An Interview with Matt Turner
Clara Davis

Clara Davis: In the absence of page numbers or a table of contents, the time stamp titles in 6AMING (Antiphony, 2026) provide an alternative linearity, one which does not move at an entirely predictable pace. I'm curious about how you see your practice of assigning these small poems to small periods of time in relation to how they come together, into what you call "a more comprehensive game"?

Matt Turner: In the book I note that the poems were mostly written early in the morning—and, to be honest, it was often a competition with myself to see what I could write before I went to work. Of course, the real “game” was whether I could force myself into a state conducive to writing. Since I was interested in process over a refined product, and the ways that process was the poetic act (and not the recorded and revised act), this really required a lot from me, and I had to summon all my resources every time I sat down with my notebook—whether it was 6:30 in the morning or 3 or in the middle of the night. As it went on, though, I was able to play with it more.

A friend pointed out to me that there was a lot of overlap in the times, giving the impression that the poems weren’t only records of the times I wrote them, but were composed so that the poems folded into each other—creating layers within the individual pieces that were only revealed in the surrounding pages. Although this isn’t what I intended when I began, around halfway into the composition of the book was when I became aware that it was happening, and became more self-conscious about it. So I decided to exploit thematic and musical echoes in ways that might otherwise have only happened accidentally—a process that was certainly more athletically varied and sustained than the first impulse of the book, which was writing in short sprints.

CD: I think those echoes are part of what make the collection so compelling—they seem to be building and destabilizing a space at the same time. I noticed a recurrent concern with the process of entering. I want to know more about how you see the beginnings and endings of poems as they construct and deconstruct their world?

MT: Funny, I hadn’t noticed that. But it doesn’t surprise me, either. Take a building, and the way that entry happens: you can walk in one of the doors, or maybe through a loading dock or stairwell entrance, and if you’re locked out (or breaking in) you can use a window. It’s the same with leaving: each point of egress has a specific function, although those functions are occasionally merged or violated. Poems aren’t too different, or at least I don’t think of them as different. It’s like there’s a blueprint marking the official way to get in, via the title or first line, and then there’s an exit on the opposite side, when the text ends like a wall and you suddenly find yourself outside it, surrounded by a blindingly white field. You look back, but the door is now locked shut, and the only way back in is either to go around to the front door, or break in wherever there’s an opening—say, between stanzas.

Again, like a building, poems don’t build themselves, they need people for that. But once they are constructed, they tend to take on different functions according to the needs of those reading or using them. For me, the notion that a poem has a definite beginning or end is just a fairly dull fact of the matter, like doors on buildings—without them, they become something else. But sometimes we don’t look at those parts, and focus on something else, rearranging the order of the poem from the inside. Since the poems in 6AMING are, first, records of the time they were written (and literary artifacts only in the derivative sense that these records had to record something), they weren’t constructed around beginnings and ends. The content of the writing obviously reveals what I was thinking about or feeling at the time of writing—another fairly dull fact. More importantly, the poems in 6AMING are themselves different kinds of blueprints, post hoc, and in excess of what is on the page in front of us.

CD: In addition to elements like doors, your poems feature references to the surveillance involved in entering and exiting a country. How do you see these images modifying the material sense of navigation and measurement that happens in parallel throughout the book?

MT: I’m very interested in doors as the technology that gets you from point A to point B (in life, as well as in narratives), but also because they apply a framing to what we see or imagine can been seen through the door, or that may exist on the other side of the door.

Part of that is surveilling, and this works from both sides of the door. We all know we’re being surveilled, often very formally as part of constructing methods of enforcement of codes of behavior. This is somewhat commonplace, I suppose, though a real concern of mine, especially as I get older and feel that so many of the existential aspects of my life—the decisions I make—are only in my own hands for maybe a fraction of a second. When Virginia Woolf said, in The Waves, “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour,” she described the totalizing effect of this elaborate image that we live in. Much of 6AMING is directly concerned with this.

The poems are always implicated in a system of judgement and the measurement of value, and they reflect that back through their language. Entering or exiting a country—it’s the same, just a dance of perception and power. I’m not sure when I became so pessimistic about this, but the poems do at least try to ameliorate things, if imperceptibly and somewhat secretly, through the acknowledgement of the compositional process. The poems on the page aren’t afterthoughts, but flickers of the evasion of surveillance, and of borders as well.

CD: Earlier you called the poems « blueprints. » Can you talk more about the role of shapes and numbers and measurement in the poems? I am especially drawn to lines in "5:34-5:38," where you write "you want the angle to break / into several contradictions, angles / and then you will measure them"

MT: Of course. The best way to think about that may be to consider how the lines work, or, maybe, don’t work—there’s no common practice for end-stopping or enjambing them, except maybe my hatred of the common practice of enjambing lines while keeping each line discrete, as if each line were a little sentiment that in the end would add up to a larger statement of gravitas. I’m not interested in that way of imagining or practicing the writing of poetry. I think it’s hilariously self-congratulatory. So in that sense I’m not a big-tent poet; I’m not capacious enough to amicably include everything in my worldview. Possibly for that reason I’m more interested in ideas that break down under pressure, forms that are weak, and internal divisions—in the unitary object of the poem as well as in the self.

What’s the opposite of the type of poem that I’m reacting to? One that hides a bit. One that jettisons representational images and sentiments at key moments and instead includes abstractions or becomes abstract, trying to render visible the process of thought, even the process of perception. From the time signature titles of the poems down to the line breaks, I’m trying to show the composition process at work. By using notation—times, measurements—and by calling attention to discontinuities and the ideas that motivate the work, I’m trying to take the mask of mastery and control away.

But it’s also a different kind of sensuality, one that emphasizes different aptitudes and different kinds of attraction. I’m thinking of the artist Gu Dexin, who, upon realizing he really couldn’t draw a human figure, proceeded to take precise measurements of the shape of his body and create an outline or blueprint that way. I like that way of rendering the self for people to see: a series of measurements that people can use as a model for their own practice, if they so wish. It’s more inclusive when it comes to different ways of understanding and feeling what the world even consists of.

CD: Do you see your work as a performance?

MT: That’s a hard question for me to answer. I’ve certainly gestured in that direction––specifically in the essay I wrote for Cha about 6AMING. And I’m vocal about my enthusiasm for the performing arts, particularly music. And writing as an activity can certainly be a performance. But that’s theoretical. When I think of “performance” per se, the first things that come to mind are performances in front of an audience, and the performance of identity, whether in public or to oneself—to the degree that there’s any self to perform to. So I’d have to say no, I don’t think of my work as performance, since I’m not interested in engaging any of those subjects directly, as themes. But to be clear, I do readings, and like doing them, and those are performances in the strict sense. And writing is, for me, something very deliberate—I’d argue that’s another performance. These are conventions, even habits. The kind of performances I’m attracted to, not the ones I lazily think of first… but maybe I’m convincing myself, as I write this, that my work really is performance. At least in a low-key way.

I gave a reading a couple of years ago at the Brooklyn Public Library with maybe a dozen people—one of those events of goodwill that you’re happy to participate in, even if you don’t exactly fit in, though in this case I was also there to read my translations of Wan Xia alongside him. So I was there first performing my role as translator (a pretty lowly role, psychologically close to being comedic, just ask any translator), and then later I got up again to read my own poems. When I was reading alongside Wan Xia—he’s got a big, projecting voice, and gesticulates widely, so even if you don’t know what he’s saying you get the idea—I was just reading along in the spirit of the footnote, not monotone but, in comparison to his reading style, pretty close. When I read my own poems, it was of course different. My last book was about to come out, so I was reading poems from it. Some are funny, some are pretty loud, but one I read, called “Shore,” has some onomatopoeia in it, and is a pretty quiet poem, a sort of landscape poem. It went over like a rattle in a janitor’s closet; no one noticed. But I was really proud of that poem, maybe more than any other in the book. Afterwards I kept asking myself: Should I have performed it differently? I realized it would have been quite difficult to.

Maybe performance is the constant negotiation of circumstances, even as that negotiation tends toward reification. If so, when I sit down to write, it’s something I try to move past—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write. I’d feel like I had no route through the forest. Abstractions already inhabit us, as well as constitute our living environment, so in the process of writing I usually concentrate on those things in the world, including ideas, that I’m either attracted to or that I’m trying to understand better. And although I earlier in this interview talked about incorporating abstractions in my writing, it’s because they are so powerful as tools, not because I’m particularly interested in the history of ideas. Sometimes I do push past the initial attraction or difficulty to its formation or circumstances, but sometimes I like to let the objects of fascination wait, and shimmer or ripple amidst the fields of detritus. And then all that detritus might take on different qualities—performing for me, I suppose. In 6AMING, then, the poems would be performances of writing. I think the act of writing can, to a degree, take precedence over the finished thing. That’s what 6AMING is a document of.

Finally, when I’m writing, I’m doing it at home, in front of no one—I’m just a lump of ideas and sensations maneuvering through images—and it’s only later that people read the poems or see me read them. I hope they like them. And now, after this interview, I can also say I hope they like these little performances, as quiet as they are.