27 Questions with FARID MATUK
1. Hey Farid, got a favorite writing prompt?
Pay attention.
Photo by Roberto Guerra
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2. Hey Farid, which foreign language poet do you most wish you could read in the original?
Paul Celan, though I’m not sure what that original language was for him or if anyone else ever spoke it.
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3. Hey Farid, who’s the coolest looking poet from the past?
Cesar Vallejo.
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4. Hey Farid, how does being married to another poet affect your work?
I get to live and work beside an amazing reader for my stuff, though amidst household, parenting, and our own teaching and writing, we don’t get to connect as readers and writers nearly as often as I’d like. We’re working on it.
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5. Hey Farid, any advice on how to remain vulnerable as an artist in a political atmosphere where it can be dangerous to be vulnerable?
This is so personal. I think a lot of the poets whose work I love already write themselves into a space of powerful vulnerability. It’s the work of the page. But the page is never just the page. In her poem “I the People” Alice Notley wrote “And we are the masters/ of hearing and saying/ at the double edge of body and/ breath.” I think another word for the mastery she’s talking about is vulnerability.
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6. Hey Farid, what’s your submission process like?
It just varies depending on what else I’m doing with my work. I’ve written a lot and revised a lot in the last two years while working on two separate manuscripts, but I’ve sent out very little of that work because I’ve been focused on making the best books I could make. It’s been really compulsive and intense, so I’m grateful a handful of editors have solicited work from me over this time. Each submission has been a chance to place a little bit of a manuscript under a particular light. The anticipatory shame of putting out rough work sometimes pushes me into bolder revisions, usually all to the good.
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7. Hey Farid, got a favorite famous poet anecdote?
I like the one about the poets who dismantled patriarchy and white supremacy and settler capitalism.
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8. Hey Farid, got a favorite lyricist? (or musician?) Care to share a video?
I think Dan Bejar in his Destroyer project is pretty amazing (shout out to my friend Lucas Anderson for turning me on to him). I’m a 90s kid so Phife Dawg, QTip, and Jarobi White of A Tribe Called Quest are still favorites.
A much, much less popular or defensible favorite is the British artist Tanita Tikaram, particularly across her first three or so albums. I’m not saying the music is good or relevant, but the associative rapture of her lyrics made a big impression on me as a teen. I’m proud to say one of my hero poets, Bhanu Kapil, is the only person I’ve ever met who recognized Tanita’s work on my car stereo, though I can’t say Bhanu would endorse the work, you’ll have to ask her. Oh, and Frank Black of Pixies.
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9. Hey Farid, got a favorite quote about poetry?
Besides the lines I quoted from Notley above, I like what the writer and painter Philip Trussell said: “Poetry can be a record of an attention still willing to be surprised.”
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10. Hey Farid, does your day job make its way into your poetry?
I teach at the University of Arizona, so I get to read and write with really talented graduate and undergraduate students. I don’t write about teaching, but certainly I’m immersed in a series of ongoing conversations about poetry and ideas, so all that feeds my work.
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11. Hey Farid, how does the natural environment make its way into your art?
I hope it’s in the turns of my syntax and pulse of my syllables.
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12. Hey Farid, where’s your ideal place to write? Care to share a photo?
The Atacama desert in northern Chile.
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13. Hey Farid, how does your neighborhood affect your poems?
My neighborhood is in the flight path of an air force base’s training flights. I don’t flinch because they don’t shoot at me. So my spiritual and art practice is to hate my life in a loving way.
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14. Hey Farid, what’s something poetic about Tucson?
2) University of Arizona Poetry Center
3) POG
4) Casa Libre
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15. Hey Farid, any artwork that inspires you to write?
Anything by Daniel Joseph Martinez, ASCO, Jenny Holzer, those intense durational performances of Hesieh, all of Kara Walker but specially her texts! I’m grateful to the poet and performer Raquel Gutierrez who recently turned me on to the photographic work of Laura Aguilar.
IMAGE: “Grounded #111,” 2006, by Laura Aguilar.
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16. Hey Farid, have you done any collaborations with other poets (or artists? or fill in the blank)?
I got to write in response to a piece by Joseph Beuys at the Dallas Museum of Art. That was awesome. But no active, real-time collaborations.
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17. Hey Farid, any poets you think should be household names in poetry households?
Susan Briante. John Wieners. Gwendolyn Brooks. Layli Longsoldier. Roque Dalton. Bhanu Kapil. Hoa Nguyen. Solmaz Sharif. Alice Notley.
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18. Hey Farid, if you could insert yourself as a member into any historical art/literary “scene” what would it be?
Are you fucking kidding me? No thanks.
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19. Hey Farid, got any go-to revision techniques?
Wait. Be grateful when anyone invites you to read work-in-progress in front of strangers. Listen for your own embarrassment.
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20. Hey Farid, what’s the last non-poetry book you loved?
Willful Subjects, by Sara Ahmed.
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21. Hey Farid, what’s the last great poetry book you read?
I only read great poetry. Right now I’m catching up to Sarah Vap’s 2007 American Spikenard (Iowa) and I’m being rewired by Harmony Holiday’s brand new Hollywood Forever (Fence). Eric Sneathen’s Snail Poems (Krupskaya) has also been an exciting recent find.
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22. Hey Farid, what’s the first poem you remember blowing your mind?
I don’t know the name of it but it was by Archibald MacLeish, I was 15 or so.
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23. Hey Farid, could you tell us about the first poem you wrote?
It was awesome, kind of alluded to the famous rainbow bridge poem that people get when their pets die even though I’d never read that poem. I was in fifth grade.
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24. Hey Farid, what’s best piece of writing advice you ever got?
Stay.
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25. Hey Farid, any books on poetry you’d recommend?
Poets on Teaching, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
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26. Hey Farid, what do you read when you’re not reading poetry?
Currently I’m reading bits and pieces of what Fred Moten calls the ongoing tradition of black study, though that study exists in real time and across various modes of practice that extend far beyond books.
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27. Hey Farid, are there are any metaphysical or spiritual ideas that inform your approach to poetry?
Like I said, I’m just trying to hate myself in a loving way.
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[This Q&A was conducted in April 2017 and first published, via Facebook and Twitter, in May 2017]
A Dozen Questions.FARID MATUK
A Dozen Nothing 