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WORK TITLE: Dear Everyone
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Shears, Matthew
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berkeley
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/mshears * http://www.brooklynartspress.com/portfolio/dear-everyone-by-matt-shears/ * https://hyperallergic.com/author/matt-shears/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Miami University of Ohio, B.A.; University of Iowa, M.F.A.; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
California College of the Arts, senior adjunct professor.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry and nonfiction to periodicals, including the Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Notre Dame Review, Cutbank, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
SIDELIGHTS
Matthew Shears earned his bachelor of arts degree at the Miami University of Ohio. He then went on to complete his master of fine arts degree at the prestigious University of Iowa writers’ workshop. Shears continued his academic career at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he held Schaeffer Fellowship and earned his doctorate in literature. As of 2017, Shears worked as a senior adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, but his first poetry collection, Where a Road Had Been, was released by BlazeVOX in 2010. Shears released his second book, 10,000 Wallpapers with Brooklyn Arts Press in 2011. His third book, the poetry collection Dear Everyone (which was published in 2016), also came out with Brooklyn Arts Press. In addition to his books, Shears’s poems have appeared in such periodicals as the Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Notre Dame Review, and Cutbank. Shears has contributed nonfiction and reviews to several periodicals as well, including the San Francisco Chronicle.
With Dear Everyone, Shears presents a four-section, book-length poem that explores American culture in a digital age. Clips and quotes and bits of information are packed together to overwhelm the reader with their onslaught. By combining litany and collage, Shears presents questions and rhetoric, popular culture, media, and politics. Relying largely on sound, Dear Everyone features everything from FaceTime to Paul Simon and the names of victims of police violence. The digital and analog frequently combine in discursive and chaotic bursts before decaying apart again. The result is a sort of overwhelming noise with brief moments of clarity, be they real or imagined. “Shears’s churning verse may not be for everyone,” a Publishers Weekly critic noted, but tenacious readers will find in it a ‘new togetherness.'” Brennan Burnside, writing on the Fjords Website, was even more positive, asserting: “Shears reveals how the verses could be read against themselves. What is or could be is what is meant to be resisted. The species of Shears poetics is one meant to be dismantled and discerned. If anything, this is a collection about deletions, a Zen-like exercise eliminating ego to reform perception, clarify existence. The reader, to borrow a term from philosophers Hebert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, is a ‘craftsman’ and its task ‘is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in [it]self the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.'” Indeed, online Decomp correspondent Spencer Dew stated that “no talk of the metaphysics of love, the significance thereof, can be heard over the prattle and hum, the sheer accumulation, the deluge, that is this text. It’s as if, instead of talking to everyone, everyone were talking at once, through corporate platforms, peppered with ads, and the poem takes down what dictation it can, a transcription of ambient noise, a soundtrack drowning out the human in both its tragic and hopeful forms.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 21, 2016, review of Dear Everyone.
ONLINE
California College of the Arts Website, https://www.cca.edu/ (August 21, 2017), author profile.
Decomp, http://www.decompmagazine.com/ (August 13, 2017), Spencer Dew, review of Dear Everyone.
Fjords, http://www.fjordsreview.com/ (February 27, 2017), Brennan Burnside, review of Dear Everyone.*
Matt Shears
Matt Shears is the author of Where a road had been (BlazeVOX) and 10,000 Wallpapers (Brooklyn Arts Press). He lives in Berkeley with his family.
MATTHEW SHEARS
Matthew Shears profile image
Matt Shears is the author of 10,000 Wallpapers (Brooklyn Arts Press 2011) and Where a road had been (BlazeVOX 2010). His poetry has been featured in The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Notre Dame Review, and Cutbank, among other journals. His nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jacket2, Xantippe, Interim and The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural and Geographic Map of California Today. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D in Literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was awarded a Schaeffer Fellowship.
Senior Adjunct Professor, Writing and Literature
Senior Adjunct Professor, Writing
mshears@cca.edu
BA, Miami University of Ohio; MFA, University of Iowa; PhD, University of Nevada
Website: http://www.brooklynartspress.com/Matt-Shears.html
Dear Everyone
Publishers Weekly. 263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Dear Everyone
Matt Shears. Brooklyn Arts (SPD, dist.), $18 trade paper (204p) ISBN 978-1-936767-34-2
In his second collection, Shears (Where a Road Had Been) clips and collages the endless scroll of new media into a searching portrait of America's addled culture. Though divided into four sections, the book is essentially one long poem: a deadpan litany of competing commands, refrains, questions, and rhetorics. Its racing lines often jump tones, ramming the comic ("Paul Simon/ burdens the future") into the political ("you are a conditioned response. Why not/ consider the sponsors?") or metapoetical ("Epiphany seeking =/ a high traffic arena."). Though consistently melodic, Shears's sharp line breaks often flip the channel or click through: "Life on the Oregon Trail/received a FaceTime request: love all creatures/or die trying." Fixating, digressing, and self-commenting, these lines capture the fluctuations of the digital; only the occasional clear signal cuts through its noise, as when Shears suddenly begins listing victims of police violence. "I want to create and to create a world with you," he writes, "in these brief instants of our shared lives." Whether readers feel that he's successful probably depends on whether they feel included in the book's eponymous address. Pitched dead between thrilling and numbing, Shears's churning verse may not be for everyone, but tenacious readers will find in it a "new togetherness." (Dec.)
DEAR EVERYONE BY MATT SHEARS
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Fjords Review, Dear Everyone by Matt Shears
February 27, 2017
POETRY
DEAR EVERYONE
BY MATT SHEARS
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016
198 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-34-2
by Brennan Burnside
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye in an interview said that “words can give you something back if you trust them, and if you know that you're not trying to proclaim things all the time, but you're trying to discover things.” Words take control of a poet, words lead. This idea troubled me as I read Matt Shears’ Dear Everyone, a sprawling prosaic poem that comes so crushingly close to elevating a violent ambivalence and disappearing into nonsensicalness. The collection reads like a deceptive cadence though. Reading his work is like listening to Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor: every ending only leads to a further suspension. Shears accomplishes this through the repetition of stock phrases, more in the tone of advertising slogans than verses, that appear truth statements at the beginning but near the end of the collection take on a mocking tone, a non sequitur appeal in their seemingly rote repetition. The collection is broken up into four sections – “Emergency Procedures,” “Total Quality Management, Or Essentialism,” “Descriptive Analytics, Or The Highway Of The Past” and “Coda: The New You” – that read more like a training manual and differ very little stylistically from each other. The dryness and sameness of the tone is their shared conceit.
The book, although broken up into sections, has no sense of rest or pause. No sense of beginning or end. Shears often uses enjambment to refuse natural breathing space. The end of his sections have no punctuation and unfinished phrases may lead the reader to think there is a cyclical nature to the work. Not so. The responsibility is given to the reader to engage the poesis and slow it down to a natural speed. What is a natural speed? For me, it was pausing on individual phrases to examine the reemergence of leitmotifs in different forms (Dear Everyone rests on these thematic ideas as nodes to establish or continue rhythm). Recurring images that Shears approaches are the notions of “whiteness,” “capitalism,” the “police dream” pursuit of docility to and abuse of power as well as the production of interiority that would otherwise be the only bastion against such psychic threats. There is a modernist sense to his presentation, much in the vein of T.S. Eliot’s refusal to spoon-feed poetic imagery to the masses. Shears places ideas that are passed by like a billboard advertisement to a passengers of a speeding subway train.
On the surface these ideas are given no more credence than anything else in the nearly 200-page poem’s media-saturated landscape. This is a reorientation of Nye’s notion that poetry must be trusted in because it will lead the reader somewhere. Shears work shifts the focus of Nye’s quote (which, it really should be said, is far more true of her or William Stafford’s work, for example, than Shears’ experiment) and challenges the reader to slow poetry down and interrogate it. His lines are arranged in a form that disrupts their ability to move. Just before meaning or essence seems to prepared to emerge, it crushes itself into submission or pushes itself into silence by its very form.; kaons requiring the reader to step away from the text, create space for ideas and consider them. For example, “Connections are essential” is a phrase Shears uses that can’t fulfill its own mission, misses the gesture for sake of a gesture. “Connections” becomes another theme for Shears work, themes that rest on hypocrisy as a foundation to existence. It’s obvious they’re not true but you are encouraged to move forward and just accept them. Connections for connections sake is a meaningless, rootless idea. One who lives by the poem without considering whether it should (or was meant to be) read against itself risks leaving the verse with a sense of anomie. A discrediting of individuality under the false auspices of the embrace (but really, dismissal) of the individual. The enjambment and unfinished lines that lead to nowhere could leave the reader with a space where things have been allowed to remain rootless while an unspoken center remains: whiteness, capitalism, etc. Exterior things (celebrity and material culture) create interiority and only reveal how it wants to be responded to.
Does Shears offer an out or is his landscape an inescapable Spinozan purgatory where all objects are reified into internally infinitesimal nonliving things? There seems to be. Shears leaves gaps in the poem’s thrust. The verse is sometimes nervous about itself in self-affirmative statements that seem to carry the essential tenuous essence of language and truth statements. In short beats it opens up. For example, “becoming white” is similar to a Deleuzean notion of escape except it is not escape into freedom but imprisonment, stasis: “Consider monopolies, cartels, business as/ unusual. Yes, they have now become white,/ stuck in a photo album somewhere,/ or the facility.” Further down the page, the poem admits that perhaps human beings are the predicate of an entirely different subject, “The vagus nerve soothes cargo, trucks/ in troubles. You pass yourself around./ Your life is a soundbyte culture”. The next line contradicts this by leading into a fog of rootlessness: unfinished phrases that permeate the work and resist full expression. Yet, the hint was left. Shears reveals how the verses could be read against themselves. What is or could be is what is meant to be resisted. The species of Shears poetics is one meant to be dismantled and discerned. If anything, this is a collection about deletions, a Zen-like exercise eliminating ego to reform perception, clarify existence. The reader, to borrow a term from philosophers Hebert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, is a “craftsman” and its task “is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in [it]self the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.” However difficult the landscape’s structure attempts to obfuscate them.
A Review of Dear Everyone
by Matt Shears
Spencer Dew
“No poetry is not political,” Shears writes in this relentless, largely unbroken pummeling of a book, “despite the facts.” At times snidely dismissing, and riffing off of, the cooptation of political struggle by, say, the summer music festival scene, or the slide from fantasy into pornography and other modes of commodity, or even offering a seemingly nihilistic barrage against all possible options, there is also a voice here insistent on the desire “to create and to create a world with you / in these brief instants of our shared lives.”
But how might such creation work, especially in the context of a poem that reads like a ceaseless but fluid screed, a breathless block of words, at once mimicking the ubiquitous and largely junk-quality “media” of our contemporary society and, by keeping busy with the footwork, engaging in a kind of survival tactic, moving and moving and verging on duplicity. At one moment, sites of mass shootings are recited at another, we’re told “Believe in the power and the glory / of advertising,” and then there’s talk of “password protection” and brochures of information, significance sliding into background static. Can one watch “the anxious, twitchy news” while simultaneously channel surfing on multiple screens? Because that is the feel here, more cut-up than composition, with the direct address always indirect, or directed too broadly, the narrative voice here opting to hit “‘Reply All.’ Dear Everyone” and broadcast “a public service announcement” that, tailored so broad, for such an amorphous public, it says nothing, or merely establishes a possible spectrum of meaning along which it refuses to pin a statement: “Placebo or trauma?” for instance, though simultaneously fingering the hot buttons of a society where the names of victims of police violence are also so much clickbait, where racist presumptions are on par with public constructions of identity via corporate algorithms, where drone warfare and government surveillance are on par with “the transformative power of music, and falling towers,” a stitching together of folk ballad and terrorist attack, just as the role of children as “Collateral damage” is both as passive and active victim, as casualties of bombing, for instance, and as armies of youth mobilized by “the self-righteous and the god-complexed.” Can anyone be guilty in such a sea of information, atomized to ambiguity?
“I definitely like your activities, hobbies / and pics of happy children, your detailed / music and movie selections, your status / updates and whimsical asides,” writes Shears, “but I am also / passionate about destroying dominant / history, narratives and reification and distrust / the trend of fashioning an idealized image / of who I want you to think I am, and / having that simulation embody me. Of course, / visit me at my homepage....” The worm turns and turns: accumulation (of political platforms, of philosophies, of the body, of artistic schools) leads to nullification. “Liking is essential,” but by this Shears also means that it is meaningless, an empty gesture in a virtual world of surfaces that barely masks the deeper world of biology and violence, itself only a platform for the conceptual world, “organized by systems management, / expressions of self-aggrandizement / and market research.” Even our identities are not our own, and certainly we are not our failing bodies (“flaking skin, mucous membranes, / pus, MRSA, staff [sic] infections, abscesses, / and ecosystems.” “Certain anathema / are invigorating,” but others are just confusing, taking up space and running down the clock with so much blank gab and cross-referential double-talk. “Capitalism is / the new slavery? Desire is everywhere!” “Is / experimental poetry still happening / on weekends?”
Meanwhile, “This book is / dedicated to all other victims, to silence, / forgetfulness, unforgivable truths, destroyed / histories, ongoing deaths-in-life: patriarchy,” and we are reminded, as “everyone” of the horrors done in our names and by our representatives. But what of it? No horror stands amidst the onslaught of online marketing, canned delights, beach weekend pics and new tunes. Likewise, no talk of the metaphysics of love, the significance thereof, can be heard over the prattle and hum, the sheer accumulation, the deluge, that is this text. It’s as if, instead of talking to everyone, everyone were talking at once, through corporate platforms, peppered with ads, and the poem takes down what dictation it can, a transcription of ambient noise, a soundtrack drowning out the human in both its tragic and hopeful forms.