Matthew Rohrer was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in Oklahoma. He earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for poetry, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from the University of Iowa. His books are A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), Satellite (2001) and A Hummock in the Malookas (1995), which was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1994 National Poetry Series. He is Poetry Editor for Fence and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Buy his books here. See some work here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first real poem I ever loved was by Ezra Pound – The Garden. I read it in 10th grade in Oklahoma. I liked it because the images were accessible to me, and there was an interesting Chinese print reproduction on the facing page – which is strange since, though Pound was interested in China, the poem is about London. But the combination of the art and the poem hooked me. Then a guy named Nick and I had to meet up outside of class at the Town Tavern and “figure out” the poem so we could present it to the class. This seemed very grown-up. This was also when Nick gave me a mix tape of Robyn Hitchcock and the Soft Boys music, whose importance to my life and my aesthetic it would be impossible to overstate. Now I have The Garden memorized. Last year I got back in touch with my 10th grade teacher and I think he was happy to learn that I had The Garden memorized and had had such a formative experience with poetry in his class. Certainly no one else did. I remember people either openly sleeping, openly eating full BBQ meals, or being goggle-eyed car crash victims. But not actually paying attention to the teacher. 2. What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I have read many, many books about World War 2, mostly memoirs by soldiers. Recently I have been focusing this interest on the Pacific Theater, perhaps because my grandfather served there, but more likely because of my life-long love of the F4U-1A Corsair. This is the plane, if you don’t know, from the television series Ba Ba Blacksheep, and in fact I recently read both Greg “Pappy” Boyington’s Ba Ba Blacksheep and Bruce Gamble’s Black Sheep One, which basically dismantles everything Boyington says in his book. Boyington was sort of a hero to me when I was a kid, and indeed was a hero to an entire generation of Americans, claiming to be more than a quintuple-Ace, with 25 or 27 kills. Gamble meticulously deconstructs Boyington’s exaggerations and this shattered my long-held belief that one could be a drunken misfit and still kill 27 Japanese. That might be the thing that interests me in all of these soldiers’ memoirs – the fact that the good ones are largely about the misery, boredom, injustice, and meaninglessness of war and of all social structures and hierarchies. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is of no importance to my writing. This is not to say it is of no importance, but simply that I distrust poetry that resembles philosophical writing too closely. I don’t believe poets need to be smart. I believe they need to write well. This is not the case with philosophers. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Without question my favorite non-Anglo writers are Chinese, mainly very old, very dead Chinese writers like Han Shan, Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei. John Yau is also non Anglo, not dead, and he is an extremely present influence on my writing. Tomaz Salamun and Vasko Popa. Novelists like Machado de Assis and Ivo Andric. And Julio Cortazar. Why? I guess in all of these writers, as well as in the Anglo-American writers I really admire, I find a common thread which is the importance of history and memory. Writers I admire are interested in reaching out to others, of communicating something of a commonality beyond even their home culture or era. The greatest literary pleasure for me is to feel that I am meeting a writer half-way, meeting up in a central zone which is the poem or the story, and that we have both reached outside ourselves and our cultural and aesthetic environs a little to find ourselves both here in a common, human place. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read a lot of poetry. It is very important to my writing. Reading an exciting book gets me excited to write. I am inspired to write by reading fiction or non-fiction too, or even by walking down the street or looking at a worm, but reading an exciting book makes me, I don’t know; feel like I want to get involved too. I want to join in. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've read but haven't? Why haven't you? Maybe it would be assumed that I’ve read Milton or whoever that guy was who wrote The Faery Queen. I also haven’t read Lord Byron. I didn’t have to take any pre-Romantic period English classes in college, and was not interested enough to go out of my way to do so. I was plenty taken with the Romantics and the Moderns. Then I took a class wherein we read Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley and Ron Padgett and that was just more interesting to me. And from what I can tell without actually reading a complete poem of his, Lord Byron is all in the mystique. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? Uh, a poem doesn’t have to rhyme at all. A poem is a way to say something that it is very hard to say or impossible to say in a story or a newspaper article or a song. A poem should be read slowly, and should be read several times. A poem is a celebration of language and writing too so lots of them want to sound good as well as say something. And a poem is pretty much anything you want it to be, and anyone who tells you different is a Puritan and a bully. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I don’t believe in a Role for the Poet. It seems like a slippery slope, once you begin stating what a poet should be or do. Soon you will be stating what they should write or not write. None of that is of any importance, and it is surely nobody else’s business. Poets write poetry, sometimes they write good poetry, and sometimes they write bad poetry. Other poets pay attention, or not, and are influenced, or not. I say this because poetry is not a political force in contemporary Western society. There are political poems, and perhaps the following two poems could get me in “trouble” – SHOOT CHENEY FIRST and KILL THE PRESIDENT but these poems are not going to change who is put in charge of the interim Iraqi government, nor are they going to have Rumsfeld thrown out. But there are ways to do this. Direct action. Voting. $$$$$$. Assassination. Intimidation. Terrorism. $$$$$. At best the two poems above will cause me a lot of trouble, cost me a lot of money in legal fees, but also bring widespread national and perhaps international attention to the fact that I am a poet with, TA-DA!!, books to sell! If I begin shattering my diction and using “avant-garde” techniques of indeterminacy and deconstruction, Rumsfeld is still going to be there. And no one in the swing states of Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado or Florida is going to read my disjunctive verse and realize that it is up to them to vote Bush out of office, or even better, to rise up and destroy the plutocracy that rules our country. That is the Role of the Citizen. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**CURD Chiseled**BLUE I**BEEF Of**TEN Form**LINES 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I am gaining weight and losing my hair, and this is reflected in some of my recent poems.