hika.

What writers/artists find yourself looking to for inspiration? How do you feel they inspire your work?

So many answers to that. I literally wrote my essay to get into this school about Joan Didion. She is my number one of all time. Even though she didn’t write poetry, the way she writes has really affected me. Everything that she does is so concise and thought out and there’s a reason every word is on the page. I try to think of that whenever I’m writing, I try to channel my inner Joan. As far as more recent poets, I love Hanif Abdurraqib. The way he writes about music inspires me so much. And his poetry as well. Although he is more of a cultural critic, he has written some of my favorite poems ever. There are lines that he has written that make me want to throw up and scream and cry because they are so good. Ocean Vuong as well. I own every single book he has published just because they are so good. Whenever he is doing anything, I’m going to be there. All these writers have really unique voices. You know, I’m only 18 years old! I don’t really have an artistic voice yet, but reading these writers with such specific voices has helped me think, “Oh, I can do this! Oh, I can write this! I’m not limited to anything.” My favorite writers have helped me realize that the conventions of genre and poetry writing—none of it really matters. 

What’s your dream project to work on? 

I play guitar, and although I’ve never been big into songwriting, the music scene at Kenyon is so good, it has inspired me to get into the practice room a few times a week and mess around. It’s also helpful with writing. If I’m ever stuck I’ll just play some guitar, play Taylor Swift covers, just anything fun and easy to get that creative energy flowing. If I had infinite resources, I’d make an album. I’ve written maybe two songs in my life, but I love music. Music is my number one thing. 

Do you have any practices that are crucial to your writing routine?

The music that I’m listening to always inspires my writing. With the poem in HIKA that is titled after the Smashing Pumpkins song, there is not even that much relation to the song, it’s genuinely just what I was listening to as I was writing that poem. It describes that piece better than anything I could come up with. It’s like saying: this is exactly what I am feeling right now, if you want to feel it go listen to the song. I’m always making new playlists for what I write. I just hit shuffle, let loose, and go from there.

If you could collaborate with any other writer or artist, dead or alive, who would it be?

My two favorite artists of all time are Amy Winehouse and Jeff Buckley. If I was in a dream world, I would love to just get in a room with them and trade some of our favorite poems, play some guitar, and sing some songs. Both of them had such a vital creative spirit within them and it makes me so sad that they are not here any more. Or also, the artist Sophie. She was this trans music producer who was absolutely incredible, she redefined the way I think about sound. Her music was so electronic and abrasive and completely unlike anything I’d ever heard. Getting in a room with her would be life changing, even though she has passed away too. A lot of my favorite artists are not here anymore, but I think that speaks to their power as artists. Because that’s what I love about music and writing: it lives on after you. 

What themes and motifs do you consistently turn to in your writing?

I was just thinking about this today because I have a master google doc of all the poems I have written that are good. Everything goes in my Google Drive, but if it’s good, I’ll put it in my one document. I went through that document today and did a word search for the words “water,” and “ocean,” and I realized how much I talk about beaches. I’m from Pasadena, California, 40 minutes from the beach. I think that affected me more than I realized, growing up with a body of water always around me. Water can be anything, rebirth, death, and it’s so beautiful. 

I also turn to a lot of religious imagery. I mean, I grew up in the catholic church, I went to catholic school for 13 years. I do not consider myself catholic but my family is. So even though I don’t necessarily believe in religion, it still had a huge impact on me that I see in my writing. I also love the aesthetics of catholicism. I mean, the art is unmatched. The language and poetry of old religious scriptures is so insane to me: “ashes to ashes,” and “dust to dust.” I think about that a lot. 

The queer experience as well, that’s something I’m always thinking about—it’s how I live. I see the world through gay eyes, cause that’s how it works. I came out when I was thirteen, and that’s always been a part of who I am. Everything I’ve written, even if it isn’t explicitly about sexuality, is still a queer poem because I wrote it. And I think that’s really freeing. 

What inspired you to write each of these poems?

Recoil and the smashing pumpkins, 1993, spaceboy I wrote here in the past two months. Getting to campus, I was overwhelmed in the best way possible about how beautiful everything is, and how smart everyone is. It made me want to reflect on my experiences of home. I was thinking about the stuff I have been through in my life and how there’s nothing attaching me to that anymore. I’m here, I’m free, I can be whatever I want. So, to use that freedom the best way that I could, I had to look back on what I had been through [and write about it]. Deciding is a lot about that. It was definitely a poem that I felt a personal connection to. I wrote that and I was like, “Oh, this is me. This is my writing.” If I had to point to one poem that describes my writing it would probably be that. All these poems describe turning points for me, but Deciding especially is one of those. It was kind of the turning point in my life where I realized, “You can be healthy, you can be happy, you can be a completely normal, free person. Just ‘cause you’re gay, for example, doesn’t mean you have to live a life in pain.” That was a big realization for me, and the reason I called it Deciding was that I was deciding to not live within those boundaries anymore. 

In both Deciding and Recoil, there is a lack of punctuation and capitalization that gives the poems a lyrical and train of thought quality to them. What led you to choosing this form for these poems? Or was it less of a choice and more of something that arose as you wrote them? Are these same formal choices present in other poems you have written?

Usually when I’m writing something, the first draft never has punctuation or capitalization. As I go back and revise, I add it in if I feel like it helps the form. But with Deciding and Recoil I wanted to play with timing. I love when the last word of a line flows into the next one and gives a double meaning. It connects the two lines, so each one can mean its own thing, and when you read it together it also means another thing. The lack of punctuation allowed me to do that a lot, and allowed for many different shades of meaning within the poem. As I was reading them back to myself, they felt more lyrical. I’m a huge music person and I’m always thinking about the rhythm while I’m writing. No punctuation allowed the poem to breathe a little more and come across more freely on the page. So it can be interpreted however it wants to be interpreted. With both of these poems, I had something I really desperately wanted to say, so I didn’t want to filter myself at all while saying them. Both poems came out of me very quickly, and I wanted the reading of them to mimic that. No stops, everything rushing all at once. You get to decide what you make of it. 

15:00, just finished question 6

Deciding and Recoil seemed to be in conversation with each other in terms of theme, form, and voice. Do you feel this is the case, and if so, can you expand on this idea?

Yeah, that’s really interesting! All of my poems kind of end up in conversation with each other, but those two specifically handle two sides of the same coin. I feel like Recoil looks back on my childhood, whereas Deciding is more where I am now. I think the interplay between those two wasn’t planned but it ended up being a happy coincidence. I remember I sent one of my best friends, who’s a writer too, the master Google Doc of all my poems, and she picked out these two as the best ones. I had never even looked at them together, but once I read them together, I was like “Oh wait! I like the way this works.” I think both [Deciding and Recoil] kind of say the same thing, which is, “I’m not gonna let myself be tethered to anything. I’m gonna let myself do whatever I want.”

We found it very interesting that all the titles of your poems don’t appear in the poems themselves. “The smashing pumpkins, 1993, spaceboy” especially intrigued us. How did this title come about, and how do you go about titling your poems in general? 

Well, for the Smashing Pumpkins one, my dad is a really big Smashing Pumpkins fan and he has influenced all the music that I listen to. I’ve never really shared my writing with my parents until I got to college and.  I’ve started sending them a few essays here and there, but as I was deciding on that as the title, I was like, “Oh, this would be really cool if I send this to my dad once it’s in print, and it’s a Smashing Pumpkins song.” You know, because he loves them so much. Also, I wrote that poem with a very specific person in mind. There were a lot of intense emotions in these first two months of college; that poem was the result of those intense emotions. As I was feeling those emotions, the one song that I kept turning to was that Smashing Pumpkins song. So, I felt like “there’s nothing else I can title this,” even though the song doesn’t appear in the poem at all. I usually try to do that! Like you said, none of the titles have appeared in the poems. I didn’t do that on purpose necessarily but I always feel like the title is an opportunity to expand the poem, so why would I repeat myself when I can give them something else? Or give them another clue as to “what’s this gonna be about?” 

As for the title Recoil, I felt that Recoil was a really good description of when something feels out of your control and you react in the only way you know how. Deciding, like I said earlier, was a literal moment of deciding for me. The poem itself was me stating “No! I’m gonna live, I’m gonna be happy, fuck you guys, I’m gonna do what I want.” And that was a really big moment for me. There’s an old Mitski tweet that I was thinking about a lot when I was deciding to title the poem Deciding. And it’s, I’m gonna butcher it, “I used to think the best rebellion was to destroy myself, but then I realized that’s what everyone wanted. The best rebellion is actually to choose joy.” That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that:“Okay, I’m gonna choose joy. That’s the best way to rebel. Mitski’s always right!” 

How do you feel about the connection between writing and publishing? Do you believe that publishing is an essential part of being a writer?

Ooh, that’s a really interesting question because I’ve never had anything published before. This is my first time ever submitting to somewhere and hearing back, so it’s definitely really scary. My writing is so personal and it’s something I never really shared in high school. I’d write music articles and stuff like that, but that was within the form of prose, within the constraints of the non-fiction album review. There are very specific restraints within that genre of prose, whereas poetry is so much more free. It’s so personal that the decisions you make, or the decisions you don’t make, are reflections of who you are, and that’s really scary to send out to someone to be published. 

I don’t think you have to be published to be a writer. I called myself a writer all through high school and I never published anything! It was just me and my Google Drive against the world, you know? But I think publishing is definitely a rewarding part of the process, and I’m excited to see how it becomes even more rewarding as the process goes on, because, like I said, I’ve never been published before. This is all new to me, and it’s really exciting. Writing and music have affected me so deeply and really changed my worldview. They have gotten me through tough times, so it’s nice to know that if I put this out there, maybe someone will latch onto it the same way that I’ve latched onto these artists I love. So, it’s kind of like a cycle. I could keep my writing for myself, forever, but why would I do that when I could put it out there and it could have a good effect on someone? I don’t wanna miss that opportunity. So, I think that’s the best part of publishing, the opportunity to reach out to more people, even if you never meet them. Even if you never know how your work affects someone, it’s still cool to think that someone is probably being affected by your writing. 

How would you describe your poetic voice/who you are as a poet? What subject matter and themes are you most concerned with in your writing? How has this changed over time? 

That’s a really interesting question because I’ve been writing poetry since eighth grade and back then they were SO bad. But, they were all very raw and gut-responses to the stuff that was happening in my life at the time. Over time, as my life has fluctuated and gotten harder and easier, it’s given me more time to realize that poetry doesn’t have to just be a reaction, it can be a response. I can choose what I want to say and choose carefully too. That’s what I love about Joan Didion! All of her words are there for a reason, you know? I realized as I got older and as I kept writing poetry, “Oh, I can be really thoughtful about this!” So that’s definitely something that informed my poetic voice. 

For themes, like I said, growing up gay, being queer, that’s really always gonna be the number one thing that I come back to, because even if the poem isn’t about that, it’s still a queer poem, which I think is really cool. Religion, also. You know, I don’t consider myself religious anymore but I went to Catholic school for thirteen years baby! That leaves an effect on somebody. So, that’s definitely a theme that I’m always coming back to. And then also, family as well, which I think is really intertwined with religion for me. Just the concept of  the way we pass down things in our family and intergenerational trauma. Even the positives of family too! I love my family! Poetry has been a really good way for me to examine the parts of my family that I don’t wanna replicate and the parts of my family that I do wanna replicate. One of my favorite artists, who I think does such a good job of describing intergenerational trauma, better than I ever will, is Ethel Cain. She has a line that’s on the first track of her album that’s like, “Jesus can always deny his father but he cannot escape his mother’s blood.” That’s the best description of why I write about my family, because my mother and my father are always gonna be a part of me, so of course they are half of my poetic voice. There’s half of it that’s me and half of it that’s fully their genetic material, you know? So, my family has definitely informed the way I write. 

Then, there’s also the poets I’ve read growing up, read in the past four years. I remember the first time I read “Crush” by Richard Siken. That was a life changing experience, let me tell you! Total core memory. I feel almost like, in a way, ever since I read that. I’ve been trying to replicate or write my own “Crush,” which is stupid because you shouldn’t try to replicate anybody, but there’s this really breathless quality to a lot of his poems which has kind of inspired the lack of punctuation in a lot of my pieces. I love that sense of breathlessness in a poem, that sense of urgency. It’s like, why am I saying this? I HAVE to say this right now, you know? So, he definitely affected my voice a lot, and the imagery, and the way he talks about love and queerness. Ugh, just so good. 

So that’s my poetic voice. An amalgamation of Richard Siken, my parents, religion, Ethel Cain, Mitski, Fiona Apple, everybody! Just all of these experiences that I’ve had. I am a collection of my own experiences and it’s up to me to make something out of them. 

What are your writing aspirations for the future? 

Well, I mean I’m at Kenyon College which seems like a pretty good start, writer’s college and all. I’m a Kenyon Review Associate this year and I definitely want to keep doing that. I’m also on the Sunset Press workshop team for Will’s project, which is gonna be a really rewarding experience. I’m really excited about that and I really wanna keep working with them and become a head press editor. Because as much as I love writing for myself, I also love working with other people’s writing. As for the future, post college, I don’t really know! I’d love to be a writer but there’s not that much money in that, let’s be honest. But I think as long as I’m alive I’m always gonna be writing. Even if it’s not my career, it’s always gonna be something that I’m doing, it’s always gonna be something that I’m passionate about so I’m not letting go of it any time soon. Even though I don’t know where it’ll take me, I know it’ll be there with me.

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Matthew’s poems “Deciding,” “Recoil,” and “the smashing pumpkins, 1993, spaceboy” will be published in the 2024 issue of Hika, and appeared in the Hika Fall Preview.