Matthew Tuckner – Conversation & Three Poems

for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy

Carlie Hoffman & Tiffany Troy: Styled like museum wall labels, Matthew Tuckner’s ekphrastic poems look at how artists create the optical illusion of the horizon and the awe in representing the passage of time. Tuckner’s speaker grieves the loss of a friend, makes his way to the American cafe where “there is a discount on avocado toast and shaved ice,” and wraps his head around “objects too viscous for the mind to wrap around.” In that way, Tuckner’s framing of each artwork reflects as much about the artist’s intention as the speaker who is drawn to the artwork.

Writers often build their own creative canon over time, and here, all three poems in the feature are inspired by an artwork in a New York museum or gallery. How would you describe the origins or influences of your language and voice as a writer?

Matthew Tuckner: Thank you, Carli and Tiffany, for these questions! I definitely agree with you when it comes to the notion that a poem’s creative canon changes over time. In writing the poems from my second collection, Cloud Chamber, that appear in The American Wing, I tried to widen and expand my voice to better actuate the ekphrastic responses that the poems memorialize. Thus, these poems feature stitched within them descriptions of the artworks, snippets of quotes from the artists themselves, even quotations from critical texts surrounding the artwork. I really see these poems as collage-like in this sense, composed of different kinds of rhetoric while the stitch or the cut itself usually remains hard to locate in the poem. To me, it is imperative that a poet always attempts to change their approach from poem to poem and book to book, and this was one method I experimented with after completing my first collection, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

CH & TT: Which poets, writers, artists, or musicians have shaped your identity as a poet? 

MT: I really feel that my poems are, increasingly these days, records of my aesthetic encounters with music, visual art, film, other poetry, etc. Which is to say, I feel that my poems are always ekphrastic, even if they don’t seem to be so on the surface. That said, my influences change from day to day. When working on Cloud Chamber, I was immersed in the paintings of Gerhard Richter, the drawings of Vija Celmins, and the criticism of John Berger. I was reading and re-reading the poems of Karen Solie. Currently, I am working on a project that engages topically with the music of Gustav Mahler. Yet, stylistically, the project seems to be a reckoning with the influence of Louise Glück’s late work—particularly the books Averno and A Village Life—on my conception of the speaker in lyric poetry. So as the influences change, the poetry seems to change as well. 

CH & TT: Is there a poem or poetry collection you believe everyone should read at least once—and why?

MT: This is a really good question. The first book of contemporary poems that I ever read was Lighthead by Terrance Hayes, a book whose idiom and formal rigor still astound me to this day. I see Hayes as one of our greatest living writers, and I credit that book’s vertiginous storm of music with introducing me to what poetry can be, and how it can continue to change as a poet finds more exciting, innovative ways to keep their poems coming. Hayes is a poet who, to me, feels truly representative of a particular American poetic ideal, in the sense that his work is a true admixture of schools and approaches. Sometimes his poems feel motivated by influences in the New York School. Sometimes they stem from the Black Arts Movement. Other times they are pure Oulipian language experiments. To read Hayes is to get a sense of what American poetry is and can be. 

CH & TT:  What can poetry offer people today? What personal meaning does poetry hold for you?

MT: Like most poets before me, I sometimes feel ambivalent about my chosen art form. Does it, in fact, make nothing happen? Recently, I’ve begun to feel quite the opposite. I am excited by poetry of the contemporary moment that feels like it can truly be, and do, anything. Poetry can be criticism. Poetry can be a historical record. Poetry can be fiction. Its utility directly corresponds to its elasticity, and I feel that its elasticity is endless. For me, poetry has served several of these purposes and more. It has helped me process profound grief, personal and global. It has served as a receptacle for my obsessions, my fears, my confusions. It has taken me across the country and back. There is no letting it go at this point. 

CH & TT: What are your hopes for the future of American poetry and its place in our culture?

Similar to my response in regard to Lighthead, I find that our contemporary poetic moment is so exciting because of its formlessness, its bravado, the willingness of contemporary poets to read widely and pull from whatever school or formal approach works best for any poem at any given time. At the same time, I am fully aware that poetry, in terms of its broader cultural saturation, is imperiled. Often, when people learn that I am a poet, they follow up by asking if I’m worried about ChatGPT taking my job. Nonetheless, poetry has always thrived regardless of the broader public’s ignorance of its power and import. And the average person, whether they read it or not, seems to like to know that there is a poet somewhere fiddling with a line break, or attempting to preserve that which is fleeting in the urn of a sonnet. They seem to know that they would suffer from the lack of what is found there if it were gone forever. 

A Gathering of Time

Cy Twombly 
(Oil on Canvas)
2003

Painting the sea is a problem of sky & distance. To solve it, the artist used his hands to meld the edges of water & atmosphere, applying an excess of color, red & yellow dollops that connote the idea of boats. It is the splatters of white that tell the story of how the seconds move across the ocean, or how the ocean rides on the back of the seconds, revealing themselves in the shudder of a wave, a sputter of foam, the sudden change in texture achieved by bunching up the canvas with a micro-fiber cloth. Painting the sea is a problem of time management. In the months after the loss of a friend, the clocks were mere ornaments. I thought about empires & glaciers, their gradual splintering into a constituency of atoms. I tried to picture it. I read a slim book on phenomenology, where the movement from the present to the future was described as horizontal. It is a series of inhales, the book said. It is the mold conquering an old apple. The moment of silence between two clangs of a church bell.

The Allegory of Faith

Johannes Vermeer
(Oil on Canvas)
1670-1672

Back beyond the gallery dedicated to the origins of landscape, it hangs in a room of domestic still lives. You have come to trace her, the woman in a blue satin dress, her sandaled foot perched on a globe. You will describe them, the shapes moving through your hand & onto the page. Tread lightly. Follow the path back through time, beginning at the entrance on Fifth Avenue, the doors bracketed by polychromic sculptures. Byzantium is to the left. The busts stand cloistered, lacking arms & legs. History is holding the missing pieces as ransom. In the bedroom, ripped from the Sagredo Palace, it arrives in waves, the smell of dead skin, the dust floating near the cherubs wrapped in garlands of flowers. You could live forever here, shrouded in amber light, rushing through the Middle Ages, a saint cradling his own severed head in the crook of his elbow, the ruins of columns smothered in masks & birds, pouring up the stairs past portraits of manifest destiny, the banks of the Colorado River cleared of all buffalo. In the American Cafe, there is a discount on avocado toast and shaved ice. Trade & Transformation, Faith & Love, the rooms accumulate by theme. Urban Luxuries & Revolution. Sacred Icons & Immersive Interiors. After all painting is destroyed in the Baroque period, enter the gallery & approach the portrait. Try to hold the breadth of it in your eye: the bible crushing a snake, the clear orb made of glass hanging from a blue ribbon in which the room is reflected, the earth forced to hold up the weight of the woman, the woman forced to balance on the edge of the earth. It is a small room. It is a small room in a godless world where the sun is setting. You could live forever here. I am begging you to leave.

Burning Petroleum

Robert Morris
(Lithograph on Woven Paper)
1969

The ignited plumes of oil in the print look like architecture. Towers of sandstone & shale. Highrises constructed on the flow of a stream that, in the plan for the artwork, is constantly fed by a storage tank in the middle of two mounds of earth that define the borders of the sculpture. One must stand beyond them, always beyond them, watching the earth burning from afar. I’ve read the theories. That there are objects too viscous for the mind to wrap its head around: capitalism, black holes, a sea of styrofoam, the oil spill that dyed the Gulf of Mexico rust-gold, causing mass cardiac arrest in the schools of bluefin tuna, the oil spill the satellites made miniature from a distance. I’ve tried to turn the spills into sentences. It is a gray cloud, a cobweb, a funnel of wind, inching further & further into the water. A brainless organism, all tentacles. A glob of bloody spit in a toilet bowl. I can feel it. The blurry fact of it. A mass in the planet’s gut. A speck of dust, stuck in the mind’s eye. I am getting closer now. I have never been so far away.

About the author:

Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where he is Managing Editor of Western Humanities Review. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Best New Poets, among others. He is the author of two collections: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Four Way Books, 2025) and Cloud Chamber (Four Way Books, 2028).

Author’s Web Page: https://fourwaybooks.com/site/matthew-tuckner/