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Author Statement
Stand in Old Light focuses on a personal journey of change and how it coincides with relationships with self, family, friends, and memories. These poems show how all elements of internal and external interactions combine to form a mosaic of life –– small and sometimes broken pieces combining to create a product one can admire, accept, and use as inspiration to continue on the path of change and self-exploration.
3 Questions
Matthew Porubsky
INK: What most inspires you to write?
M.P.: Music gets my brain working and blood pumping. It could be Leonard Cohen one day, Flower Face the next, and Björk after that, but they seem to hit me in the same way –– a shared alignment of emotions that create reality. I add whispers of music in all my poems.
INK: What does your writing routine look like?
M.P.: It’s about as random as it could be. I’m always writing and taking notes in my mind, but I don’t sit down to write until the spirits move me. This system works best for me because it keeps writing from feeling forced and creates an exciting atmosphere for the ritual of writing by heightening the value of the act.
INK: Name a favorite poem you feel everyone should read and why.
M.P. “Sea Church” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a recent favorite. The images have a conjuring quality to them. And she shifts the meaning of “church” into something transcendent and applicable to everyone –– a sacredness defined by the individual.
Q&A with C.W. Bryan
C.W. Bryan: Your indentation, enjambment, caesura, and use of whitespace all lend themselves to a very visual reading experience. What inspired your formatting? And what do you think that formatting lends the poems that otherwise might be missing were they all to be traditionally left-aligned?
M.P.: I wanted to actively engage the reader on the page, so all the visual elements mentioned felt like the right way to make that happen. It helps prompt the exploration of what is happening inside the poems. As the book developed, I realized it lent to the mosaic quality of the collection and how events that might seem random and disconnected join in the grand constellation of self-defined existence.
C.W. Bryan: The way some of your poems bounce between scenes, images, and emotions reminds me of Sylvia Plath. Even stylistically, especially your short declarative sentences are reminiscent of poems like “Elm” and “Nick and the Candlestick.” The book also includes an epigraph from Robert Lowell. Is it fair to say your poetry is inspired by the Confessional poets? Or is it something else entirely?
M.P.: Well, that’s a fine compliment and a great conclusion. Plath and Lowell, along with Anne Sexton, have always been an inspiration for me but I have never actively traversed their confessional territories until writing Stand in Old Light. The epigraph for the book comes from Lowell’s poem “Dolphin” where he also writes, “plotted perhaps too freely with my life, / not avoiding injury to others, / not avoiding injury to myself— / to ask compassion …” Those lines get to the heart of the matter in Stand in Old Light –– realization of transgressions, acknowledgment of effects, and compassion with oneself and others as we become … well, whatever it is that we choose to become.
C.W. Bryan: Whenever I read a collection of poems that are separated into sections, I am instantly curious to know why they are sectioned that way. What was the delineation for you? Why did you feel it important to portray your work in four parts?
M.P.: The sections can be interpreted in several ways. One way could be the traditional hero’s journey –– in this case, I would say “anti-hero.” The first section is where the recognition of change is realized; the second is a journey into the desert to transform; the third illustrates how the enlightened return influences all aspects of life; and the final section showcases the acceptance of how change yields brighter possibilities. A similar interpretation could be made by linking the sections with the seasons, starting with the first section as fall and the final section as summer. Most of all, the sections lend to the cyclical nature of change, a vital part of this collection.
