The End is Not the End:

A Conversation with Lucian Mattison

BSR: What would you say is the origin of your writing practice?

Lucian: I was actually not into school—I hated reading and writing. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, I took a contemporary American Lit class. I read a couple of things that really sparked my interest. Stuff like Kurt Vonnegut, things easy to strike up the teenage mind. I think that’s when I first started getting a little more interested in writing.

My first real love for poetry emerged in my junior year of college. I had a professor who saw some value in my work and really encouraged me. He gave me enough instruction and direction, where I started to really feel like he was nurturing that thing inside of me.

As far as everyday practice, that solidified post school. I worked at a bar from 5:00 in the afternoon until 3:00 AM five days out of the week. I woke up at 11 or noon, ate lunch, and I would write until about 3:00, and then I would go to work, again. I think I did that for about a year, and, with afternoon classes, I could almost replicate that same schedule at ODU.

Could you speak a little bit about your MFA experience at Old Dominion University?

Some people say no one needs an MFA, and yeah, no one technically needs an MFA. But it depends on the person, and it was good for me. When I entered the program, it quickly became apparent there was a lot of stuff missing in my tool belt. I had raw ideas, passion for language, and a love for creation, but it was really like cave painting at that point. I didn’t have anything that was truly crafted.

My experience was all about learning craft, how to follow rules, how to break them, and how to make those rules my own. On top of shaping my craft, I had a lot of social stimulation in the community, which was really good. We even had shows at our house and people came over. Those were moments where you could see something intimate and up close. Even if you didn’t really love the music that was going on in front of you, it was still cool to see someone who was good at what they do, doing it well in front of you. Interacting with experts and seeing people who were in their own space, it made me feel like I could also take risks.

In your newest book, Curare, spirituality is prevalent. Could you speak about that? 

I was raised by my mom who was a pretty firm believer early on. A very vocal, not reserved kind of Catholic. We were God fearing, went to church every Sunday. Eventually, I had a little fracture with it. But having been raised with this idea of an irreplaceable something magical in the world, the idea sticks around. Divinity and the afterlife are truly beautiful things, and there’s nothing else like it in the real world.

In our current format, what is a religious experience equivalent? What I’m trying to get at is religious experience and transcendental experience outside of that we attribute to religion. I tried to have some metaphors that work between both. I think, for this book, God ended up taking the shape of a collective consciousness.

There’s a poem in the book where I’m referencing God as a drunk driver. God is also nighttime, and God is also birds, and God is also everyone looking at the accident that’s happening, and God is the accident. I want it to be a translatable experience. If God truly is everything, well this is everything. And does it matter? Maybe not. I think humans make it matter. My approach to spirituality, in that sense, is that we are beings who thrive on the experience of something divine and beautiful, regardless of the spiritual.

A motif of cloud poems is dispersed throughout the collection. These poems felt like moments of reflection throughout the piece as a whole. In the final one, “[clouds] if there is a god,” there’s mention of police brutality. Structurally, what was your thought process for these pieces? How do they speak to each other?

It goes back to spirituality. The cloud as a concept is all of our shared information; it all exists; it’s everywhere, always a present, invisible. I wanted to use an image that could hold us accountable.

There’s something about a god figure above us. If we are surveilled and we’re also documenting everything, that will eventually have meaning. Right now, it’s kind of hard, because we’re living in this time where, even on camera, people are doing weird and despicable shit and not being held accountable. But, I think, this documenting of reality is      going to lead somewhere positive. We could have a more just and fairer world as a result of so much shared information.

Among topics of violence, there are moments of humor. Can you talk about how you use humor in your work?

Most of the time, a person looks at me differently after they read my work. There’s a kind of shift. Because, in person, they see me always making jokes, trying to have a good time. But a writer’s work is kind of dreadfully serious sometimes. A lot of poets are just like that, that’s just how it is. I think part of me is like, I want to be more honest and genuine. I think every poem that I’m writing is trying to be honest and genuine in some way, but I want to be slight, too. I want to bury my tone a little, and I want to have fun, not necessarily with grave subject matter, but sometimes you can be a little cynical, you can be a little irreverent, and as long as you’re not doing it in the wrong way, hopefully it has a good effect.

I would say that these poems, when they do have that kind of humorous bend to them, are usually created that way, in the genesis of the writing. If you try to add it later, it might come off a little clunky. If humor is a part of the poem itself, in its origin, the reader immediately has to be invested in that approach. In our own lives, we function with humor just as much as we function with everything else. So, why not make poetry mimic the human experience a little more?

What does your writing process look like?

I’ve tried to organize my desktop in a way that makes sense, but it doesn’t. I have a folder that’s titled Unfinished, and another one called Unpolished, and then I have poems on my desktop of just crap. I’ve tried to organize it, and it still doesn’t make any sense.

For example, this morning, I was so productive. I got here at 10:00 AM. I sat over there. I was like, alright, I’m going to camp out and go to town on these poems. You know those giant magnets in junkyards? That’s how I felt today. I was just going into the     se terrible documents, working through      them, and I came out with about five drafts. Most of the language was there, I just had to peel away crap, throw things out.

There     ’s something about being away from the day-to-day clutter. I took four days off, and I’m not thinking about work. When I went to ODU, I worked here, at Cure Coffeehouse, as a barista and a cook, but now I don’t know anyone here. I went out last night to this place where I used to know people. I sat at the bar and just watched and thought, this place is nothing like how I used to know it. The only person I knew was the guy leading karaoke. But that unfamiliarity within the familiar seems to help with getting me in my writing flow state.

Did you sing any karaoke? What’s your go-to karaoke song?

I didn’t! I would’ve done “Kiss”, by Prince. I love that song. I can no longer do the end where he’s screaming.

When you start a poem, do you have an idea of where you want it to go?

When I go into a poem, usually I’m not attached to an overarching idea. I’m attracted to a very specific thing, or a specific moment, or sensual experience that is stuck in my head. It usually doesn’t have any immediate meaning, but it sticks. I write it down and explore it. After the fact, the true meaning—not that there’s any true meaning—comes to light. When I go into a poem, I’ll just make my way to the end, and the end is usually not the end. That comes later in revision. I’ll make my way to a stopping point, and I’ll leave it for a while. That’s the kind of sad and beautiful part about poetry—as soon as you’re done with a poem, you’re kind of done with it. You’re writing other things that you’re excited about. The poem that is refined, polished is still fun to read sometimes, but it doesn’t have the luster. Hopefully, it has luster for someone else.

Do you feel that way when you read stuff that you’ve already published in a collection?

Yeah, I think in the first book, Peregrine Nation, for sure. I go back and I’m like, oh yeah! But there’s still some really cool stuff in there. I wrote that book about ten years ago. I was just a different person. I read it now, and I understand where I was, and I can revisit that, but it doesn’t have the same meaning and emotional impact on me anymore. Not that I think it’s less valuable.

What’s next? Do you have another book you’re working on?

Yes, I am working on a book. I have enough poems to make a book, for sure. I just don’t really have a thread yet. When putting together my first book, I found the thread when I started the program here. I think that was thanks to Luisa Igloria. That book was a lot about my experiences being raised in English speaking countries like the US and having my whole family identity being somewhere else. Luisa really helped me craft that into something that made sense.

With this latest collection, the title and the title poem came from this book called Tales of the Shaman’s Apprentice. It’s about this ethnobotanist guy visiting the Amazon, trying to talk to Shamans and to the people in these local tribes to set up apprenticeships for younger tribe members to keep traditional medicine practices alive. He was looking for this compound, curare—an arrow poison     —that could be used medicinally. In large doses it paralyzes      your insides and stops your breathing. So, he was interested in that compound, but he couldn’t locate it, and couldn’t replicate it. Reading that book got me thinking about what it means to cure, what it means to heal and how medicine can be both poisonous and curative. It’s just a matter of dosage.