Matthew Thorburn’s new book of poems is String (Louisiana State University Press, 2023). He’s also the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including The Grace of Distance (LSU Press, 2019), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Dear Almost (LSU Press, 2016), which received the Lascaux Prize. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx and New Jersey arts councils. Originally from Michigan and for many years a New Yorker, he lives with his family near Princeton, New Jersey.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Your latest collection, String, consists of a book-length sequence of poems all spoken from a young boy’s perspective as his town experiences war. The poems progress more or less chronologically before ending in hindsight; although the speaker’s voice carries a narrative arc, all poems have unique titles. Perhaps to begin, I’d love to hear you speak some about how this project came to be and the way you see a sequence of poems functioning as narrative, or separate from it?

Matthew Thorburn: Thank you for inviting me to have this conversation with you, Cate, and thanks for starting off with such a good question. Looking back, I can see how a couple of different things came together that helped get me started. First, I had been wanting to write some poems that did not come out of my direct experience, having just published a very autobiographical book called Dear Almost. On top of that, I’d been reading translations of the French poet Jean Follain, who wrote these wonderful, usually brief poems that capture fleeting but transcendent moments from a lost world. I was (and still am) fascinated by these poems, which suggested a different (to me) way of returning to the past. And then this was in late 2016 into early 2017, which felt like such a strange, dark, hopeless time. So with all this in my head, I started writing lines and phrases in my notebook about what turned out to be a time of war, and gradually in those notes I found a voice that became the voice of David, the main character in String.

Beyond that, I didn’t have a plan for this book. In fact, I intentionally did my best not to think about how these poems might fit together. I just took it poem by poem—dipping back into my notebook for a line or image that would spark another poem—and tried to stay in this world that was starting to take shape for as long as I could. I figured once I had written all the poems, then I could work out how they went together. Which turned out to be a whole process in itself! I tried the poems in many different arrangements. I wanted the order to be a little jumpy, to reflect David’s mental state, though in the end the book is roughly chronological, like you say. It starts somewhat in the middle of things, with Rosie shooting the army captain, then backs up to give a sense of what led up to that, and of who these people are and how they’re connected, and then moves forward again.

CL: This fascinates me, the idea of finding the voice of another. So often poets worry about developing their own voice, or their singular voice; in this obsession we can discount the power of persona, especially persona where the speaker is not a known cultural or historical figure. I’m also intrigued by the idea of a collection as world-building, either linguistically or literally, as yours does. At the beginning after that first scene with Rosie shooting the captain, a number of pieces do this work: “the long brown whip” of Roger the dog “stretched across the green / and yellow rug” for example, or the “sky of finger-smudged glass / spring of wild asparagus // in the wet ditch beside the road.”

Immediately David has an observant, sonic voice as he describes pipistrellos that “sew up the night / out and over trees” who “gather loose ends…zip and stir swerve strike / pluck bugs from air…” or his aunt’s and uncle’s makeshift band where “before one song could end another began.” There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to nearly every poem, which gives a certain sense of innocence; at the same time, most pieces braid nostalgia and the mourning that comes with hindsight, as with “the silence / that used to be starlings” or the piano’s “white keys broken // teeth in the gutter.”

Could you speak more about how you found David’s voice, and the role enjambment and perhaps tense, as well, played in its shape? How (or does) this tie to the way the collection jumps in time?

MT: Once I had a good handful of the poems drafted, I realized I was writing in a voice that wasn’t mine. Who was speaking in these poems? Some of the “war poems” (as I thought of them initially) were in a more omniscient-author voice, but the ones that really felt vital and interesting to me were in this first-person voice, so I focused on that. I tend to talk about “finding” David’s voice, but maybe it’s more accurate to say that as I was writing I took on this voice, then gradually figured out who it could belong to. I made up this character, and once I did that I started to imagine the world around him and the other people who lived there. As I continued to write, new poems were peopled by new characters—Mother and Father, Rosie, Uncle Albert, Aunt Adelaide, Father’s friend Jean, Doctor Saltzman, Old Schmidt the farmer. This must be what fiction writers do all the time, but for me as a poet it was completely new.

Something else I’d had in mind as I started writing these poems was to try writing with little or no punctuation. I just hadn’t done that much before—in fact, for a long time I felt resistant to the idea. But as I got into these poems, and who David was became clearer to me, this seemed to fit well with his voice. He’s someone who lived through a war, lost so many people he loved, lost the whole life he had known. String is his looking back, as an adult, and trying to untangle his memories and make some kind of sense of his life. So to me it felt natural that the poems would be a little skittery and jumpy, with fragmented language and line breaks that can create double meanings or delay the reader’s understanding in (I hope) interesting ways.

CL: I love double meanings, or the resonances and paradoxes that words working in multiple ways can afford. When, in a poem of the same name, the magician comes to town, he makes David forget “the bomb-splintered tree out back its branches scattered in a halo” as he performs the ultimate trick—and probably wish of many during war—: making himself disappear. Disappearance repeats at the end of the piece, as David recalls Grandfather with his “heavy walking stick the newspaper folded on his chair / how it did not disappear for a year it was the day he died.”

The lack of punctuation here superimposes the physical world—a particular day’s now dated paper—on the less visible but perhaps more-real sensation of loss that will not abate. I can’t think of a better description of waking to grief each day, of living inside those long seasons where “for a year it was the day he died.”

When the punctuation disappears, so too does the boundary between seeing and perceiving. Like you mentioned, fiction writers (and you, too!) build out a world as pieces get peopled with characters, but I’m particularly interested in the ways both the syntax and physical objects of the poems—mud, boots, pianos, to name a few—build out a psyche of both trauma and nostalgia. How (did) you think about crafting this emotional world, in terms of what surfaces and returns? And since these mindframes trouble and retread the same terrain, how, in individual poems or across the collection, does one resist the temptations of symbol?

MT: As I was writing these poems, it felt like working without punctuation and letting syntax operate in a way that was different (for me) fit with how I imagined David’s thoughts, emotions and memories would overlap and intersect in his mind. You hit the nail on the head: for David, going back through his experiences and telling this story is an experience of reliving the trauma of losing these people and this way of life, but also a deep nostalgia and love for them and what life was like before the soldiers came. There’s great joy in the family’s music-making, in his falling in love with Rosie, in his relationship with his parents—and I wanted to get that in the frame too. Those conflicting feelings are tangled together, and probably always will be for him, right? And so I wanted his voice and thoughts to feel a little tangled and fragmented, though I was also working hard to ensure that they were coming across in the poems in a way that does finally make sense.

As for the physical objects, those reflect my debt to Jean Follain, but even more what I have learned from (and love in) Seamus Heaney’s poems: how an object—a physical thing—can be an emotional and gravitational center that a poem radiates out from and also keeps pointing back toward. A pen. A sharpening stone. It’s a tricky thing to describe—I hope that makes sense. And you’re absolutely right: there are certain things I kept coming back to in the poems, like pianos and boots, that felt emblematic of this world and these people, the way, for example, a piano recalls Uncle Albert and his joyous music as well as the freedoms and creative expression in music. But it is also just a piano, and so can be smashed or pushed off a balcony or scored with bullet holes, but live on in David’s memory.

CL: I love the description of an emotional center that radiates and pulls back—almost like a boomerang of sorts, or a rope swing. I think these opposing forces of being cast out and bound together in the central object: string. The collection’s third section, a ten-page piece “There’s This String,” stretches out in one skinny strophe and weaves many threads in David’s life: violin strings, yarn from his aunt’s scarf, his stillborn brother’s umbilical cord, Rosie’s yellow dress, and ties for packages, pants, suitcases. The string takes on a life of its own as it tethers David to his family so they don’t get lost as they flee. Much like the syntax of the poem, it knots and unwinds, loops and doubles back; at one point the string is “the line / I’ve drawn / the one I hold / tight / that holds us / together / like cursive / lacing one / letter to the next…”

At times, I must admit I don’t always follow the string myself—sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical—at the end of the poem it becomes “a trail in / the snow / a track in / the ash / like a sign like / a clue a story a / song…”—even the vehicle requires simile to describe it—and so I wonder about what the string, as guiding metaphor here, tells us about language? Or, perhaps conversely, what language can teach us about connection, or transformation?

MT: Once again, I really appreciate your close readings of these poems, Cate. I do think of string in this book as a metaphor or symbol for language, and especially for the shape of a story or narrative. Metaphorically, this book is David’s looking back and trying to untangle the string of his story, so that he can follow it from one end to the other as a way of making sense of his life.

I trace the string in this book back to the thread in William Stafford’s poem, “The Way It Is.” That’s a poem I read years ago that just got stuck in my brain at some deep level until I needed it. (Or better to say it got stuck there because I kept needing it—and still do.) Then it became one of the sparks that got me started writing that long poem in the middle of the book, “There’s This String.” Like you say, that poem is a kind of summing up of so much of what this book is about, as it brings together characters and images from throughout the poems.

In the narrative of the book, “There’s This String” comes at the point when David and his father have gone to the train station, intending to meet his mother and make their escape. But they don’t find her there—and then David gets separated from his father. So I tend to think of this poem as David’s physical and mental wandering—terrified, alone, disoriented, without any good idea what to do next. I won’t pretend that I initially wrote the poem with this kind of conscious narrative plotting. But as I revised the poem, I did begin to think along these lines. I wanted to describe and evoke string in as many different ways as I could—with this long skinny poem looking like a string, but also acting like a long piece of string in the way it ties together all these different elements of the story.

CL: As the collection progresses vantage point changes; in a late poem the speaker recalls lying still in the woods playing dead to survive, and ends “why tell us this / because I’ve grown old because / my punishment for living / is to keep living.” It is as though these unpunctuated, run-on sentence poems are the run-on sentence of surviving and having to continue, of reliving and making (non)sense of unspeakable violence and suffering. To do so, the alternately knotted or slippery syntax, and also the elisions, evince a coping mind.

At the same time, clarity and precision matter as well, both because survivors speak where the dead no longer can, and because each loss is singular. Sometimes I get caught up in the sonics of my own lines, and in several instances I’ve had wise writers tell me particular poems have too much at stake to risk uncertainty.

Were there places in the collection that you felt it necessary to make things plain(er)? How, especially in revision, did you think about productive or non-productive ambiguity?

MT: That’s an astute observation and something I thought about a lot over the course of writing these poems and putting String together. To be honest, it was a challenge. I tend to value clarity in poems above almost everything else. I love crystal-clear images and poems that let me know, as a reader, exactly where I am—in a specific landscape or speaker’s life or whatever the particulars of a poem may be. Again, that’s a quality I recognize and love in Seamus Heaney’s poems, and something I’ve tried to learn from his way of doing it. (It’s no coincidence that String opens with a line of his: “let all things go free that have survived.”) In the poems in String, and especially in writing without punctuation, I had to force myself to let go of that a little. Not to be willfully unclear or to make things confusing (I hope), but to allow some useful ambiguity into the poems. Which I think you’re exactly right in saying can be suggestive of a coping mind—of someone who’s survived but is damaged, and who is living both within his memories and within his own present moment, in which he’s struggling to come to terms with those memories. That’s how I think of David.

In “The Stag,” which you quoted from, I thought of those questions and answers as a kind of interrogation by whomever he’s telling his story to (a doctor, a psychiatrist?)—or perhaps it’s all in David’s head, and he’s asking himself why he acted as he did (pretending to be dead). I think you can read it either way, which feels like useful ambiguity to me.

To be honest, though, it’s hard to really know if enough of what’s in my head is making it onto the page, and if what makes sense to me will make sense to someone else. But isn’t that the eternal challenge? Probably the smartest thing I did was to share all of these poems with two friends of mine, Rhett Iseman Trull and Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, who are wonderful poets and astute, sharp-eyed editors. They each read an earlier version of String and provided many helpful suggestions, so much wise advice and encouragement, including pointing out places where poems were ambiguous in an un-useful way. That helped me understand where I needed to revise certain poems, as well as to recognize places in the sequence where another poem might need to be written to bridge a gap in the story.

CL: I’m always interested to hear people’s preferences, or their writing inclinations; I, for one, like to be a little ungrounded—I go to poems because I am ungrounded, with the hopes they meet me in that place, show me how to better stand inside my awe, my terror. I suppose this is a sort of coping, too, although I wonder about time—by the end of the collection with “A Girl Was Singing” we circle back to a time before the war, to a world that exists just as vividly and, crucially, simultaneous with the losses. The present depends on the past, and perhaps vice-versa. So if a narrative chronicles time’s passage and a lyric its suspension, I’m curious what writing this collection has illuminated about that tension? What qualities (here I’m thinking, voice?) might transcend both?

MT: Well, first, I think it’s probably a good thing to be a little ungrounded when it comes to writing poems. With the poems in String, I don’t think I ever sat down and started writing with a clear idea of where that particular poem was going to go—what would happen from line to line. There would be some image or phrase that was a jumping off point for me, and I would see where it went from there. (And then revise and revise and revise.) At other times, I’ve drafted a poem with a clear idea of where I wanted that poem to go—and that can work too sometimes, but (for me, anyway) can also end up feeling a little canned or preordained.

But I love that idea of the lyric as a suspension of time. That’s so true. One of the things I thought about and that felt so novel to me when working on this book—and again, this is the stuff fiction writers must just take for granted—was that I didn’t have to tell everything that happened and I didn’t have to tell it in the order it happened. I could shuffle things around a little. So I thought a lot about whether “A Girl was Singing” should be the last poem in the book or the first. That was actually one of the last changes I made before signing off on the book with my editor, Ava. Chronologically that poem would be first, right? But lyrically it felt like the last scene in the book—and that it would be that much more poignant because by then we know all that is barreling toward David and Rosie. But they don’t. None of that has happened yet. There’s just this string of a melody between them, that first glimmer of feeling when David hears her, then leans out the window to hear her better.

For me a big part of writing this book-length sequence of poems was learning how to write a book-length sequence of poems—or learning one way to do it. And part of that was learning a bit more about structuring a narrative in poems, of playing with the order in which you tell the parts of a story. You know, I feel like I’ve always loved novels and movies that do that—that go back and show you something that happened earlier which, once you see it, somehow changes or complicates or just deepens what you’d seen before. I think sitting in a movie theater watching Pulp Fiction was the first time I really felt how powerful that can be, but there are so many examples of it in movies and books.

CL: If the poem happens from line to line, it’s incredible then, the number of times that they arrive at such poignant places—poignant as in pricking, as in a place where we as readers are pierced. “The Barn,” for example, tells of Old Schmidt and his affinity for his sheep: six stanzas recount this farmer and his muddy overalls and wiry dog and how he “was happiest / there in the dry hay // the sagging gray barn.” The poem is mainly about Schmidt calling in his sheep. It isn’t until the last two lines when the barn “burned down one night / all the sheep inside” that the full import arrives; that one understated detail changes the entire poem as we wonder if Old Schmidt was inside, too, since he often slept with his sheep. The poem ends and leaves readers reeling which requires not only knowing what to keep in and out of the frame, but also knowing when to stop. Much of this collection operates with unpunctuated poems, but our (and so David’s) thoughts never cease. What did writing these poems teach you about restraint? Was this something revealed in the drafting, line by line, or something you learned in revision? And how do you revise into or out of poems—what can you say about beginnings and endings when, as you mention, these are curated portions of the story, and every entrance could be an exit, and vice versa?

MT: I love that idea of what makes it into the frame and what doesn’t, that way of looking at a poem. That’s something I thought about a lot with these poems, especially as I was working to sequence them as a manuscript. I also focused a lot on the spaces between poems, keeping an eye out for places where it felt like another poem was needed to bridge too big of a gap in the story, as well as moments where something might have happened (in this fictional world) but didn’t need to be in the frame for this sequence of poems. With “The Barn,” in particular, I also wanted to convey the experience of normal life suddenly being upended—set aflame—by these invading soldiers. How quickly that can happen—in a poem, across the span of a line break. And once that happened, that often felt like the moment for a poem to end, and leave the sense of what happens next, or in between poems, to the reader.

I’ll also just say again: I drafted the poems line by line, and loved that journey of discovery, especially in poems like “The Barn,” which serve partly as introductions or portraits of characters. But I also spent a lot of time revising these poems—and loved that too—sometimes widening the frame, but probably more often cropping the scene further. Overall I tended to pare things down, cutting rather than adding. (“There’s this String” is the one big exception, as that long poem seemed to get a little longer each time I revised it.) Partly this urge to pare back came from a feeling of wanting to suggest the violence and horror of what happens, but also be very careful not to be overly graphic or allow the violence depicted to feel gratuitous. As a reader, I admire poets who can convey great emotion through the use of restraint, and that’s something I aspired to too.

CL: That instant can happen so quickly, and at the same time continue happening, forever—in the face of death, especially when sudden, or recently here in the face of wildfire—disbelief can feel eternal to the point where there appears to be no “next.” That void is both restraint and silence, to me at least—sometimes it’s not that we’re holding back but that what we must face is unlanguageable, and the best poems, to me at least, get at those moments when words will not suffice. In terms of best poems though, if you were to meet a reader who had never really experienced poetry before, what piece, of yours and/or another’s would you share first?

MT: Unlanguageable—what a perfect word to describe what we’re after in poems: to find words for what has no words, or didn’t until we sat down with a piece of paper and a pen. You know, your question—to choose one poem—could seem like an impossible question, but I have an answer for you almost immediately. If I share a poem with someone who doesn’t really read poetry, what I want them to do is fall in love, so that they want to read more poems. So I think about what made me fall in love with poetry. I’d hand them a copy of “The Rain Stick” by Seamus Heaney. (You can read it here. Better yet, you can listen to Heaney read it here.) Here’s a poem I love, a poem I can read again and again—and one that is doing that very work you describe: finding words for something that is essentially wordless: a sound. Heaney is such a great poet for bringing objects to life, like I talked about earlier, finding the meaning and story and music in a thing. Here it’s a dried cactus stalk you can “upend” so that the seeds and whatnot inside fall through it and make a sound like rain. A rain stick—it’s a handheld metaphor. And in Heaney’s hands, also a source of aural delight: “Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash”. The rain stick makes “a music that you never would have known / to listen for.” Which to me is a perfect definition of a poem. It also describes so wonderfully the experience of reading a great poem: “You are like a rich man entering heaven / Through the ear of a raindrop.” What more could a reader ask for?