Matt Thomas is a smallholder farmer, engineer, and Pushcart nominated poet. His work has appeared recently in Copihue Poetry and Hiram Review and is upcoming in Dreich Magazine and Halfway Down the Stairs. Disappearing by the Math, a full-length collection, was published by Silver Bow in 2024. He lives with his family in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia.
You can read King of the Road in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Our house is on a small mountain. The Shenandoah River runs at the bottom of the mountain, and across the river we have a small farm. I drive every morning from the house to the farm to do chores and feed the animals. It’s a beautiful drive, and I’m always a little dreamy. This particular morning I had things to do in town afterward, and the transition from the dirt roads and river to town for some reason felt like aging. I imagined the shadows of the trees on the mountain aging in the flat, treeless town. I thought about how I’m always moving, from chore to chore, driving somewhere, doing something. How busy-ness is such a weird way to choose to spend our lives yet we don’t know any other way; there are always things to do, bills to be paid, miles to cover. It reminded me as a kid of cruising the local loop – what a silly way to spend time! Yet we loved it, because there was affection, love promised somewhere along the way, other kids to make you feel wanted. I thought about how our days are burned like gasoline cruising a loop, whatever loop we choose. And how a day is a kind of lifetime, start to finish.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
The honest answer is that this is my only poetic form. I’m a one trick pony. I push the boundaries sometimes but this form is pretty much the way I’m built to write. My daughter is also a poet and does some cool, outrageous things. I always want to write like that but then it comes out like this.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Weirdly, Jill Bialosky’s The Players is a touchstone. Although it’s specifically about her kids playing baseball, it just speaks to me. Maybe because my childhood was so wonderful and terrible and is kind of the house I’ll always live in. And baseball was a part of it.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I’d probably be a really bad painter.
How do you revise your work?
I love this question because to me, the work of poetry – and all craft – is an iterative process. You write a bit, then write some more, change things, sometimes move the middle to the top end to the middle and try to arrive at something that when you look at it looks back at you in a way that you expect it to. I’ve built stone walls around our property and it’s the same craft.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Writing a poem that I’ll like just as much a year from now as I do this moment. And if I’m honest I’ll also admit that I like publishing very much. I did a book-length collection, and I’m happy to have written and published it, but I like individual submissions / acceptances to journals and magazine so much more. It’s rewarding to get to know editors and other writers journal by journal. Like this interview – so much fun!
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Literally any kind of music. I love classical, indie, country, metal, pop, whatever. And for some reason, the Beach Boys are the cornerstone of what I consider to be ‘good’ or ‘quality’ music. Brian Wilson is a genius. I could (and probably will) listen to Pet Sounds a million more times and I’ll never be bored by it.
What are you working on now?
I work poem to poem. My last collection was kind of sad, in a ‘sad that makes you ultimately hopeful’ kind of way. These more recent poems are different. I think I may be over my mid-life crisis ha.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Always an observation. That’s the gift that poetry has given me; how to see. It’s a never-ending practice. I’ll always want to see more, be present for more. I’ll see something interesting, and the the poem will glom around it. As a farmer and engineer, I’m very aware of life cycle. Everything I see comes back to that. Living things and machines both. Every second of the day is filled with heart-rending, mind-exploding clues to some larger mystery. I have no idea what that is. But the clues are so beautiful. Just watching two strangers talking on the street, the way they move their hands, meet each other’s eyes or not, the way that the trees near them move in the wind while they talk; it’s amazing. We write and direct and paint and sing and try as we will we can only get so close. There’s a LOT in the space between us and the thing we’re trying to understand. It’s like dark matter.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Every art form but I’m visual, so I find visual art and film most inspiring.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I have a full-time job, a family, and also manage a farm. So I’m busy. But because the way I write is iterative, I don’t mind writing in the margins of my day, in small bits. When I have time, I write. When I don’t, I take notes on my phone. Writing is like breathing. Nobody asks, when do you have time to breathe? Of course, you breathe all the time. That’s how I write.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Two recent films have inspired me recently: Spaceman by Johan Rench and All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh. Both stories are memory plays in which the characters try to integrate their histories with the present, a theme that always interests me.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
I think what I’ve learned is that writing thrives on dissatisfaction. I don’t mean sadness or unhappiness, I mean a determination that no matter what you do, you know that you are capable of doing it better. I think that applies to any craft – and is maybe the definition of craft. I think it’s possible and healthy to reach a point with a work when you can say about it, ‘I wrote that to the best of my current abilities and perception,’ while understanding that a year from now, you’ll probably be able to do it better.