by Regina Waters
Matti Ben-Lev is a queer nonfiction writer and poet from Baltimore, Maryland. He has been published by McSweeney’s, Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, HAD, Jake lit mag, and more. Matti was a part of Grub Street staff for Volume 72 and has contributed to Volume 74 and Grub Street Online. He is currently pursuing his MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University where he is the assistant nonfiction editor for their intersectional feminist literary magazine, So To Speak. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matti about how his poem “Of Jamie” came to be.
This interview was conducted over Zoom by Regina Waters and was transcribed and edited for clarity and length.
Regina Waters: Can you give us a quick overview of what “Of Jamie” is about?
Matti Ben-Lev: One of the things I love so much about poetry is that you don’t really have in nonfiction is the luxury to obscure meaning. When I’m writing for or thinking about publication, there are topics I won’t go into because I know that anyone I bring it to will say, “You need to go more in-depth on this topic.” I feel like, as writers who write about things that are true, including fiction writers who also write about true things, we have some duty to try to protect the people that we’re talking about who don’t necessarily have a voice.
So, for me, this poem was about setting an emotion about a friendship that kind of fell apart when the person in the poem started to get really sick and unwell. I wanted to convey the depth of that relationship and convey his experience without claiming it. Instead of saying, “oh, I know all about it, let me write nonfiction about it,” I wrote what I observed in images, and then what it meant to me. I wanted to use language as the vehicle to get you to feel this tension and breaking apart and power in this friendship, rather than explain exactly what happened and what the meaning is.
I tend to write poetry as a mostly nonfiction writer these days. My poetry is pretty confessional and straightforward, and you can kind of tell what it’s about. So about 6 months ago, I started reading some other work where a brilliant poet wrote a series of images, and then made meaning out of them. I thought that was really interesting. And so, I started trying to write poems that were more image-based and more based on conveying emotion through sound and form and images and language, rather than just through story. I think that’s how this poem and a series of other poems I’ve written since then have come to be.
RW: What inspired you to write “Of Jamie”?
MBL: I have a lot of experiences. I write a lot about these experiences, I have a history of addiction, I got sober 6 years ago, and it’s pretty open—it’s all over all of my writing. There are a lot of experiences that I’ve used writing to make sense of. So, I think a lot of the poems and pieces I write, especially poems, are trying to make sense of something from my past that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t have an answer and almost convey that on the page. I think “Of Jamie” came from me trying to make sense of this.
Four years ago, I basically wrote a version of it which had only a couple of the images. When I really started writing a lot of nonfiction, it was for me to basically make sense of this. I don’t necessarily know what I’m gonna write before I sit down to write. I can have a general idea that I want to work on a project that I’ve been working on, but when it comes to a poem or starting a piece, sometimes I’ll sit down to work on one specific thing and write something else. Sometimes it feels like I don’t have a lot of control over that creative energy, although I have some. So, I read a bunch of those poems from that poet. I didn’t realize that this is the poem I was gonna write until I was sitting down and creating these images. I realized, “Oh my god, I’m creating images of this time in my life with this person.”
RW: What was the process of writing “Of Jamie” like for you?
MBL I started by collecting images. I wanted the images to show a change. I wanted them to start a certain way and show change as a situation specifically got darker. I’m watching some negative things happen with this person, I’m watching our relationship deteriorate, and I’m watching his relationship with his family change. I wanted to show that change happening over time in images. So first, I started by collecting images and starting a certain way, and the pieces that come at the end of each section appeared last where suddenly I’m piecing these things together to show a change, and then I’m trying to almost make sense of those images in that situation in those lines.
Originally they were not indented that way. There weren’t sections. I just had a space in between each section. The sections came from showing this poem to a dear friend of mine who suggested breaking this into sections. It will make each piece stand alone, stand out more as more impactful when you utilize this space. I don’t think space is always the answer. I think it’s really tempting to play with space, and then a lot of us end up just taking it out when we’re editing unless it fits the subject or theme we’re talking about. And I thought the space worked really well here. The numbered sections were probably the last edit I did, where I was adding the numbered sections. At first it was collecting images, making sense of the images, and playing with space, which came in at the very last minute.
RW: What does your poem mean to you, and did the meaning or goal change as you wrote?
MBL: I think I’m never really thinking about a goal when I’m writing. I guess the goal would be publication or finishing the piece. In a broader sense, the goal is conveying what I want to convey in as meaningful a way as possible. I think that’s different for me with poetry. Because really, I’m trying to convey and capture an emotion or a situation, or just how something felt in a sensory sense, rather than the story and everything that happened. For the goal of that piece, I was thinking, “I want these images and my meaning-making to allow the reader to have an experience that follows the emotional experience that happened in the relationship.”
RW: “Of Jamie” is an emotional timeline of what happened to Jamie, and how they changed as things occurred. How did you make space for your feelings as you wrote? Were there any techniques you developed or adapted for yourself?
MBL: I think this comes up in nonfiction a lot, like, “How do we write about these experiences that are really difficult to write about and think about?” I was at a conference, I think it was the Baltimore Writers’ Conference around two years ago, and this brilliant nonfiction writer, Athena Dixon, was leading a panel. She was talking about having a drawer—I think she had a physical one, but at least metaphorical—when writing about these really difficult, traumatic, challenging experiences in the past. When you’re starting to work on a project and realize “I’m not ready yet,” you can almost put it back in the drawer. I think that’s very, very true in nonfiction, and I think it’s similar in fiction.
When these situations that I wrote about were occurring maybe three or four years ago, I was writing to make sense of it, and I was saying, okay, that’s not gonna see the light of day. I wrote a poem called “Of Jamie” at the time that I kept working on and off, and was continuing to stash it in the “Do Not Disturb/not ready yet” drawer. And I sat down to write a piece that borrows a form or a style that another writer’s using, and this kind of just came out. So it’s almost like I didn’t know that I was ready to write this until I wrote it.
Once it was written, I would say because I was ready, the space I needed to make for myself was putting it down on the page and looking at it objectively, and trying to make it the best that I could.
For me, there’s an amount of emotional processing that happens in writing, and then there’s, “Am I writing in a way that’s almost unhealthy?” Anything I write, I tend to write pretty obsessively. This goes more so for essays because I can spend longer in them. I obsess about it—it’s what I think about, it’s what I dream about. I’m researching what I’m writing about, even if there’s not necessarily a research component. I’m reading and thinking about things that other people are doing. It’s almost like it starts to occupy my day. It’s like I’m living my day with that piece of writing that I’m working on. And I think there are times when I’ve needed to put that down and give myself a break. When I was writing “Of Jamie,” I called Jeannie and asked about her experience of writing her second book and how she processed emotion, and we’ve talked a lot about that. She said going on walks and swimming, and being willing to put it down and pick it back up as needed. I think with poetry, because I had processed this, I didn’t have that experience.
RW: What did you have the most difficulty with when writing “Of Jamie” and why?
MBL: I think picking images that were not repetitive, picking images that I loved, and playing with image patterns. I think I refer to the Tonka truck and the toys in the playroom twice. I wanted to make sure that I noted the change in an image without making it repetitive, stale, or boring.
The biggest challenge was at the end. I walked away with this poem, and I was honestly thinking, “my past poems are very confessional, very straightforward, you can tell what something’s about.” And I took this to my friend who’s a poet, and she said, “Matti, this is a little too cryptic. I want to get a little bit more of a sense of what this is about,” which made me laugh. As a prose writer who was experimenting, that made me chuckle. So, there were a couple lines toward the end that I added because I wanted the perfect amount of the reader knowing enough to understand the power of the poem and the images, but not so much that I was telling a story and spelling this out for them. I guess it is, in a sense, telling the story, which is something I liked about indenting the lines. I wanted there to be this movement through images.
I think the hardest things were how much to actually give the reader in regard to context, what’s really happening, and what this is really about. Also, how to move somebody through the piece and make the images repetitive enough that you can see meaning in them, but not so repetitive that they’re stale. And honestly, I used to be so ashamed to admit this, I’m a thesaurus guy. I will look up synonyms. If I feel like, “I’m using this word too many times,” I will find synonyms online. Word choice, the fine-tuning is something that I really like doing, but it’s always a little bit challenging.
RW: Was there anything you had to sacrifice when writing or updating “Of Jamie”?
MBL I had to sacrifice what I wanted it to be. I either wanted this piece to be much shorter or much longer. And so coming to where it is, I intended for this piece to be shorter and to take up less space. I think working in the lit mag world, as I’m thinking about submitting, and especially when I’m submitting to print magazines, I am thinking about how much space I may take up. When it comes to things online, I don’t think it’s as pertinent, but even if we’re writing a nonfiction piece, and the word count fits what a magazine wants but we play with space a lot, if it’s gonna be in print, that space, that economy, means a lot to editors. I don’t really think about it when I’m drafting new work. I don’t think it’d be productive for me to think about that, but when I was kind of coming backwards with this piece, I think those are some of the changes I made. Originally, there was much less white space in this piece. And I was thinking about lit mags when I was doing that, and I only added more space at the encouragement of a friend.
RW: Spirituality and trust is a recurring motif in your poem. What does spirituality represent to you in the poem? How do you see it interacting with trust?
MBL: When I was incorporating this piece of spirituality, I was trying to get at the spirituality of trusting somebody, but I was also trying to communicate the idea of worship almost as a way to look up to another person and how every human is incredibly fallible. When I said God in brackets, as the person who experienced it, that is what I meant, but I also wanted it to be a stand-in for something to worship, which is why it’s in lowercase and in brackets. I wanted to convey that sense of trusting, looking up to somebody almost as a form of worship. That’s why I also had the images of the statue there, because I was thinking about worship and looking up, and a statue kind of does that double meaning of somebody turning to stone emotionally, or someone turning away. There’s that emotional stone-turning, and there’s the bottom of worshipping something bigger than you and finding out that whatever you’re worshiping is fallible.
RW: You incorporate nature and statue imagery, connoting life, restriction, and frozenness. What choices did you make when introducing these motifs? Especially in the ways they lent themselves to the poem’s structure?
MBL: I feel like there’s some things that I love in my personal life that I don’t like writing about. And funny enough, nature is one of those things. Nature writing does not enthuse me as much as I wish it did. But for this piece, I had this image of the forest somewhat taking somebody. I’m imagining an illness as a force outside of somebody, and I’m thinking about my experience touring abandoned places and seeing vines wrapped around statues and things. Almost like seeing time eat this thing that once was used.
I really liked that image as a metaphor for a relationship. This piece is not so much just about the person as it is about that relationship. Today, everything is good in that person’s life. I was really writing about this relationship and this dynamic and the image to me, which is kind of why I brought in the image of God. God is something that is static. God is something that means something very different to me than it might mean to anybody else, so I kind of was looking at this sense of worship, looking up to and imagining this outside external force taking that thing away as nature does naturally. Pun intended.
RW: You have a lot of wonderful imagery that helps set the scenes and bring your audience in. How did you or your poem decide what images belonged? Were there any that did not quite fit that you had to tweak or shelve?
MBL: Yes, there were a lot. When I write anything, minus some of the fiction I’ve written, I tend to write in vignettes of text. That goes for poetry. I’ll write lines, I have notebooks full of lines that have never become poems, and lines that have gone into a poem. And so, when I started writing this, I really was collecting images. Until I started collecting images, I didn’t actually know what this really was about. Then I was collecting more images, and I was thinking about our relationship, and I was thinking about nature and how nature demonstrates time, how nature changes over time, especially when people don’t interfere with nature—it will grow around things. There were a lot of images that I felt represented myself and my subject and this relationship that didn’t belong here. For example, I had a bunch of imagery about coffee cups and coffee because that felt like a totem in this relationship in a weird way, and it didn’t make it into the piece. In Section 6, “chair folded out at the room’s tip / seat kissed ash green / like the greenery around your waist, swollen,” that’s the first section that directly jams into the next section. That “chair-folded / ash green,” I tweaked that like crazy but I’m still not super satisfied with it. There are a couple other places, too. “painting in your foyer / bruised at its folded edges.” I had a friend strongly encourage me to actually remove that line and replace it with something else, and I really liked it, so I kept it.
RW: You use limited punctuation in your poem: comma, brackets, ampersand, and periods. Do they have ascribed meaning in your poem?
MBL: I think the way we play with punctuation in poetry is extremely important. I participated in a workshop Professor Leslie Harrison did about punctuation in poetry, and it blew my mind. Line breaks are punctuation. When it comes to poetry, I think we think punctuation tells the reader how to read it. From what I understand, poetry was never intended to be written. It was originally spoken and memorized, but I was really thinking about how I could teach the reader to read this poem. So, I was thinking about line breaks and about how I can make the reader pause, and I thought the image of “a seat / a seat,” was something I really wanted people to focus on. I wanted the pause to be there. And the change being “a seat / a seat,” and then the next section, “a seat / an empty seat.” I wanted that pause to be really strong. That’s why I included punctuation there. The brackets in God, I just wanted to be a stand-in that different people can relate to and ascribe their own meaning.
RW: Were the events told linearly, or did you go anachronistically? If you change the way that your poem proceeds, would its meaning change with it?
MBL Yes, it’s a chronological telling. I recently wrote a piece that was similar to this, that shows the change in a relationship. I workshopped it with somebody, and she said, “Why don’t you basically flip it around? You can still play with chronology, but start at the end, start with the change, and then kind of work downward.” That totally changed the meaning of the piece, but it worked better, in my opinion. So, I would be curious if this hadn’t been published, maybe that’s something I would have played with in this piece.
I really like how it ended. I feel like as someone who mostly writes prose, I tend to think chronologically, but it’s cool to break out of that space.
RW: You pay a lot of attention to tangible items that further bring your readers into the poem and senses. What influenced and validated this decision for you?
MBL: I think it goes back to the poetry I was reading over the summer. I think reading in general really pushes us to write in different forms and think differently. I was reading more image-based poetry rather than story-based poetry. I’m thinking of Ocean Vuong, for example. Brilliant poet. I consider him to be someone who more or less conveys a story and movement. For me, the power is telling a story in beautiful language, and not a strict telling of the story. Conveying a story, basically. Some of the other poetry I’ve been reading focuses on conveying meaning through imagery. That was what I was thinking about as I wrote this piece.
Regina Waters is a senior at Towson University pursuing a degree in English. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Grub Street Online.
