradictions in the design : poems LCCN 2016011686 Type of material Book Personal name Olzmann, Matthew, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Contradictions in the design : poems / Matthew Olzmann. Published/Produced Farmington, Maine : Alice James Books, [2016] Description 83 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781938584275 (softcover : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS3615.L96 A6 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Mezzanines LCCN 2012046705 Type of material Book Personal name Olzmann, Matthew. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Mezzanines / Matthew Olzmann. Published/Produced Farmington, Maine : Alice James Books, [2013] ©2013 Description 58 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781882295982 (softcover) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1307/2012046705-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1307/2012046705-d.html Shelf Location FLS2013 000127 CALL NUMBER PS3615.L96 M49 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• best american poetry - http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/05/apia-series-matthew-olzmann-poem-and-interview-by-sally-wen-mao.html

  May 24, 2014
  APIA Series: Matthew Olzmann Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

  Our next featured poet is Matthew Olzmann!

  Olzmann photo 2 for BAP interview
  Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, received the 2011 Kundiman Prize and was published by Alice James Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. Currently, he is the coeditor of The Collagist, and a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College. (matthewolzmann.com)

  I am enthralled by the poems of Matthew Olzmann. They are often funny, poignant, lyrical, astute—and when he reads them, they come alive like little beasts leaping from the page. In the following poem, Olzmann asks us to consider the remains of such a beast—the skull of a dinosaur—as a metaphor for our navigation of the fallacies our hopes create. “I know what it means/to watch your good fortune change its mind”, he writes, as he switches dexterously from the narrative of the chagrined archaeologist to the speaker’s own memory. And disappointment, the shell-shocked stillness of that realization that what was true minutes ago is actually false, is something we can all empathize with—we find ourselves dreading the supermodel’s discovery, the moment “when the light ruin[s] everything.” Sometimes what we dream is that much brighter at the moment we realize that it won’t come true—the “new world” that we craved, “its beaches of untouched skin”, “moons that smelled of a hundred flowers”, or “I-Could-Live-Here-Forever Land and Holy-Shit-Was-I-Wrong-Land”. Olzmann mixes pure sincerity with joyous language, as well as humor; I laughed at the brilliant lines “What kind of animal is this?/ I call it: The Motherfuckerasaurus.” Immediately preceding these lines, there is a different emotional tenor, one of painful longing. These exhilarating shifts in tone sets the wonderfully varied emotional landscape of Olzmann’s poem: this landscape does seem like a “new world”, one that, despite the poem’s sentiment, fulfills our many hopes as readers.

  The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur

  does not belong to the dinosaur skeleton

  to which it has been attached.

  A man thought he made an amazing

  discovery. Now, it’s a towering mistake,

  one for which he’ll likely lose his job,

  but only after taking this skyscraper

  of bones—with its eye-sockets

  like windows to hell—apart.

  Femur by mandible, I know what it means

  to watch your good fortune change its mind.

  Like that time in college, when my friend’s

  supermodel cousin invited us to a party

  and accidentally kissed me in the dark.

  She thought I was someone else—I have

  no idea who—but the gist of the story

  can be seen in her freaking out

  when the light ruined everything.

  For a moment, I thought I discovered

  a new world. And what a world it was—

  with its beaches of untouched skin,

  and its moons that smelled of a hundred flowers.

  I named that land I-Could-Live-Here-

  Forever Land and Holy-Shit-Was-I-Wrong Land.

  Einstein says imagination is more important

  than knowledge. Certainly, it’s kinder.

  I imagine the man who wired these

  dinosaur bones must have imagined

  his vision was real, must have pictured

  it alive. Covered in flesh, the imagined life

  can also be terrifying—able to cleave you

  open with the swipe of a claw

  or devour you in seconds.

  But as it is now, having never existed

  after tricking you into believing,

  it eats at you more slowly, lets you feel

  every new rip in your gut, makes you beg:

  What kind of animal is this?

  I call it: The Motherfuckerasaurus.

  And, technically, that’s not the right name,

  but neither is the word stamped here now—

  in block letters, on a bronze plaque,

  screwed to the floor.

  First published in Gulf Coast

  Interview:

  Who are you? What are you all about?

  I like how Ocean Vuong answered this same question a couple days ago, saying, "Some days I feel like a human. Some days I feel more like a sound." I like the flexibility of that answer, allowing for an identity in flux. For me too, it changes rapidly, from moment to moment. Right now, there's a baseball game on the radio. I'm all about—this October—the Detroit Tigers winning the 2014 World Series. If this fails to happen, I'll be all about them winning it in 2015. I'm easily distracted, and what I'm "all about" is constantly in motion. I'm all about the newborn lambs and piglets on the farm of the college where I teach. I'm all about the mountains that surround this place. In the autumn, when the leaves begin to fall, you can see houses behind the tree line that you didn't know were there.

  Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

  I just finished what I hope will be my second book, and I'm working on poems that might become another project. I usually don't think in terms of "projects" or even "books" while I'm writing. I write poems independently of each other with no thought as to how they might be connected. Even if I'm consciously writing poems that are obviously linked to each other, the series as a whole usually fizzles out after 3-10 poems and I go back to writing individual poems, one at a time, over and over. Much later, I go back, sort through them and see how they relate to one another. So the "genesis" is always in the steady accumulation of individual poems. The "transformation" comes from sifting through the piles, slowly becoming aware of correspondences in the work, and then trying to enhance, undermine, or complicate those correspondences.

  That said, I feel like—maybe for the first time—I'm working on a series of poems that feel intrinsically connected to each other. It's a sequence of letters, mostly, and it's gone on long enough that I think it's more than just a quick "series" of poems. We'll see.

  Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

  Something that I didn't expect to invigorate my writing practice that ended up impacting it in a big way (especially the poems I'm currently working on) was improv theater. A couple of years ago, for fun, I took some classes at GoComedy—a comedy club located just outside of Detroit, in Ferndale, Michigan. The performers at that theater were some of the most talented artists I'd ever met.

  Improvisation, I thought, was something that came from the opposite impulse that most of my writing comes from. As with many writers, I like to think about what I'm going to say before I say it. Then I like to write it down. Then delete it. Then write it again. Then look up synonyms for some haphazard word. Then maybe set it aside for a while, come back later, and revise. That's not how it works in improv. You're on a stage and you have to say something right now.

  Also, in the revision of poetry, much of the work often comes down to the necessary excising of material that's not working. In improv, you can't reject, remove or delete anything. You have to say "Yes" to everything and build from that. If something doesn't work, you can't just remove it; you have to justify it, build from it, and somehow make it fit.

  These were challenging concepts for me, but they were also revelations and taught me new ways of thinking about the creative process. And while I still prefer to think something out and revise it, I learned to value speed, spontaneity, wildness and escalation in the creative process—in the initial drafting—much more than I had previously.

  Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

  Influence is such an enormous subject, and it's impossible to name everything and everyone that shapes a person as a writer. Everything and everyone is a potential influence. It's hard to go through the world and not be stunned and awestruck all the time. In terms of writers, Robert Hayden, Larry Levis, and Wisława Szymborska are poets that I've been turning to with increasing frequency in recent months.

  Steve Orlen, Stephen Dobyns, Heather McHugh, Brooks Haxton, and Martha Rhodes were teachers of mine, and all of them had a profound and lasting impact on the way I write.

  People like Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi and the community they've created at Kundiman have shaped—maybe more than anyone—my ideas regarding literary citizenship, and the type of person I hope to be as I move through the writing world.

  "Lineage" is an interesting concept. I've been fortunate to have a number of wonderful teachers and mentors in an MFA Program, Kundiman, and writing conferences such as Bread Loaf and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Each of them has shaped and continues to shape the writer I am and the writer I'm trying to become. If we were to "map" it out as a family tree, it would probably look like a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scenario where everything is threaded through everything else. For example, I did my MFA at Warren Wilson. A couple of my teachers went to Iowa. There, they met people like Donald Justice, who studied with folks like Berryman and Lowell. Lowell studied with John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon College, Ransom started the Kenyon Review and, seventy-something years later, David Baker (Kenyon Review's current poetry editor) offered me a fellowship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. I'm sure we could keep going backwards and forwards until we connect each of us to Whitman to Donne to Horace. Horace used to teach in the MFA program at Syracuse, etc.

  I find myself constantly inspired by writers who are emerging right now. Cathy Linh Che, Jamaal May, Tarfia Faizullah, Michael Mlekoday, and Brynn Saito have all put out books of poems in the past year that are stunning.

  What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

  The next poem is always the thing I'm trying to say but haven't said yet. Even if it's something I've already said, I'm trying to say it better. I hope the future holds a successful variation of that poem many times over.

  Posted by Sally Wen Mao on May 24, 2014 at 08:00 AM

• panhandler magazine - https://panhandlermagazine.com/interviews/matthew-olzmann/

  Matthew Olzmann

  Olzmann AuthorphotoMatthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Prize. His second book, Contradictions in the Design, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November, 2016. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Necessary Fiction, Southern Review and elsewhere. He was the 2015-16 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina, and currently teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
  March 3, 2016

  Katherine Masters: How do you begin a poem? Is it a matter of inspiration, is it something you set out to do with a chosen theme, or is it both?

  Matthew Olzmann: It’s very rarely a matter of inspiration. I try to write a little every day, and that quickly wipes out your reservoir of backup ideas. Often I sit down, unsure what I’m going to write. I like writing just for the process of writing. I like the way it makes me slow down and think something through. Sometimes it’s just writing out thoughts, writing a scene, writing a sentence, and then if something sparks or seems promising when I return to it, then that’s when the real work often begins: revising and developing the idea. I think C. Dale Young once said that drafting a poem is like an artist gathering materials, but revising a poem is an artist shaping the materials. So the poem truly begins in revision, when I have something that I want to try to expand and develop.

  Joe Angeletti: In that process, how often do you stay close to the original form or idea that you thought of? Or are they sometimes just complete revisions?

  MO: In revision, one of two things usually happens. I can tinker at a poem, just making small changes—a word here or there, line ending, inverting the order of two different clauses—or a complete reimagining of the entire poem. I might like the first stanza, but I not anything else that follows, so I restart using that stanza. Or there might have been an idea that I was trying to convey, but I’m not excited about any of the ways I actually said it. Small adjustments, or a massive overhaul. It seems to vary between those two extremes.

  KM: You write with a wide variety of form, and I’m curious if you choose each form before you start a poem or if form comes to you in the processes of writing and revision.

  MO: If I’m writing a received form like a sonnet or a villanelle, those never happen by accident, so you have to just sit down and say, “I’m going to write a villanelle or a sonnet,” but with free verse, the form can sometimes come more organically, and the shaping starts to happen later in the drafting process. But I think that all poems, in some way, have some sort of formal structure, whether it’s rhetorical, tonal, etc. I don’t know what a formless poem would look like.

  JA: Are those rhetorical or tonal structures that influence your choice in line breaks? They’re very thoughtful, so are they determined by the word you want to end with? The word you want the next line to begin with? The sound of the word?

  MO: A villanelle has its own particular demands with two lines repeating, and in writing those, I will initially fluctuate between a few possibilities until a couple of them seem to really stick or to really capture my interest. If the poem is free verse, the shape of the line might emerge over time, through a process of trial and error where you’re discovering the particular possibilities that various line endings might offer.

  KM: Your poems have many wonderful endings that kind of nudge the reader toward a message without wrapping up the moral in a bow. For example, in “Bigfoot and the Placebo Effect,” the final lines suggest broad implications without being too explicit. How do you know when to stop?

  MO: That’s a question that I often ask myself, because I frequently go on too long, and then in revision I look back and realize that I’ve been repeating myself for the last three stanzas in some way or another. Closure is a complicated subject, because generally when you think about closure, you’re talking about how the poem’s final moments expand or bring together or intensify or complicate various thematic or narrative or tonal or emotional threads that have already been introduced. What I’m generally interested in or drawn to as a reader in poem endings are associative moments that bring the reader in. Moments where you as the reader are starting to make connections on your own, where part of the poem happens inside your head, and you’re making the final leap with the author or with the speaker of the poem. As a reader, I’m interested less in the poems that are telling you about an experience and more in poems that are trying to create an experience and involve you in it. So as a reader, that’s what I’m drawn to in a poem’s closing moments, and as a writer I hope to move toward that in my own poems.

  JA: What feelings in the reader do you consider most when you’re crafting the themes that will make those associative moments? For example, in Mezzanines, there seems to be a theme of materiality and significance changing with the scale of perception. How do you anticipate your readers’ perceptions of those themes?

  MO: It’s hard to even guess. I think that the biggest challenge for a writer is to be able to anticipate what the reader is feeling, to look at your own work through a stranger’s eyes and imagine what they’ll experience when reading it. Are they going to be surprised? Are they going to be confused? You’re constantly trying to walk a very fine line between things being spelled out too much and the poem becoming boring and predictable or the opposite: being too elliptical and the poem becoming confusing. You’re always having to guess how the reader is going to be responding. I think the thing you strive for most as a writer is tension or interest. You just want the reader to want to make it from one line to the next and to feel like they’re not necessarily laboring or confused or left behind or fading out. So engagement is something you’re always pushing toward as a writer.

  JA: When you hear readers respond to or at least propose themes they see running throughout your book that you didn’t really have in mind when you wrote the poems, what kind of effect does that have on your writing process? Or is it just feedback that you enjoy listening to?

  MO: I’m always interested in how the reader experiences something that I wrote. When making this book, a lot of the poems were written independently of each other, one at a time, without not necessarily having each other in mind in terms of how they connect thematically or emotionally or in terms of a narrative. Overtime, you become aware of the relationships between your poems, especially when organizing a manuscript. But different readers will notice different attributes, and it’s always interesting when you’re allowed to see your work from someone else’s perspective.

  KM: How long did it take you to write Mezzanines?

  MO: I think the oldest poem in that book was written in 2006, and the newest poem in the book was written in 2012. So there is a range of about six years there, but the bulk of the poems were written between 2008 and 2010. I started shaping it into a manuscript in 2010 and sending it out into the world, and then a year later I returned to it and revised it, added some new poems and did it again, sending it out. Six years from the oldest poem to the final version of the manuscript, but two years for the majority of the poems to be written.

  KM: When you say some of these poems were written in 2006, do you have a sort of expiration date? Poems that you can’t go back to? Or can you work on a poem for ten years?

  MO: You can work on a poem for as long as you have patience to work on it, but I don’t have a set expiration date other than a loss of interest. I think that would determine when the poem is no longer salvageable. If I no longer care about it, then I’m moving on. And it may not even be a conscious thing. I may just slowly forget about something I wrote eight years ago because I worked on it, and it didn’t work; I set it aside, then worked on it again, and it didn’t work again, and slowly I might become immersed in other writing projects and, eventually, I might lose track of it. If I was given the opportunity, I would love to revise some poems that were still in this book, but at some point you want to focus on your current work and let something be its own thing.

  JA: In this collection, and some of your other poetry, but specifically here, titles tend to function in many different capacities, either as an introduction, label, or sometimes the first line of the poem. What significance do titles have for you, in poetry in general, and in your own poetry?

  MO: Titles are the thing we identify the poem by. They’re the name. That’s one primary function, to distinguish one thing from the next. If you went to a movie theater and every movie was just titled “movie” or “untitled” it would be very difficult to choose. But beyond that, titles can introduce a particular subject. They can provide some larger context or offer some sort of expository argument or thought or stream of information that you don’t want to have to burden yourself with once you get into the poem, when you want the reader to just hit the ground running. They can be used for misdirection, to create a set of expectations that the poem will then be working to intensify or overthrow. There are as many strategies for titles as there are poems.

  JA: Many of your poems, like “Breathing Water” or “Crocodiles,” are shaped by elements of science or natural facts that fit very well into the metaphors you’re creating. What is your process for taking those facts, whether scientific or just data, and making figures out of them?

  MO: Sometimes it is the fact itself that interests me and I start asking questions about it. What would this fact mean in a larger context? For the poem that you’re referencing about the crocodiles, I saw a news story that said scientists were trying to tape magnets to the heads of crocodiles as a way of disrupting the way they use Earth’s magnetic fields to navigate, so they wouldn’t keep coming back to the same backyards. As a writer, you start asking questions. Isn’t that kind of sad that they have this ability to do this, and they’re trying to make it home and they’re walking across roads and runways to return? And then the metaphor starts to become apparent as you think it through, as you ask questions about it. A number of the other poems in the book began like that—with sort of newspaper-ish headlines, “NASA Video Transmission Picked up by a Baby Monitor.” That also was something I saw on a news story, and it had a sort of headline-esque feel to it. I’d written a lot of those poems but the challenge would always be to make a poem that was as interesting as the headline. Often the answer for me was no. So, many of those poems didn’t end up here. There has to be an element of discovery.

  KM: When you’re building a collection of poems, and the themes of those poems are so complexly layered, what is your process for selecting and ordering the pieces?

  MO: Mezzanines is a collection of poems that didn’t necessarily have one common binding element. There’s not a recurring character or historical event or story that the poems are trying to tell. A lot of the poems, in general, were written completely independently of each other without me thinking, “How does this poem speak to other poems that I’ve written?” I rarely write poems as a sequence or series, so the process of trying to determine how they fit together (or don’t) when you haven’t thought about it can be challenging. There were a lot of poems that didn’t seem to fit. So I began by selecting which poems were my favorite at the moment and then choosing other poems I had that I thought might complement or contrast with some of them in an interesting manner. It was a lot of putting poems in different orders and then discarding poems and putting new ones in and then moving them around again. The order of the poems kept shifting, and even after it was accepted for publication, we went through a couple rounds of edits right up until it was published. I think we added five poems to the manuscript after it was accepted, discarded a few, and changed the book title. Ultimately, as a reader, I’m always sort of in awe of the poets who have a single vision that guides an entire collection, and I’m really interested in those types of books, but I haven’t written one yet.

  JA: Are there any poets whose writing on a single subject in that way particularly stands out to you?

  MO: There are many poets I admire. The list is somewhat infinite. But for a book that has a single subject that binds the whole collection together, I was just rereading Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly, which talks about Lead Belly’s life and the world he lived in, and all the poems are about that one title character. My wife, Vievee Francis, is a poet who can return to a single subject and mine it for material in a way that I’m not able to do. If she wrote about a glass of water, there’d be a poem about the person who made the glass, a poem about the river where the water came from, a poem about human thirst in general, and suddenly she’d have ten poems on that one subject. It’s a way of seeing the world that I really admire.

  KM: Who would you consider to be your influences?

  MO: I think every book I read probably influences me in some way, but some of the poets I’ve recently been returning to are poets like Wislawa Szymborska, Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, some of my teachers such as Steve Orlen, Stephen Dobyns, Heather McHugh, Martha Rhodes, Brooks Haxton—they’re poets who taught me, both as my teachers and through their writing. Also, a lot of contemporary poets like Jamaal May, Tarfia Faizullah, Cathy Linh Che, Patrick Rosal, and Jennifer Chang. And, of course, Vievee. The list is kind of endless. I think most writers are always in conversation with the writing of the world around them.

  JA: Thinking of that conversation that writers are having about the world, are there any trends that you’re seeing right now that are exciting to you, or any stand-out media trends that are paving the way for something?

  MO: I don’t know about trends. I just think there’s a lot of interesting work being generated right now and there’s plenty of room for all sorts of variations in style and sensibilities. There are so many MFA programs and writing conferences, and so many people who have devoted their lives to studying their craft. People are trying new things every day. There are videos online of people performing their poems that have a million viewers, festivals with thousands of people in attendance, poems in online magazines that are suddenly shared over and over again. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by a “trend,” but poetry certainly seems to be something that increasing numbers of people have access to; it’s becoming more and more available and shareable.

• daily tarheel - http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2016/02/qa-with-kenan-visiting-writer-matthew-olzmann

  Q&A with Kenan Visiting Writer, Matthew Olzmann
  Rashaan Ayesh | Published 02/03/16 7:43pm

  Each year, the creative writing program in the UNC Department of English & Comparative Literature selects someone to be the Kenan Visiting Writer. For the 2015-16 year, the department chose writer Matthew Olzmann. Olzmann will read this afternoon at New West to students, faculty and graduates. Staff writer Rashaan Ayesh spoke to him about his writing, his inspirations and his time at UNC so far.

  The Daily Tar Heel: What can you tell me about Kenan Visiting Writers?

  Matthew Olzmann: So the Kenan Visiting Writer, the position I have, is a one-year visiting position where you come in here and you teach one class per semester. And I think the goal is they hope you will write your next book here, and they give you a lot of time to write. There is not a lot beyond teaching and writing that is expected of the Kenan Writer to do beyond a public reading, which I’m doing tomorrow. Mostly a poetry reading.
  GO TO HIS TALK

  Time: Today, 3:30 p.m.

  Location: New West, Dialectic Chamber

  More info: http://bit.ly/1X4l3xM

  DTH: What has your experience, so far, at UNC been like?
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  MO: It’s been great. I’ve got great colleagues. People in the English department and writing program — they are all really smart and generous with their time. Very supportive of each other. The students are engaged and fun to talk to. As a professor you can’t really ask for more than that.

  DTH: How did you start writing?

  MO: I started writing probably late in high school, just something sort of like a journal but trying to shape things more creative and trying to shape something more into a piece of art. Not always just this random spilling of anything that you might put in a diary. I think I started that approach because in the moment when I am talking to someone, such as like right now, I often don’t have the right words.

  But then later, I think of things I wish I had said or could’ve said better. So I just started writing things down. Maybe they resembled unmailed letters, things you wish you said to someone but didn’t, period. Or something you said to someone you could’ve said better. Also, I started writing poetry and stories and essays.

  DTH: Tell me about your first published poem.

  MO: I had maybe three things accepted at almost the same time, so the first letter of acceptance I got was maybe Main Street Rag, which is actually out of North Carolina, and I’m from Michigan. And I saw some poems in it that I liked, so I sent to them, but I also had poems accepted by the Atlanta Review and the Rattle around the same time. I think the Atlanta Review was the first one to publish one of my poems. It might not have been the first letter of acceptance I got, but the first one I actually saw in an actual magazine, and it was a poem called “Even Now, My Father Still Resembles Beowulf,” and it was in the Atlanta Review. It was when I was an undergrad in college. It was the second time. I stopped going to college and went back in like six years so I was in my mid to late 20s.

  DTH: What is your writing process like?

  MO: I’m usually revising five or six things at a time and I shuffle between them. As for generating new work, I try to write a little bit every day and maybe at the end of the month, I’ll look back at what I’ve written over the month and see what I am still interested in. So part of the process is knowing what to discard and pursue in revision, so it involves writing a lot of stuff with the knowledge that I might not return to it. Then going back and picking a handful of them and reversing them constantly.

  DTH: Where do you draw some of your inspiration from?

  MO: I try not to rely too much on inspiration. I sit down and I write and I might not have any idea of what I’m going to write. I just like that process of, just for itself. Some of my ideas are things around me in the world that make me stop, make me ask a question and make me say, "What if?" A lot of my poems will begin with a question.

  DTH: What advice would you give to young poets?

  MO: I think the most important thing for anyone who wants to be a writer is to read a lot. And probably for several reasons, the more poems you read, the more approaches you become exposed to. The more strategies for developing a poem you will witness. Training yourself to read as a writer. To look at a poem and say and see what it is about that particular poem of what is it that produces those effects and how can you apply it to your own writing.

• alice james books - http://alicejamesbooks.org/2016/one-on-one-with-matthew-olzmann/

  One on One with Matthew Olzmann

  AJB: Death is a recurring theme throughout your collection and is also a part of the cycle of life. That in itself could be considered a contradiction. Can you describe the tension between life and death?

  MO: Describe the tension life and death! You’re giving me way too much credit if you think I can answer this question! However, these types of unanswerable questions are often the forces that draw us to poetry in the first place. As a reader, I first became interested in poems when I began to see them as a way to understand some complicated issues in the world around me. A poem takes some ephemeral thing, some abstract notion or elusive feeling, and makes it tangible. An elegy, for example, doesn’t just publicize grief; it doesn’t just say “I’m sad.” It gives us a device that allows us to comprehend that concept—and in some ways actually experience it—from the speaker’s perspective. There are things that we don’t have words for, and the poem creates a metaphor that allows us to access and process and explore those spaces. It doesn’t necessarily answer any particular question, rather it allows us to experience the mystery on its own terms.

  AJB: There are many poems in this collection that are inspired by art: “Replica of the Thinker”, “The Raising of Lazarus”, as well as several poems that are titled, “In the Gallery of. . .” Would you say ekphrastic poetry is a lost art in this digital age, if so, how?

  MO: I think ekphrastic poetry is thriving today. Poets have always placed their work in conversation with artists in working in different mediums, and I don’t think this digital age has done a lot to change that. It might change the way we consume, purchase and read poetry—it might make it more accessible—but poets are still writing about the worlds they live in, and that sometimes includes the world of art. A couple recent books that stand out to me are A. Van Jordan’s The Cineaste, which moves through the world of film, and Jessica Jacob’s wonderful collection Pelvis with Distance, which looks into the life and art of Georgia O’Keefe.

  In my own writing, I find it difficult to write about specific works of art. The challenge is to create something that goes beyond the original in some significant way, something that adds to it, or uses the original work create something entirely new. For me, that often comes in the form of metaphor. The work of art is placed next to the life of the speaker, and together those two elements combine to create a type of figurative resonance. However, when I encounter a piece of art that moves me, I usually just want to say, “Hey everybody, look at this! Isn’t this amazing?” But that impulse rarely produces good poems. For this reason, there are far more ekphrastic poems that were left out of this manuscript than included. And while there are a number of “true” ekphrastic poems in the book (such as those you mentioned), I think there are probably even more “fictional” ekphrastic poems—poems (such as most of the gallery poems) that are responding to museums that don’t actually exist. For those, I was thinking less about how museums display art, and more about how about how they present ideas and frame specific aspects of history.

  AJB: The collection is titled after your poem “Contradiction in the Designs”. It speaks in contradictions and the backward nature of inventors, writers, artists, and points out the irony with each of them. In your own experiences as a writer, what feels most contradictory to you?

  MO: One thing that feels contradictory about writing is how it gets more difficult over time. You would think that as you read and write more poems, your ability as a writer would steadily grow and—gradually—you’d become increasingly satisfied with the poems you produce. But that’s not exactly how it works. You might technically be improving. Your poems today might be objectively superior to the ones you wrote last year. But you never feel totally satisfied because your awareness of what is possible in a poem keeps expanding. As your knowledge broadens, so does your ambition. You can envision even better poems. A basketball player might shoot 1000 free throws every day. With practice, they can see the results of their work and eventually achieve a tangible goal. For the writer, you can shoot a 1000 free throws every day, but each time you move toward your ultimate goal, the ball gets heavier, the free throw line moves back several feet, and the hoop shrinks by an inch or two.

  AJB: This is your second collection with Alice James. What was the writing process like from Mezzanines to Contradictions in the Design and drafts in between?

  MO: The writing process between the two books was fairly similar. In general, I write poems one at a time without thinking a lot about how they’re connected to each other. Initially, each poem is its own entity; it exists by itself and is not as part of a larger body of poems. While I might be working on five or six poems at once—all in various stages of revision—it still feels like I’m working on very separate, individual projects. Much later, only after a substantial number of poems have been drafted, I might start to realize some relationships between them (similar thematic concerns, conceits, recurring images) and decide to heighten, complicate, or abandon those elements. I might begin to write toward some of those resonances or look to make their correspondences more pronounced. But early on, it’s always one poem at a time with the hope that some of them will eventually belong in a collection together.

  It’s different with the new manuscript I’m working on. For the past three or four years, I’ve been writing a long series of epistolary poems. While the subject matter might be disparate, the poems all have a formal element that binds them. Being conscious of this as I write—having this acute awareness of how the poem I’m currently working is connected in some way to previous poems—is a new experience for me. In many ways it’s exciting because I have a specific direction, a path to follow; I have a goal to write something that will fit into particular frame. On the other hand, there are new challenges: trying to create variation among poems that all have a similar approach, or trying find a way to connect poems that are tonally incongruent but placed together because of a predetermined scheme.

  AJB: In many of the poems within Contradictions,it’s as if the speaker within the poems is experiencing a stream of consciousness—as if the reader is inside the speaker’s mind and privy to personal thoughts. If we were to tap into your mind, what would be the first thing we’d find?

  MO: It’s probably not too different from what you find in the poems. While the persona that speaks in my poems and the persona that I have to live with/as on a daily basis are not identical, there is some overlap. Odd facts, digressions, distractions, the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated anecdotes. Similar political concerns. A similar worldview. Lines of poems. Similar doubts and anxieties. While a poem’s persona might be a “fictional” offering—a shaped and crafted entity—there’s always some trace elements of the actual poet in there.

• american literary review - http://www.americanliteraryreview.com/reviews--interviews/an-interview-with-matthew-olzmann

  An Interview with Matthew Olzmann

  8/31/2012

  Picture
  Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on winning the Kundiman Poetry Prize for your book, Mezzanines, which will be published by Alice James Books in April 2013. I’ve been admiring how the book, and each poem in it, carries a very palpable existential weight, but usually with a light touch. The voice can be very funny, often conversational, and it never takes itself too seriously. It’s a very likeable voice, and I don’t think that’s so common in contemporary American poetry. And so I’ll begin by asking how important it is to you – as both a reader and writer – to feel that the voice on the page is a likeable, regular person, someone you might get some beers with, maybe talk some hockey, maybe some astronomy?

  Matthew Olzmann: Thanks, Justin. As a reader of poems, I’m actually drawn to a number of types of voices, and those voices don’t necessarily have to sound like or represent likeable people. They can do that—and that’s certainly appealing to me—but they can also be confrontational, cynical, or even evil. They don’t have to be regular people either. In fact, sometimes I turn to poems as a way of leaving the regular behind. In those instances, I might prefer to hear the voice of God in a poem, or the voice of a dinosaur, rather than my next-door neighbor. So instead of saying that it’s important for the voice on the page to be a likeable, regular person, I’d like to say that it’s important for the voice on the page simply to be considerate of the reader. And all I mean by that is that the poet is using the voice of the speaker—regardless of the speaker’s particular persona or tone—to make some kind of connection with the reader.

  JB: Your poems thrive in part on a speaker’s eye that watches a world transform, and the watching—as voiced through poetry—becomes a creative act. In your poem “Revisions,” the transformation seems necessary for survival; anguish is turned into beauty. A tumor becomes a “cream-colored trumpet lily,” “broken dinner plates, pieces of pearl./ The ringing phone at midnight, the voice of a lark/ building a nest by your window.” I’m building up to a big question here: Can art save us? Gilbert Sorrentino would say no. Gregory Orr would say yes. I’m on the fence, and I’m wondering what you have to say.

  MO: Can art save us? It depends on the word “us.” If I’m talking about myself, then my answer would be an emphatic “I hope so.” Certainly, it’s given me a better life than I would have had otherwise. But if we’re talking about individual artists in general, then my answer is probably not. It’s impossible to ignore the massive amount of artists who are not “saved” by art, who are marginalized, or feel alienated and are living (or already lived) quick, tragic lives. Maybe art enhances our lives, but I’ve known too many artists to think of “salvation” as a simple achievement.

  However, if the “us” in that question is society as a whole, then the answer is more complicated. Graham Hough’s book, An Essay on Criticism, has a passage that I keep returning to. He says:

  The moral experience of the individual is confined by his personal circumstances, his time, his nationality, his class. He can extend it, in a theoretical and abstract fashion, by a number of studies—history, anthropology, philosophy. But through literature he can in some degree actually experience, by imaginative identification, other modes of being.

  I’m fascinated by this idea that literature helps us to transcend the narrowness of our own familiarities and allows us to have experiences that would not have been possible otherwise.

  I feel like we’re entering an age where, more and more, we as writers are going to be asked to defend what we do. Literary arts organizations are fighting for their lives. Magazines are seeing their funding slashed. Writing programs are being forced to explain why creative writing is important. What Hough says there is as good of an answer as any as to why this is important. I’ve read poems that have offered me the chance to live in different centuries, to walk through hell, to see the traffic moving through blood vessels, and to view the world through the eyes of people of different races, orientations, and religions. Can that save us? Maybe, or maybe not. But it helps us to live deeper, more fulfilling lives. It creates a more understanding planet. It calls on us—as individuals—to be more empathetic and humane. And, ultimately, it helps us—as a society—to be more worthy of the “salvation” that we’re seeking.

  JB: While I wouldn’t call most of your work surreal, when the surreal does emerge in your work it emerges with great force. Are you influenced by Breton, or Koch, or other poets who wake us with disorientation?

  MO: This is such an interesting follow-up to your previous question. In some ways, surrealism was a reaction to catastrophic events in the world (namely, World War I). Since early practitioners of surrealism hoped to create art that would jar people away from the types of thinking that spurred such devastation, an argument can be made that the surrealists believed art could “save” us. At the very least, they believed art could change us, and could impact society in a powerful manner.

  I don’t know if I would have fit in their club or not, but I’m interested in the imagination, the impossible, flights of speculation, unanswerable questions, and the weirdness of contemporary life. To answer your question about “disorientation,” I’m interested in using the “odd” and the “bizarre,” not necessarily to “disorient” the reader, but to provide a metaphor for contemplating the strangeness of the world around us. Many of the things I’ve written about that seem absurd—magnets taped to the heads of crocodiles, NASA videos intercepted by baby monitors, rabbits being shot and used for fuel, dead beetles stuffed with cocaine—came straight out of newspaper headlines. I’ll find myself staring at those headlines, asking, “What does this say about us?”

  JB: I love American cities, and the city that your book returns to most is Detroit. I am sad to say I’ve never been there. What for you makes Detroit different than, say, Pittsburgh or St. Louis or Boston? Are you like one of your crocodiles, whose “memory/ like a compass” draws you back home?

  MO: I can’t speak with any degree of authority on those other cities, but I know they all have Super Bowl banners hanging in their stadiums. As a long-suffering Lions fan, that’s something that makes me look in the directions of those cities with a certain amount of envy. And even though we’ve only won a grand total of one playoff game over fifty-something years, I keep telling myself this will be our year. Or next year. Or the year after that. I think “We’ll get ’em next year” is the official team motto.

  What is Detroit to me? Home. The city where I was born. And I’ve lived my entire life near that city.

  Currently, my wife and I are living in North Carolina where I have a teaching fellowship for the year. This is the first time I’ve lived outside of Michigan, and the change in environment has been exhilarating and wild. Since the move down here, I’ve been constantly looking around, and comparing what is “here” to what is “there.” Here are a couple things that they’ve got in North Carolina that they don’t have in Detroit: copperhead snakes and six billion types of spiders.

  This reminds me: I want to thank you, Justin, for introducing me to the idea of the “wolf spider” the other day. I haven’t seen one yet, but it sounds like they took two animals I’d prefer to avoid, and—through the miracle of modern witchcraft—created one nightmare creature that (I’m sure) feeds only on human bone marrow.

  But this area also has stunning mountains, rivers, and fog that hangs like smoke just above the tree line. There are amazing restaurants where all the waiters can tell you exactly where your food was grown, and who grew it. There’s store after store filled with things people made with their own hands.

  It’s also the most environmentally conscious place I’ve lived. I’m teaching at Warren Wilson, and one of the students recently told me, “If you stand in one place for too long, you might get recycled.”

  The poem “Crocodiles” that you referred to is interested in place, both literal and figurative, and how we find our back when “displaced.” I feel like—since moving here—I’m in a transitional space where my relationships to concepts such as “home,” and “place,” and “Detroit” are in flux. That said, it’s obvious that it’s a place to which my writing will constantly return.

  JB: Whoops. Looks like I forgot to tell you about the bear snakes.

  MO: Shit. Does that exist? You’re an evil man, Justin Bigos.

  JB: One of the clues I have that you write a ton of poems is your creation and participation in “The Grind.” Can you tell us about that project?

  MO: It’s similar to the type of the “30/30” thing that a number of poets do every April. The main difference is that this doesn’t stop at the end of April. The project has been going nonstop—with a constantly changing cast of writers—since October, 2007. It now has well over 200 participants, and frequently spans multiple continents. There’s now also a fiction component and a revision component.

  Initially, we didn’t plan on the The Grind (or “The Grind Daily Writing Series”) being a long-term writing project. It began with four poets—Ross White, Dilruba Ahmed, Zena Cardman and myself—who all agreed to write a poem every day for a month. At the end of the day, we’d send a draft to the group. There was no feedback or anything; we were just generating poems. It was intended to be a one-month thing, but two of us kept going the next month with a few new writers. And then again the month after that. Each new month, some of us would take a break, and others would jump on board.

  I’ll sometimes participate for several months in a row, sometimes every other month, sometimes more sporadically. Regardless of whether or not I’m participating in the series, the act of writing something every day has become an integral part of my writing process. I’ve found that if I haven’t written anything in a long time, the pressure I face when I return to the writing desk becomes intense. Everything has to be perfect. I need a certain block of time. I need a clean desk and a cup of coffee. I need an “idea” and a room without distractions. But when I’m writing every day, that pressure is gone. It becomes liberating; if you know that you wrote seven rough drafts last week and will write another seven next week, then you’re free to fail on a huge level with whatever you try today. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even good. This process frees you up to not only take risks in your writing, but to actively pursue them.

  JB: Aside from writing poems, you also serve as Poetry Editor at The Collagist. I was chatting with a friend the other day about literary magazines, and how they typically declare two things: first, they do not have what they often call a “prevailing aesthetic” and instead publish what is only “excellent”; second, if you want to know what they publish, “read the magazine.” Maybe I’m being a bit daft here, but if I know their only criterion is excellence, why do I need to read the magazine? Also, even if they did have an aesthetic, even loosely gleaned, why is that necessarily a problem? As an editor, do you find you have any kind of aesthetic?

  MO: It’s a good idea to read the magazines you send your poems to for a number of reasons. Obviously, one might want to get a sense of different editors’ tastes and preferences, but you also want to know if those magazines or journals are venues that you actually like. Will they display your work in a manner that is acceptable to you? Is their audience an audience that you want to connect with? Is it a place that you’d be proud to have your work featured? The selection process for publication is actually a two-way street. Editors choose the work they think is best suited for their publication, but first, contributors “choose” the publication by deciding whether or not to even submit their work. There are seemingly a million publications out there, and The Collagistwould not exist if people didn’t send us their writing.

  I don’t know if “excellence” is the only criterion for me. I’d say “interesting” is more important than “excellence.” I’m not even sure I know what excellence means. Is it a poem that has been perfectly “polished” through a series of workshops? Maybe. But many times, I’ve accepted poems that were a little rough around the edges, but I was excited by what the writer was trying to do. We get a few thousand poems each year, and can only accept a small fraction of those.

  As for my own particular aesthetic, I hope it’s constantly evolving. As an editor, I get especially excited when I read a poem that is doing something I’ve never seen before. (In addition to learning what a magazine has published, reading it before submitting lets you know what a magazine has not published). I’d say I’m open to possibility, but am mostly drawn to poems that contain a certain degree of empathy, poems that do not take the reader’s attention for granted, poems that create an experience for the reader, rather than poems that simply make the reader a passive witness to the speaker’s private experience.

  JB: What are you working on these days? I know you’re up at the Bread Loaf conference in Vermont right now. Is Bread Loaf a place you get a lot of writing done, or is it mostly shenanigans?

  MO: These days, I’m working on several new poems, and some pieces of short fiction. But Bread Loaf isn’t the place to go if you’re looking to get a lot of writing done. That’s not really part of the conference. It’s more about lectures, craft classes, workshops, and discussions with other writers. It’s a place to go to listen to writers talking about the work of writing, and to become part of that conversation. But what I’ve mainly gotten from the place is friendship and a sense of camaraderie from being among the other participants. I’ve been fortunate to attend the conference for the past four years on a variety of work-study scholarships (first as a waiter, then on social staff). So, I’ve been working at the conference: serving food, pouring drinks, etc. The folks I got to work alongside of have been wonderful writers, but also, many have become good friends. That’s probably my favorite thing I found out here: friendship.

  JB: Thank you, Matthew. For your poems, and for the conversation.

  MO: And thank you, Justin.

• lantern review - http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/2013/05/20/a-conversation-with-matthew-olzmann/

  May 20, 2013
  A Conversation with Matthew Olzmann
  Matthew Olzmann
  Matthew Olzmann

  Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books), selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Currently, he teaches at Warren Wilson College and is the poetry editor of The Collagist.

  * * *
  MEZZANINES
  MEZZANINES

  LR: Some of the most pervasive themes that Mezzanines deals with are place, identity, and faith, all in the context of mortality. Can you talk about the relationship between mortality and some of the specific places, identities, and beliefs you grapple with in the book?

  MO: I’ve heard it said that most of literature, in some way, grapples with only one question: what does it mean to be alive? I’m probably not capable of answering that question, but if the idea of mortality hangs over a lot of these poems, it’s because I often get stuck thinking in binary terms; I get at things by considering their opposites. What does it mean to be alive? Not a clue. What does it mean to not be alive? Now I’m sufficiently terrified. What I’m saying is I tend to be the type of writer who understands the dark only by flicking the lights on and off a couple dozen times. I understand the deep end of the pool by splashing through the shallow side. I know Eden is paradise only when I’m banging against the gate from the wrong side.

  LR: Mezzanines is full of unlikely juxtapositions and contradictions; for example, the interplay between high literature and the intensely personal and emotional in “The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth” or the pairing of sci-fi pop culture with a meditation on racial identity in “Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race During My Childhood.” What are your thoughts on contradiction and juxtaposition as poetic strategies? As the aforementioned poems appear side by side in the book, can you explain how they relate to one another?

  MO: I’m interested in making connections between various points, in metaphor as a device that makes something abstract more tangible. As such, I’m constantly looking at things that might not overtly belong together, and I’m trying to find correspondences among those dissimilarities.

  In trying to organize the book, I initially arranged the poems a little bit more thematically: here are the love poems, the poems about identity, the poems about weird stories from the news, etc. However, those thematic clusters quickly began to feel artificial and predetermined. So I deliberately broke them up and tried to spread them out over the book, hoping those threads that were related in terms of “content” would echo and speak to each other across the length of the book rather that exist back-to-back as next-door neighbors. I began thinking of the order “tonally,” and those two poems—while apparently dissimilar in terms of subject matter—felt similar in terms of tone and perspective, both in their movement from humor to emotional crisis, and from an outward gaze to internal reflection.

  LR: How would you describe the roles of humor and self-parody in your poems?

  MO: There is no form of humor that doesn’t come with some kind of “target.” In this way, for me, humor can be a type of critique. I also think types of humor and absurdity—with their tendencies to disrupt the reader’s ability to anticipate—can be an interesting entrance to a more lyrical moment.

  LR: Which poem in Mezzanines was the most challenging for you to write? Can you walk us through the process of its creation?

  MO: While I’m not sure if it was the most challenging, “Spock” went through an unusual revision process. It’s actually the combination of three different poems. So the process of its creation was probably the most elaborate. First, I had to write three failed poems. That wasn’t necessarily “challenging,” but understanding that those poems didn’t work (and why they didn’t); realizing that those poems (all written at different times without the others in mind) were related and approaching similar concerns; imagining a way that they could be used together; and finally stitching fragments of them into a single poem took a lot of time.

  LR: Along with a fair number of the poets we’ve interviewed at Lantern Review, you have spoken about the importance of risk and the tolerance of failure in their writing. Can you tell us a bit more about why you think the freedom to fail as a poet is important? How does that freedom impact your writing, and what are some of the practical measures you take in order to find and harness the freedom to fail?

  MO: I think it’s a matter of having the right amount of pressure on you and your work. Obviously, I don’t want to “fail.” I don’t set out to purposely write poems that don’t live up to my expectations. But a certain amount of that is inevitable and part of the process. A baseball player in a batting cage might take hundreds of swings in one day. Obviously, he’s trying to hit each ball as effectively as possible. That won’t always happen, but each swing is part of the process of getting better.

  LR: As a founding member, participant, and proponent of The Grind, what do you think writing every day gives to writers that writing less frequently doesn’t?

  MO: This is closely related to the previous question, and, for me, writing every day is a way of managing the pressure I put on myself, balancing the desire to write a “good” poem against the inevitability of failure. For example, if I haven’t written something in three months, there’s a lot of pressure when I actually return to the writing desk. In those moments, I feel whatever I write has to be good, because this is my only chance, it’s the only thing I’ve written in ages. To extend the baseball analogy from above, you’ve only got one swing, then you have to make contact. Because of that specific type of pressure, if I haven’t written for a long time, I become less likely to write at all. I’ll start trying to create the ideal situation for writing: I have to have three hours of uninterrupted time, a clean desk, a cup of coffee, all my other work must be done first, inspiration, and appointment with the muse, etc. I have to make it count because it’s the only thing I’ve written. However, when I’m writing every day—even a little bit—it clears some of that away for me. If what I write is garbage, then I’ll be back at it tomorrow and the next day and the next. You write as hard and as well as you can, punch out at the end of the day, eat dinner, go to sleep, and come back to work tomorrow.

  LR: What has being an editor at The Collagist contributed to your understanding of the publishing process as a poet?

  MO: It’s introduced me to the work of hundreds of writers I was previously unfamiliar with. In some ways, it’s given me a sense of how large the poetry world is; I’m awestruck by the sheer volume of poets writing good poems. We can only publish a small fraction of those, and I’m constantly humbled by the energy, grace, and imaginative force of the poems out there that are trying to find a home.

  LR: You’re currently teaching for a year at Warren Wilson College, a low residency MFA program from which you yourself graduated. How do you feel that Warren Wilson’ s program differs from traditional ones, and what would you suggest that writers interested in a low residency program consider?

  MO: I’m teaching in the undergraduate writing program, which is separate from the MFA Program for Writers. The MFA has its residencies on campus only when the college is not in session: during winter break or over the summer. From my experience as a student in the MFA program, and based on what I know of more “traditional” residential programs, Warren Wilson offers more direct feedback on a student’s work. My first semester, I had an instructor respond (in the form of notes, line editing, and personal letters) to over 30 poems and fifteen essays I had written. Those letters were substantial. By the end of the semester, he had written over 70 pages of (typed) prose about my writing. That type of instructor feedback is rarely possible if you’re in a workshop with twelve other people and having one of your poems looked at every other week. I can’t speak about other low-residency programs, but I think one the strengths of Warren Wilson is its methodology and attention to developing the writer as a reader. A lot of people say that it’s important to “learn how to read as a writer,” but few can actually say how that skill is acquired. The program at Warren Wilson is really designed to do just that. It teaches a writer to be better reader—to look at a piece of writing, see how its particular effects are achieved, and understand how those specific strategies can be applied to one’s own writing.

  LR: As the winner of the 2011 Kundiman Book Prize, can you tell us how has being a Kundiman fellow influenced you as a writer? Was it different from your MFA experience, and if so, how?

  MO: Kundiman has both nurtured and supported my writing in a number of ways: retreats, residencies, and practical advice about moving through the writing world. But what I value most are the friendships and the deep sense of community that it has allowed me to experience.

  While there are some similarities between what I experienced in an MFA Program and at Kundiman (lasting friendships, a sense of camaraderie with other writers), in general, it’s impractical to compare the two experiences. You apply to these different things for different reasons, and should approach each with separate expectations. Initially, I applied to Kundiman at a point when I was wrestling with issues of mixed-race Asian American identity, both in my personal life and in my writing. I went to the retreat to listen to and participate in a very specific type of conversation related to identity, community, and the arts. No one goes to an MFA program for those reasons. You go to an MFA program to be a student of poetry, to apprentice yourself to your art, to learn particular skills that—you hope—you’ll be able to use in a concrete way.

  LR: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

  MO: I’m writing new poems and some very short stories. I’ve got a group of poems that I think could be the core of a new poetry manuscript, and I’m trying to understand how these poems are related.

• frost place - http://frostplace.org/portfolio/2017-conference-on-poetry-teaching-faculty-matthew-olzmann/

  Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the Kundiman Prize. His second book, Contradictions in the Design, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November, 2016. He’s received scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. From 2009-2016, he was an editor of The Collagist, an online magazine of poetry, fiction and nonfiction from Dzanc Books.

  He has taught writing to students of all levels, from third graders to graduate students to retired professionals. From 2002-2012, he was a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a nonprofit organization that places professional writers in Detroit Public Schools to teach creative writing. There, he was worked in elementary, middle and high schools, and led an afterschool workshop for teenage writers throughout the city. He has also taught at Oakland Community College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, he teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Dartmouth College.

• author's site - https://matthewolzmann.com/about/

  Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Necessary Fiction, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

• warren wilson college - http://www.wwcmfa.org/faculty-2/

  Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, from Alice James Books in 2016. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Previously, he’s taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beginning in Spring 2017, he’ll be a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

• academy of american poets - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/matthew-olzmann

  Matthew Olzmann was born in Detroit, Michigan. He received a BA from the University of Michigan–Dearborn and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016) and Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize. Olzmann has received fellowships from the Kresge Arts Foundation and Kundiman, among others. He teaches at Warren Wilson College and lives in North Carolina with his wife, the poet Vievee Francis.

• bloodroot literary magazine - http://bloodrootlit.org/matthew-olzmann/

  Matthew Olzmann

  Matthew Olzmann is the author of two collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, and Contradictions in the Design, both from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Currently, he teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Contradictions in the Design
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Contradictions in the Design

Matthew Olzmann. Alice James (Consortium, dist.), $15.95 (100p) ISBN 978-1-938584-27-5

In this offbeat and insightful collection, Olzmann (Mezzanines) engages with art--in galleries, museums, and other spectacles--to question the assumptions that audiences make about the world. Many poems bear the word gallery in their titles, but Olzmann makes it clear that these aren't typical ekphrastic poems. In the opening poem, Olzmann compares himself to a replica of the sculpture The Thinker, relating feelings of inadequacy due to an inability to think, as if his head were filled with "iron and bronze,/ not neurons and god." Wandering through galleries of "American violence," "severe head injuries," and "wreckage," among others, readers find personal vignettes about struggle, hurt, and poverty. There is often humor and wit--in one poem, beauty is measured in "millihelens" (also the title of the poem), which is the amount necessary to launch "exactly one ship"--but laughter isn't the point. In "I'll Forgive John Keats, but Not You," the speaker's fraught engagement with another gallery goer results in a profound exchange over the roots of values: "when I speak of beauty and you speak/ of beauty, we are not speaking/ about the same thing. And we are not friends." Closing with a grateful observer in a place described as Medusa's sculpture garden, Olzmann conveys gratitude in his own slant manner: "let me never/ take for granted/ how I've been granted/ this permanence." (Nov.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Contradictions in the Design." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700013&it=r&asid=04259be29b6f803a1407d88fccc75332. Accessed 9 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700013

The Poetry Shelf
(May 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Poetry in the Age of Impurity

Thomas Sanfilip

Bigio Morato

PO Box 1202, Des Plaines, IL 60017-1202

9780962530623, $22.95, www.arapacispublishers.com

The world is ever changing, and some view it as not always for the better. "Poetry in the Age of Impurity" is literary and poetic criticism from Thomas Saniflip who discusses modern poetry and what he views as its failings, the changing values of the world and the failing nature of poetry to combat or properly reflect those values. "Poetry in the Age of Impurity" is worth considering for those seeking a very critical discussion of the modern art.

You Are Everything You Are Not

John Nigh

Talisman House

PO Box 896, Grenfield, MA 01302

9781584980957, $16.95, www.amazon.com

We search for knowledge, and often the knowledge we find is not what we seek. "You Are Everything You Are Not" is a collection of poetry from John Nigh, who presents stories of life and seeks to offer their search for answers and how they often mirror our own journeys. "You Are Everything You Are Not" is a fine addition to contemporary poetry collections, not to be missed. Also from Talisman House is "Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany" (9781584980933, $13.95) from Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno who presents his life's journey and the overarching themes that you can see no matter where you go in the world.

Mezzanines

Matthew Olzmann

Alice James Books

238 Main Street, Farmington, ME 04938

9781882295982, $15.95, www.alicejamesbooks.org

The world is often at odds with itself with its beauty and everything not. "Mezzanines" is a collection of poetry from Matthew Olzmann, an award winning poet who uses his frank yet witty nature to observe the world and offer new perspectives. "Mezzanines" is a strong addition to contemporary poetry collections, recommended. "The Days": Like a tribe of hunters with pointed spears,/the days crouch in the high grass,/slink through the shadows, tiptoe from/the tree line --/they've measured your footprints,/draw closer when you sleep. They may be slow,/but make no mistake, they are following you.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Poetry Shelf." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA331007111&it=r&asid=29b51ace8d4cb81f059e2f68349783e8. Accessed 9 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A331007111

"Contradictions in the Design." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA468700013&asid=04259be29b6f803a1407d88fccc75332. Accessed 9 July 2017. "The Poetry Shelf." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA331007111&asid=29b51ace8d4cb81f059e2f68349783e8. Accessed 9 July 2017.

• numero cinq magazine
  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/10/03/flat-third-dimension-review-contradictions-design-matthew-olzmann-patrick-oreilly/
  Word count: 1729

  The Flat Third Dimension: Matthew Olzmann’s Contradictions in the Design — Patrick O’Reilly

  olzmann

  Olzmann relies on a prosaic first-person style, rhyme-less, rhythm-less, too indifferent to metre to even be properly considered free verse. Many, many poets today employ a similar style. —Patrick O’Reilly

  contradictions_cover

  Contradictions in the Design
  Matthew Olzmann
  Alice James Books, 2016
  100 pages, $15.95

  .
  Early in Matthew Olzmann’s latest collection of poetry, Contradictions in the Design, we are introduced to a young boy. For his birthday, the boy has been given a box of hand-me-down tools. “Immediately, he sets out to discover / how the world was made / by unmaking everything the world has made” (“Consider All The Things You’ve Known But Now Know Differently”, 9). The boy may serve as a stand-in for Olzmann himself, who excels at finding connections between the broken, the incomplete, and the obsolete, and who eyes every artificial thing with skepticism. As he claims in one interview, he is “the type of writer who understands the dark only by flicking the lights on and off a couple dozen times. I understand the deep end of the pool by splashing through the shallow side.”

  With his award-winning debut Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), the Michigan-born poet earned a reputation for his humour and accessibility, and his talent for juxtaposing seemingly incongruous images. Now residing in North Carolina, and armed with the confidence a well-received debut brings, Olzmann continues to explore his sometimes-jarring narrative style in Contradictions in the Design.

  One stand-out poem is “The Millihelen”, named for “the amount of beauty that will launch exactly one ship.” Olzmann discovers such overlooked poetic sources with ease, and elaborates them masterfully. “The Millihelen” revisits the Trojan War, and considers a single ship leaving the entire fleet. Is this a ship carrying a disillusioned soldier away from the beachhead of Troy to a love he left behind? That’s not entirely clear, though it certainly seems that way. In any case, this ship is given more importance than the thousand Greek frigates sailing towards battle, a part bigger than the sum.

  In “The Millihelen,” beauty is a destination. But that raises a possibility: perhaps this ship is the one which carries Paris and Helen away to Troy. That would be more consistent with the rest of the collection, where beauty and art are positioned as false virtues, traps which an audience could fall prey to. Certainly Paris’s own overly-enthusiastic pursuit of beauty had disastrous consequences.

  The idea of beauty presents challenges for the artist as well. “Femur by mandible, I know what it means / to watch your good fortune change its mind,” Olzmann writes in “The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur”. That’s every poet’s pain, no doubt. But the poem itself depicts a dinosaur skeleton made up of mislabeled and mismanaged parts, the product of misguided creative labour, and exposes the blind faith and false assumptions required to not only appreciate, but to create art.

  How Olzmann himself struggles for or against this artificial beauty is not always clear. There is little to suggest the kind of painstaking editing necessary to more intricate or experimental verse. Throughout, Olzmann relies on a prosaic first-person style, rhyme-less, rhythm-less, too indifferent to metre to even be properly considered free verse. Many, many poets today employ a similar style. What recommends Olzmann above them is the sense of cohesion in these poems: while most poets of a similar style still go in fear of literalness and overstatement, often to the point that their poems devolve into non-sequitur, Olzmann spares no effort to ensure that the reader follows every step of his associative process.

  Olzmann’s talent lies not in his simple situational observations, but his observation of the whole metaphor, his observation of actors in a metaphor. He pursues the metaphor from its superficial meaning down to its pulp, showing the reader just where and why that metaphor is so poetically resonant. Think of him as a miner with a silver hammer, tapping the vein all the way to the motherlode. Oddly, Olzmann’s gift for drawing connections does not extend to other forms of comparative language. His similes, for instance, are usually duds: houses go “dark / like condemned buildings”, hair unfurls “like a flag”. These suit Olzmann’s unfussy, conversational style, but add nothing.

  Olzmann is a noticer, rather than a craftsman. Coincidences and contradictions occur to him, and he draws them into the right perspective, but he never shapes them. This usually works. While not “formal poetry” in any traditional sense, nearly every poem in Contradictions in the Design operates under a particular formal apparatus wherein the poem is set up as a meditation on some single object or situation, then veers off in a completely unforeseeable direction, before returning to its thesis. This strategy, which I’m calling the “Olzmannian diversion,” makes it nearly impossible to quote from one of these poems and do justice to the whole poem, but it allows Olzmann to consider his subject from every angle, as though walking around a statue rather than merely looking at one face-on. As such, most poems in Contradictions in the Design have a satisfying sense of completeness.

  Take, for example, “The Man Who Was Mistaken”, about a man who reconnects with his own sincerity thanks to a drug-addled roommate. The poem begins by mentioning the speaker is often mistaken for another professor at his university, who in turn is often mistaken for Moby, the electronica artist beloved by the speaker’s roommate. Then the turn:

  Once he thought our furnace was talking to him.

  Which is when I said, Why don’t you tell me
  what the furnace was trying to say?

  Which is when he said, It said
  that me and it would always be enemies.

  Which is when I said, Son, that’s a fight you can never win.

  Which is when he said, Okay, and then went outside
  to dance on the hood of his car.

  Which is when the cops came.

  Perhaps he was right. Jesus was inside the music.
  And that music was inside my roommate.

  And the state could not tolerate it.

  I should note that this is just one small part of a long chain of events; “The Man Who Was Mistaken” follows Olzmann’s typical form: an opening gambit, a turn into shaggy dog territory, and then a return to the original theme in the third act, sort of like a sitcom. And the poem, already a page and a half long when this anecdote begins, goes on for another fifteen lines. The final line in the excerpt serves as that second turn, bringing the poem back to its original line of thought. While it acts as a punchline, dripping with false indignation toward “the Man,” it is also filled with genuine dismay that such harmless enthusiasm should lead to police intervention. The line rests precisely between the cynical and the sincere, which is where much of Olzmann’s best work happens.

  But Olzmann’s competence can be its own trap. This is not a book one should read cover to cover. Taken at random, and with few exceptions, any one poem in this collection would be considered very good. The imagery is evocative, the humour charmingly ironic. But this one jarring, book-ended form would be more effective if used more sparingly. Reading Contradictions in the Design comes with a sense of degradation: inevitably some poems don’t seem to hit as hard as those which came before, and add nothing that earlier poems didn’t imply to greater effect. The Olzmannian diversion can lend a poem a sense of efficiency that it does not usually deserve.

  This is a limitation to Olzmann’s style, as well. While the hyper-colloquial first-person narration affords him a degree of freedom not found in other poetry, it can also lead him to strain for importance. Such is the case with “Still Life With Heart Extracted From The Body Of A Horse” (16), a clearly personal, pointed poem, which devolves into bromides and clichés and eventually ends with a thud. When Olzmann gets political, as he does with this poem or “Imaginary Shotguns” (14), his politics are unthreateningly liberal[1], more bumper sticker than rallying cry.

  What does one look for in a poetry? How can one define it? Olzmann himself might view even the question with suspicion. The poems which make up Contradictions in the Design are not challenging in any sense, but some might assert that “not challenging” is not necessarily the same as “not good.” I find myself, admittedly to my own surprise, in this camp. Olzmann draws insightful, even profound, connections between object and meaning. An artful poem, where several components work together in harmonious efficiency, such that you cannot replace a single mark for fear of breaking it, offers a kind of wonder. Here is a thing that shouldn’t exist, yet can’t possibly exist any other way, a made thing that feels innate. Olzmann’s poems are robbed of this wonder. But if the poems are without wonder, they still provide something like relief: that thing you noticed about the photocopier? Matthew Olzmann noticed, too, and he’s found some meaning in it that you hadn’t. Sometimes that’s enough.

  —Patrick O’Reilly

  N5

  Patrick OReilly

  Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He just graduated from St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”

  Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

  Be advised: this is the opinion a Canadian critic. Issues like gun control and same-sex marriage, more or less settled here, may demand a less daring or incisive take in the United States.↵

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  2016, NC Magazine, Reviews, Vol. VII, No. 10 October 2016

• Glass
  http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/reviews/lee-olzmann.html
  Word count: 497

  April 13, 2017

  Tanner Lee

  Review of Contradictions in the Design by Matthew Olzmann

  Contradictions in the Design
  by Matthew Olzmann
  Alice James Books, 2016

  Matthew Olzmann begins his second collection, Contradictions in the Design, with an image of Rodin's sculpture, The Thinker. This statue, a man sitting with this elbow on his knee, hand pressed against his face, initiates his book of poetic meditations about the paradoxes in life, spirituality, and existence.

  The expression on his face:
  somewhere between agony and falling asleep.

  yet he holds this pose
  as if no one will notice what frauds we are,
  as if some world around him is about to make sense,
  some answer has almost arrived. Almost.

  Perhaps this book is an answer, and Olzmann wants us readers to sit, like The Thinker, and join him in his existential contemplation. Olzmann's voice is oracle, seer-like, and he navigates through life's difficult philosophical questions using terse, occasionally satirical language. In "Possum Drop" Olzmann observes that "in the name of tradition, entertainment, or superstition, / the well-meaning of our civilization will do / freaked out things … " Some of these include dropping a possum in to a crowd in North Carolina, throwing furniture from windows in South Africa, wearing bear costumes in Romania, or engaging in community fistfights in Peru. He complains that society removes itself from the violence by using tradition or entertainment as an excuse. Because of this, there is always a victim. There is always a lion or a criminal that gets killed in the colosseum: "Do you recognize the story yet? Always, that fear / in the circle. Always, that crowd: poised, ready".

  In the eponymous poem "Contradictions in the Design," Olzmann asks why Beethoven was deaf, where Walt Whitman was fired for his poems, and why the designer of the Eiffel Tower was afraid of heights. He confronts the Maker, asking:

  How he was alone in the frost before time began.

  Drafting and erasing and already: so tired, so frazzled,
  confused. The tools he used, scattered about his desk.
  The ripsaw, the bucksaw, the hacksaw, and the lathe.

  Olzmann makes us one with God — or, perhaps, he makes God one of us. By dissecting the oddities of being, such as the reason for suicide, why Keats is wasted on a pretentious bachelor, why a classroom full of child victims is worried about horses, and why this is the only place where God and chaos consume the same space, Olzmann builds his own Thinker. "So these are the monuments. / … let me never / take for granted / how I've been granted / this permanence, this patience / to stand forever — a stone / in this small corner of history —.” Poetry gives us permanence among the contradictions. It provides a place to confront the abstract, shine a spotlight into the void, and make significant the otherwise meaningless.

• tupelo quarterly
  http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/contradictions-in-the-design-by-matthew-olzmann/
  Word count: 1210

  Contradictions in the Design by Matthew Olzmann
  This entry was posted in Reviews and tagged Matthew Olzmann Paul A. Christiansen on November 28, 2016 by Kristina Marie Darling

  contradictions-book-coverIn many ways, Matthew Olzmann’s Contradictions in the Design exists as an outlier amongst current American poetry books. It’s concerned with politics but not consumed by them, considers the self without becoming solipsistic, uses humor but avoids glibness, embraces linearity and directness instead of fragmentation and ambiguities of language, all while eschewing a narrative arc or project-based cohesiveness. The poems in Olzmann’s sophomore collection thrill the reader with straightforward insights regarding the natural and human world thanks to their humor, diversity of topics, startling metaphors and profound observations.

  As the partially blurred image of Michelangelo’s David on the cover suggests, the distortionary effects of time are amongst Olzmann’s many fascinations. In the opening poem, for example, he writes “you know how it works when you make a photocopy / of a photocopy? The eye fights to see the original, / which appears blurred in each new version.” This theme reemerges in “Build Now a Monument,” where an hourglass maker “no longer satisfied by the way time slips / through his life’s work” quits his job to craft a staircase that leads him so high that what “he left below is almost unrecognizable.” And in “The Gallery of Small Innovations” a Rubix cube becomes a metaphor for an entire life. At some point no solutions for it remain, and were it to make a sound it would be impossible to tell if it was the

  murmur of friends gathered at the end
  of a hallway, the splash of a single frog
  into a pond surrounded by night,
  or a quiver of bees so thick
  around a tree that the tree can’t be seen.

  By ruminating on existence’s temporality, Olzmann reveals a simultaneously stupendous and insignificant world in which his work searches for precious moments of fleeting sentiment and understanding.

  Even when not at the center of a poem, time and by extension the vast extent and variety of history, involves itself. The book gives equal attention to a foot soldier approaching Medusa’s lair as it does a drug-addled raver who finds God in Moby’s music. Unicorn skulls, a Diego Rivera mural, pre-Columbian ceramic grave dogs, Lazarus, Keats, Eiffel, minotaurs and an imaginary “Department of Doubt” all appear in the collection. Reading through it reminds one of perusing an enormous, eclectic museum with Olzmann serving as wise, emotionally astute docent.

  Despite its concerns with the transience of the universe, the book does not take up an isolationist stance. For example, several poems in “Contradictions” investigate humanity’s in general, and America’s in particular, fascination with and propensity for violence. In “Possum Drop,” Olzmann compares a peculiar North Carolina tradition of dropping a possum on New Years Eve, instead of a glowing ball, to barbarous Roman coliseum games and recognizes in it an unfortunately universal scene of:

  The captive with a stone in his hand: terrified.
  The muscled predator, all claw and fang: terrified.
  Do you recognize the story yet? Always, that fear
  in the circle. Always, that crowd: poised, ready.

  In another, a personified musket sulks in a museum “humiliated” as school children abandon it for “flashier” instruments of war. We begin to sympathize with, even feel sorry for the musket that

  stalked the battlefields,
  a God without mercy. Blood on the blades
  of grass, blood on its bayonet,
  a hungry tooth. A celebration
  thunder-stomping its way though the smoke.
  Cannon songs. Banners waving in the dark.
  There were fewer stars, it thinks, on the flag
  back then, but more in the sky.

  Whether specifically addressing our current politics or offering something so seemingly benign as a list of experiences shared with a lover, the pain inherent to the human condition seeps in as “war glistens on every TV screen. / ... the static from the speakers, like birds choking on garbage.” The looming presence of atrocities in the book underscores their inescapable place in the natural order. By including them, Olzmann reinforces the truth that even if focused on vast stretches of time and history, one cannot avoid intimate feeling.

  While often outward looking, many of the poems have a present speaker offering perspective. Sometimes the inclusion provides merely a brief aside, such as recognizing how tedious naming all of the animals must have been for Adam, especially when considering the speaker himself has trouble balancing his checkbook. Some poems however only succeed because of the parallels made between a global object or event and the self. For example in a true testament to the book’s breadth of subjects, Olzmann combines a scientists’ erroneously constructed dinosaur skeleton with an anecdote in which a supermodel mistakenly kissed the speaker. Only by connecting them can he support the realization that

  the imagined life ... having never existed
  after tricking you into believing
  it eats at you more slowly, lets you feel
  every new rip in your gut
  makes you beg

  And on rare, but satisfying occasions, the poems ignore the outside world entirely and instead focus solely on a singular human’s situation, such as “In the Gallery of Severe Head Injuries” where a college kid monitors a man whose suicide attempt failed, his chest releasing “a heavy sound, as if, inside, a smaller man / drags an iron reliquary across a hardwood floor.”

  Though varied in subject matter, a singular, wit-filled voice unites each poem. But rather than serve as a jester mocking everything, Olzmann’s humor often acts as a gut-punch awakening the reader to a haunting reality, such as when a newly discovered planet turns out to be so dense it would essentially condense into a colossal diamond, Olzmann notes “A field made of diamonds / is impossible to plow; shovels crumble and fold / like paper animals. So frequent is famine...” That metaphor also exemplifies his frequent and astounding use of figurative language. In Contradictions we find a man “shouting holes / into his children,” “cellphone towers staked into the ground like hypodermic needles,” and the hope that

  the afterlife is one country road
  after another, unseen from the highway,
  passing through small towns the way
  autumn passes through the wind chimes slung
  above the front porches out here.

  While most of the poems succeed as complete, cohesive wholes, the fact that they contain so many insular moments of language-related splendor expose Olzmann’s many talents.

  Ultimately, Contradictions in the Design makes a strong argument for the value of collections that deal with diverse topics, themes, tones and perspectives that stand on their own. Depending on how one choses to focus, the world, much like a life, is simultaneously happy and horrific, funny and serious, about one’s self and tremendously unconcerned by it. Matthew Olzmann’s wide-reaching curiosities and emotional depth offers readers a unique perspective on our place within it.

• blackbird
  http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v12n2/nonfiction/vanprooyen_l/mezzanines_page.shtml
  Word count: 1303

  LAURA VAN PROOYEN

  Review | Mezzanines, by Matthew Olzmann
  Alice James Books, 2013
  spacer Mezzanines

  Enter the mouth of the gift horse. “Pry the jaws back / and stare through the phlegm that falls / between the teeth and the hallway of the throat,” writes Matthew Olzmann, “because the world is beautiful, / haunted, and begging you to receive its offering.” Enter the imaginative world of Mezzanines where, as the book’s title suggests, poems inhabit intermediate spaces, navigating the “in-between.” In this prize-winning debut, Olzmann writes narratives from a new angle, making strange connections and quirky comparisons that aim to capture the lyrical moment. Poems shift from storefronts to asteroid fields, from Facebook to Bigfoot, weaving together a cohesive collection and a series of insights that traverse the enduring themes of faith, love, and identity. In this book, we discover a warm and playful speaker whose keen awareness and penchant for metaphor attempt to put a finger on the very nature of existence.

  Unlikely juxtapositions and associative leaps provide the core strength in Olzmann’s work. Within many poems, the lens zooms in and pans out, creating jumps in space and scale, where objects and ideas soar or plummet with great velocity. Olzmann’s poems can address a wild premise—a mother who discovers on her baby’ s video monitor a space station hurtling toward earth — zip to a magician whose gloves transform into “two fuming ravens that shriek[ed] around the room,” then zero in on the speaker’s spiritual reflection and contemplation:

  . . . I’ve known people, afraid
  of the sun, who opened their eyes to God, but found
  only a wine cellar lit by a guttering lamp. There’s so much
  to be afraid of, so much to gaze at and be wrong about.

  Throughout the collection, we discover a speaker both a skeptic and believer, a questioner positioned between the limitations of earthly experience and the possibility of transcendence.

  In one of the book’s most direct and humorous expressions of faith and frustration, Olzmann pens eight short missives “For a Recently Discovered Shipwreck at the Bottom of Lake Michigan.” The writer begins his one-sided exchange with questions addressed to the boat (“So what’s it feel like to have everything inside you still / ‘intact’?”). By the third letter, the writer’s thoughts surge toward spiritual concerns, offering a fresh look at the conflict between reason and belief:

  April 24th, 2010
  Dear Shipwreck,

  So I was talking to my priest the other day. He’s worried that
  I’m having some kind of existential crisis. Meaning: I’m trying
  to rationalize God by replacing the ephemeral with a tangible
  object. Or: I’ve replaced one object that’s been hidden from
  view with another object that’s hidden from view. Or: every
  time I speak to you, I’m talking directly to God.

  If this is the case: Lord, I noticed you haven’t written back yet.

  The conversational tone and absurd context of the message disarms the reader, making more poignant the depth of the speaker’s grappling. Tonally, the subsequent letters reveal the speaker’s growing irritation; they move through sarcasm (as in the next note’s greeting: “Dear Shipwreck/Dear Metaphor for God,”) and anger (“Fuck you, boat.”). In a statement of both recognition and resignation, the speaker empathizes with the unreachable ship/God in his final missive: “I know what it’s like to sink, to be angry because no one on / Earth knows if you exist.” The beauty of this series resides in the way Olzmann calls attention to the device of substitution, ironically noting the method of metaphor, while heightening our awareness of his figurative constructions.

  The pleasure of Olzmann’s poetry lies in its combination of careful craftsmanship and surprising images. His technical and inventive powers show off in the sonnet “While Scratching My Wife’s Back, I Calculate the Distance Between Sky and Earth.” In the context of performing a tender yet mundane task, the speaker envisions his wife’s otherworldly origins:

  In the space where my wife’s wings must have been
  there are no scars, no broken screws, hinges,
  or binding clips. There is only her skin.

  Grounded by the physicality of the body, Olzmann launches the imagination into the celestial realm, creating a space filled with possibility. In subsequent lines, the speaker feels guilty that his wife’s wings “were severed, / erased when she opted to be married / to a man built with more clay than wind.” He suggests we all have a choice “to fall: without memory, meant to land // with what catches us.” The sonnet’s conceit brings to mind Icarus, who attempted to escape Crete by means of wings made from feathers and wax, but who ignored his father’ s warning and flew too close to the sun. The melting wax caused him to fall into the sea and drown. In this case, the wife’s “fall” does not lead to death or failure. Instead, the final couplet illuminates the power of free will and her preference for a gritty, flawed, mortal existence with her husband in “a new, coarse Eden,” challenging the ideal of a perfected, purified paradise.

  In Olzmann’ s hands, irony and wit unhinge ordinary events, opening them to larger issues. The poem “Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race During My Childhood” confronts what it means to be biracial, to be forced to consider alternate or imposed ideas of the self. We learn that the speaker has a “German father” and a “Filipino mother” and that he thought he was “like all the other kids / until [his] best friend said, No, you’re not.” His paradigm shifts; the revelation “mess[es] with things like gravity and light,” making him feel:

  half-alien, staring down an eternity
  that was both limitless and dangerous
  as a captain’s voice boomed from above:
  Brace for impact, we’re going down.

  The speaker not only inhabits the space between races and cultures, but he also floats between the present and the idea of a bottomless future of pending doom.

  While race is not the central focus of the collection, there are notable moments that highlight its role in the speaker’s idea of where he belongs. In “The Melting Pot in Housewares Has a Slight Crack” the speaker declares:

  I say the word assimilation like a blade
  of grass bending. Always bending.

  The line break sharpens the edge of the comparison, encouraging the association of a knife. The sentence turns, however, to reveal that the blade is a leaf of grass in a position of perpetual tension and compromise—perhaps resisting the anonymity of the lawn, or ducking to avoid being cut off. Through this expertly rendered simile, we understand the speaker’s complicated and sometimes painful relationship with the formation of his selfhood.

  The strange interrelatedness of disparate things makes this collection work. Olzmann situates his speaker with two feet on the ground, but with an eye fixed on the cosmos and a hand extended to the bottom of the Great Lakes. He casts a gigantic net that captures and connects tangible elements of the earth to orbiting abstractions that help us make meaning in our fleeting lives. In Mezzanines, Olzmann creates a mythic and modern universe that skillfully suspends us in the moment and radiates with light. end
  Matthew Olzmann is the author of the poetry collection, Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013). He is an editor-in-chief of The Collagist.

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