Vanishing magnificently, with Matt Riker
Vanishing magnificently, with Matt Riker
Two poems, with commentary, from our first author of 2023
It’s about time a Valley Press book appeared on this blog, and Matt Riker’s The Magnificent Vanishing Act, our first publication of the year, seemed the obvious place to start. I asked Matt to nominate the ‘hit singles’ from his collection, and you’ll find them in full below, along with commentary on those poems and writing in general.
For the cover, Matt was determined to use ‘The Blue Rigi, Sunrise’ by J. M. W. Turner, painted in 1842, as seen above (original photo © Tate Images). I asked him to explain its appeal, and the connection with the title:
I wanted a cover that expressed some form of distance … Turner is one of my all-time favourite painters; I’ve always been fascinated by his use of light and colour and his drift into abstraction and, for lack of another word, vanishing. Also, I loved the colour scheme; I wanted something in cool, pale colours. Then, the subject matter: the painting is set in Switzerland, where I live, and it shows the Rigi, at the foot of which beautiful mountain my partner lived when I got to know her. I remember climbing the mountain with her in the summer we got together: it’s a magical place. So the painting combines several aspects of my life and identity.
Matt nominated the collection’s five-part opening poem, ‘Starfish’, as being both the closest to his heart and the recipient of the most individual praise. (That may be a coincidence, but if so, it’s one I’ve seen many times before – and something I feel many poets reading this will have experienced with their own collections.) Naturally, it’s also the poem Matt opens his readings with. It juxtaposes nature’s resilience (more on that later) with human vulnerability, finally bringing together the two threads to unsettling and poignant effect.
Before we read it though, to briefly digress: I was delighted to see that the host for this new blog, Substack, has a feature called a ‘poetry block’, which allows a writer to use multiple tab indents and preserve them across devices and inboxes – though it doesn’t provide an automatic hanging indent yet, which for me is the holy grail of digital poetry publishing. (I expect
and his team are on the case.) To say it’s rare for poetry to be considered on a general-use writing platform would be an understatement; I’ve never seen a hint of it anywhere else, so thank you for that.Time, then, to put the ‘poetry block’ to the test –
Starfish
i.
At low tide on an afternoon we walked along the beach and found a colony of starfish half-hidden in the sand.
We picked up one of them, then more and let them crawl across our hands and arms. We marvelled at their alien symmetry, the toughness of their mottled skin.
No brain to steer them—still their many feet marched on in aimless unison, eager little soldiers in translucent white battalions.
ii.
That very hour you lay thousands of miles away, supine on the table in the theatre, dead still, the baroque chambers of your skull exposed as latexed hands gripped razor blades and cut.
iii.
I walk into your ward. Travel back in time. Inside me there’s a catalogue of moments. I feel I have forgotten something that I maybe never knew. I’ll try to talk, divert you for some time.
At your door I take a breath to brace myself but pause. My hand resting on the clean steel handle feels detached.
iv.
A boxer’s helmet covers your trepanned skull. One arm hangs limp like the lost limb of a starfish on that beach. The strip light makes you look so pale it seems that I could look right through. Your skin’s thin veil is holding you
together. One side of you refuses all commands. You lie askew as I embrace you awkwardly.
vi.
We most resemble ships. There is a wind that moves us but resists prediction. The sea is full of wonders but will not be tamed. The ships seem strong, but look how many wrecks.
On the origins of this poem, Matt said:
‘Starfish’, or rather, as with all my poems, the first version of it, came about when I was living in Bangkok a few years ago. I was spending Christmas alone with my two young sons – I had recently separated – on an island off the west coast of Thailand. Only days before I had received the news that one of my closest friends had had a stroke. It was not clear whether he would survive or not, and I had just decided to fly back to Switzerland to visit him.
It was on Christmas Eve that we were walking on the beach, the tide was out and, as the poem says, we discovered these starfish in the shallow water of the beach. It was magical, though I also had a very strong feeling of coincidence, of several things going on at the same time and being related in an uncanny but hard-to-define way. The starfish seemed to be the link (at least metaphorically) between those two experiences. At the same time, I somehow felt that everything was shaky and uncertain, and I had no idea where I was heading. That was how the poem came into being, as an expression of that.
I didn’t work directly on Matt’s book myself, as it was produced during my ‘sabbatical’ last year, so it would be remiss not to briefly mention Peter Barnfather, who so brilliantly designed and edited this volume during his time running Valley Press. In our interview, Matt praised Peter’s efficiency, dedication and precision, adding: “He was always quick to give an answer to a question” – a value many publishers underestimate, myself included.
I asked Matt why he writes, and his answer was quite poetic in itself:
As I move through the world, there are things that I see or experience that I want to express in words. The process of turning these things into words also changes the experiences themselves and my perception of them; therefore, I’d say that writing is also a way of shaping my own world or view of it. I take pleasure in complexity and writing about the world somehow increases its complexity and beauty for me.
However, he writes for enjoyment too, something every writer must try to preserve. (It’s part of my philosophy for this blog; absolutely no posts will be written out of duty, the assumption being that if I’m having fun, you might be as well.) Here’s Matt on the subject of writerly enjoyment – and otherwise:
There is a lot of pleasure involved in creating a poem, discussing it in my workshop (there is no poem in my collection that hasn’t gone through that process), revising and improving it. It’s also frustrating, sometimes, especially when I can’t get part of a poem right, but it generally gives me a lot of pleasure. Part of that is also the pleasure of using and thinking about words, their meaning, their sound and their origins. All that becomes difficult when I have too much work and too little headspace. That’s when I also need the pressure of having to come up with something for a workshop, or a deadline, for example.
Environmental concerns are never far from the top of the agenda at Valley Press, and the title poem of Matt’s collection offers a fresh way of communicating the madness of ecological harm. With a similar message to Douglas Adams’ book Last Chance to See, it’s a touch melancholic (no attempt to “leave them laughing” this time), but the skill with which the idea is executed is second-to-none; this is a 10 out of 10 for me.
The Magnificent Vanishing Act
The clowns are done, the acrobats, the aerialist hanging from her flying trapeze, the juggler spinning plates on sticks, swaying on his one-wheeled bicycle, and the contortionist, reptilian in her twisting sequinned dress. Rapturous applause. The director steps forward to announce: This will be our last act for tonight. In a top hat and a suit of midnight satin, his white shirt gleaming in the light, the magician enters. Above the sawdust of the ring, motes swirl in the light. Three glass bowls are carried in and set out on a table in a row. In the first, a pair of bright green frogs, skin grainy, eyes silver in the arc lamps’ glare, the black slit of their pupils violent, a gash. With a flourish of the orchestra, the great magician flings a cloak over the bowl, removes it and the frogs are gone. In the next bowl, water magnifies the plated body of a fish, firm and muscular and tight. The floodlight glances off its scales. Fins balancing, it remains suspended until the cloak descends again. And then it vanishes. In the last bowl there’s a bird, beaked with ivory, its feathers red-tipped, blue-black, metallic, its dark claws clicking on the glass. It croaks. The cloak falls and is lifted. Nothing remains. And then the great magician bows and pulls the cloak across himself. The audience holds its breath. Losing all support, the cloak flutters empty to the ground. In the circus tent the lights go out.
The origins of this poem, as Matt recounts, come from a more familiar experience than ‘Starfish’:
I had just watched David Attenborough’s film A Life on Our Planet and was incredibly moved and sad. Over the next few days the film and the feelings it generated resonated inside me, and at some point the metaphor of man as a circus magician that makes himself vanish after having made all the other beautiful things disappear came to me. From there on, I started to develop the idea into a poem about how we deal with the beauty of the natural world around us. Interestingly, no one else but me seems to get that [precise message] from reading the poem, which is of course fine with me too…
Matt’s collection was published in February, and is available through our own Valley Press bookshop and everywhere else books are sold. By the way, he’s also a keen martial artist, but I neglected to ask him about that – next time, perhaps!
Many thanks for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed this format of “author profile/interview”; I will probably try a few alternatives before settling down, and will appreciate any feedback. Otherwise, I will see you later in the week for the next post.