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10 Questions for Matthew Tuckner


Sitting next to me on the airplane is a man with a tattoo of a swastika.
He is digging his thumbnail into an orange, dropping bits of skin onto
the carpet between our legs. Below the tattoo of the swastika is a tattoo
of a window with a view looking out onto a field with a few grazing heifers.
—from "Being There," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I came to poetry first and foremost as a reader, and as is often the case for early readers of poetry, I didn’t always know what it was I was reading, what it meant, what I was supposed to gather from it, etc. I often just basked in the beauty of it, the delightful confusion of it. Considering this, a lot of my early poems—particularly inspired by the “difficult” work of John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, etc.—was pointedly messy, confusing, and unclear. It wasn’t until I wrote a poem in my freshman year of college entitled “Sonderkommando”—a persona poem from the perspective of one of the many Jews, who under the threat of death, were forced to aid the Nazis during the Holocaust—that my poetry, and its aims, locked into focus for me. Writing this poem, engaging with a particular voice informed and burdened by history, revealed poetry’s imaginative, political, grand potential. In many ways, the work I was engaging in with this early poem can be traced through to “Being There,” my poem which appears in the most recent issue of the Massachusetts Review.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I feel like my poems are often individually reflective of whatever writers I was reading at the time of their conception. When I wrote “Being There” I was reading and re-reading Timothy Donnelly’s most recent collection The Problem of the Many. A book that, like “Being There,” is filled with poems that trace the ramifications of objects, their political significance, their loaded histories. The similar object histories found in books like Rick Barot’s The Galleons, the hypnotic interdependences of Juliana Spahr’s The Connection of Everyone with Lungs and the prose-y, associative poems of John Gallaher’s Brand New Spacesuit all feel like palpable influences, as well.

What other professions have you worked in?
I have worked as a delivery driver, a bookseller, a camp counselor, but these days I work as an editor and reader for several fantastic literary journals: Washington Square Review, Frontier Poetry, Bear Review, and Poetry Daily.

What did you want to be when you were young?
For the first fifteen years of my life I desperately wanted to be a musician/songwriter, and my first creative impulses found their outlet in music. In many ways, my initial impulse to write songs, and my current impulse to write poems aren’t so different at their core. With each, I’ve tried my very best to craft small, somewhat “perfect” objects, that can stand on their own, fight for themselves.

What inspired you to write this piece?
The inception of “Being There” finds its basis in the experience the poem begins with. Early on 2020, I found myself on an airplane seated near a man whose political ideology was illustrated very clearly on his skin. Throughout the flight, I found myself thinking of the ways in which our bodies speak to each other, without words, often without our knowledge and against our will. How is my identity—white, Jewish, male—communicated, or asserted by my body? What parts of me are kept hidden, or safe, by my body? And what sort of privilege does that safety afford me? This line of thinking—what separates the self and the other—ultimately brought me to the phenomenological philosophy of Martin Heidegger, a thinker whose work is ultimately shaded by his anti-Semitism and his involvement with the NSDAP. In many ways, my research for this poem was disappointingly circular, and I wanted the poem to feel that way: claustrophobic and stale like the oxygen that is recycled over and over again during a long flight.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I always listen to music when I’m writing and it tends to change depending on the poem. One of my staples of late has been the album The Sounds of the Sounds of Science by Yo La Tengo. A soundtrack album the band composed for a series of underwater documentaries by the filmmaker Jean Painlevé.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I’ve been lucky to meet some amazing fellow poets and readers in my years as an undergraduate at Bennington College and as a grad student at NYU. They, along with my professors, are usually the first people I trust with the work. Other than my fellow students, I would say that my partner is the first true soundboard for my poems. I often read poems to her in their nascent stages, often when they are just a couple of lines, and when she tells me something isn’t working, I know I can trust her, partly because she isn’t a poet.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
This is rather cliché, but I would definitely be a painter. I have always struggled with motor skill issues, so despite my greatest aspirations, my body seems to keep me from excelling at it. Somebody once said every poet is a failed visual artist. I would say this applies to me as well.

What are you working on currently?
I am currently working on my first collection, Zoo, while also finishing up a sequence of poems called the “Figurative Language” series. These poems, with titles such as “The Future, with Figurative Language,” “Grief, without Figurative Language,” “Time, with Figurative Language,” and “Xanax, with Figurative Language,” among others, seek to dissect the human capacity for description and the distance that is inherent to comparison in different contexts such as addiction, religion, my grandfather’s struggles with dementia, etc.

What are you reading right now?
I have been reading several collections that are coming out later this fall and early next year that give me so much excitement for the current state of American Poetry. These include Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang, Mutiny by Phillip B. Williams, Rise and Float by Brian Tierney, and Afterfeast by Lisa Hiton, among others. These books cannot be defined or trapped by any particular school or tradition of poetry. Each of these poets is a chameleon, a troubadour and I feel honored to be writing alongside them.


MATTHEW TUCKNER is a writer from New York. He is currently an MFA candidate at NYU and assistant poetry editor of Washington Square Review. He was the recipient of a University Prize from the Academy of American Poets, selected by Rick Barot. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and New South, among others.


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