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Matthew Nisinson's Writing Blog

March Round-Up

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Photo of Peach Blossoms by Matthew Nisinson

March is over, happy poetry month! While not a great month for me, March ended with flowers and a feeling like the long dark winter really is coming to an end and I can see the daylight and life returning. Meanwhile, in the world of writing, March began and ended with developments in my poetry practice. On March 1st my poem A(touch)more, written in a sonnet workshop taught last summer by C.T. Salazar, was published in the latest issue of Cathexis Northwest Press’ magazine, I hope you check it out! The whole issue is worth reading.

And on March 31st, I got an acceptance for three poems that make up an important part of my Catullus 85 project, they’ll be out in early May and I can’t wait to share them with folks.

And of course, I read and enjoyed some great art in March. Let’s get into it.

  • Poetry
  • Other Writing
    • As has become ritual lately, I start each month reading my friend Emma’s newsletter Gab & Loiter: a poetry letter. I love reading about Emma’s adventures and conversations, her poems, and her deep thoughts about the world. It’s a great newsletter and I recommend it! Gab & Loiter was a big inspiration for me in finally putting this blog together. The April newsletter, which I read just now, engages wonderfully and enrichingly with my recently published poem “A(touch)more”. I think it says something about our personalities and relative ages that her system looks to the month ahead and mine to the month gone by.
    • “Lessons of the Line: Charles Simic and Me” By Dana Levin for the Yale Review, March 4, 2024  https://yalereview.org/article/dana-levin-charles-simic – a beautiful, informative, and inspiring tribute to the great poet.
      “He said to me once, advocating a cut in a poem I showed him, “But is the word of hair-splitting, not very interesting.” He leaned for­ward, resting his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands and look­ing down at them, as he often did when making a point. “A thinker, a ‘civilized’ man, would say, ‘Farmer Joe had the loveliest pig and cared for it like his own child but slaughtered it for dinner,’ while the simple man, the peasant, says, ‘Farmer Joe had the loveliest pig that he cared for like his own child, and he slaughtered it for din­ner.’” He looked up at me, to make sure I was getting it. “And,” he said, “is more interesting than but.”” 
    • “The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained” by Brian Resnick for Vox.com, March 7, 2017 https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/7/14456154/dehumanization-psychology-explained – I read this in 2017, and was recently prompted to revisit it by a social media memory. This article had a strong influence on me and it feels only more relevant now.
      • “Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam, a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.” [emphasis mine]
    • “Dead Man Talking” a flash piece by Sean Glatch for Egg+Frog, March 16, 2024 https://eggplusfrog.com/flash-dead-man-talking/ – This is a marvelous story and I particularly loved how Glatch captures a particular NYC experience:
      “Everyone had something to say about this city (it was going downhill), this world (it would end very soon), themselves (the only good thing in this city, this world). I didn’t know how much longer I could do it for. New York is a story that everyone is telling themselves, and I had gotten lost in it, a comma in the book of run-on sentences.”
  • Books & Chapbooks
    • or, on being the other woman by Simone White – the March book for the Long Poem Support Group, I started out a little uncertain about this book but quickly got pulled in. White writes a lot of great lines and wise observations, but the one that I am still thinking the most about is:

      Photo of page, text copied below

      “i want to talk about abandonment.

      i don’t believe poetry or writing or love want death from me, rather—my son began using this word rather in the last two weeks, so i am sensitized to beauty in interactions of being in stead—rather, i am cheered by the absolute indifference of the universe to my desire. A long time ago i gave over to godlessness, that is, there is no god but there is something like division or departure or rapture that neither begins nor ends each time i am abandoned to an irruption of understanding.”

      I wrote a little bit about this passage on a discord with some friends, and I’ve adapted it below. Rough thoughts as I attempted to work through the passage and what it means in the larger context of the full poem.

      So, because this is a long poem, arguably a hybrid work of prose and poetry or prose poetry, I read with the idea that ideas do not need to coherently flow one to another in service to a specific point or argument. Rather, I am particularly looking for the associative and contrasting connotations and larger content. So my reading is based on collecting the ideas packed densely into or alluded to by this paragraph, or which, as the reader, I am already supposed to have in mind from what came before.

      The things I am thinking of coming into this passage include the fact that White is a Black woman, divorced, with a child she loves and cares for. In addition to an MFA, she has a law degree, a law degree from Harvard Law. She also has a lover, who I think is a white, straight man, they are having a long term romantic affair, and a lot of the poem feels like it is addressed in part to him. White seems to be invested in the relationship, and at the same time to wrestle with how his secrecy (and need for secrecy?) and their unofficial/official status impacts her life, including the racial dynamic between them, and how this relationship impacts her relationships and community with other black women, and how it impacts her child and her role as a mother. Also, complicating things further, I came away with a sense that at least in some way this man appears to have supported her financially, if not ongoing.

      The passage itself I see as White playing in contrasts, and in rejecting or challenging presumptions. She starts with the idea of abandonment, a looming presence that hovers over all of the remaining ideas. The paragraph or stanza that immediately follows is a play in contrasts, and in rejecting and challenging presumptions. I’m fascinated by her choices, twists, and turns. White links poetry, writing, and love as three equally weighted things that someone (society? herself?) believes want death from her. Death for why? To be successful at them? Is the idea that poetry, writing, and love all require death for completeness? To not be abandoned?

      And what does White mean by love? Perhaps because I am spending so much time with Catullus’ Amo, Amare but what we mean when we say love is a question that is much on my mind these days. The digression about her son leads to the thought that this might be the love of a parent for their child, but then White complicates this by immediately talking about her desire. So is this the love of a parent for a child, or the love of a woman owning her desire? I am tempted to go with Charles Simic’s more interesting ‘and’, referenced in Dana Levin’s Yale Review piece linked and quoted above. While the talk about her son is framed as a digression, I think that it’s more important than that, as I think most digressions in poetry are. (My thinking is that a digression is an attempt to work in an idea so important that the other natural action of a piece must pause to allow for it). Not only because White, through her son, introduces or reiterates an association of parental love, but also because she adds the complexity that she is thinking iteratively in the now of the poem. And this all prompts the question, how linked are love (parental or desire) and beauty. Seeing what to me feels like a complicated thought about ‘beauty’, particularly as White is a Black woman, had me check the date of the book, published in 2022, three years after Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: And Other Essays, which included the fantastic essay “In the Name of Beauty”, and I wonder if White’s use is informed by McMillan Cottom’s:

      “Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It’s painful. It can never by fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.”

      Whether or not she had read McMillan Cottom’s essay, I don’t think the insight would have particularly surprised White, and thus McMillan Cottom inevitably guides my own reading.

      All of this still leads to the question of iteration, which adds a sense of fracture to the poem. White has a rich life with writing, and poetry (a specific kind of writing? A related but separate way of life? Certainly poetry is very different from legal writing, though I find a (self-interested?) appeal in poets with law degrees), and love, parental and romantic, and each of these things incorporates beauty (fraught though that may be), but White can only experience each one in turn, she seems to deny the possibility of one coherent life incorporating them all, incorporating all the things that matter to her and that make up who she is, which in a way is denying the possibility that she herself is a coherent whole.

      And THEN, we add god and godlessness to the mix, which in earlier passages White has tied to her experience of blackness, her Black womanhood, and her relationship to Black women and the mutual aid and support that they are able to provide each other. Her apostasy (also her affair… is the affair part of the apostasy?) is costing her community.

      But the universe (ie, a thing that is more real, certain, and/or comprehensible than god) is indifferent to her sins against community and expectation, and this provides the comfort that god and community are not. Or does she protest too much, by drawing attention to it she necessarily draws focus on the lack too?

      Finally there is that most deliberate word, irruption. Not eruption, but irruption. This is not explosion but penetration. Understanding is not something that White is coming up with herself and bursting with. Understanding is something the world is driving into White.

      All of this could be wildly off-base, and as may be evident, I find myself more interested in what White’s associations are, and the questions she prompts, than the idea of a specific singular point, or even of answers to the questions. 
  • Music
    • UPDATED TO ADD: I almost forgot Vampire Weekend’s new song Mary Boone in this fantastic music video directed by my own brother, Andrew Nisinson who has a much slicker website than I do https://andrewnisinson.com/.
    • Dropkick Murphys album Turn Up That Dial – The Dropkick Murphys are more than just a band from back in the day, there most recent few albums have all been fantastic.
    • Sister Wife Sex Strike album Sister Wives Strike Back – A wonderful new to me band discovered on TikTok
    • I’ve also started listening to Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, I haven’t finished the album, but what I’ve heard so far is great.
  • Podcasts
    • Rest is History – this history podcast that I have a tendency to dip in and out of depending on subject recently did a fascinating 4-part series on the history of Carthage, focused as much as possible on the Carthaginian, rather than the Roman perspective of events. 
  • TV/Movie/Streaming
    • NY Mets baseball – Spring Training and start of regular season – I’m a practiced Mets fan, and my hopes for the season are low, but it’s still nice to have baseball around again no matter how bad they looked in their opening series.
  • Games
    • Fallen London – talk about late to the party! This little browser based game originally came out in 2009 and I started playing in March 2024. I’ve really been enjoying its strange, horrifying version of a subterranean London.

Here’s to April, may it give each of us what we need!

Photo of a tortoiseshell cat on a sunny windowsill in a dark room taken by Matthew Nisinson

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I’m Matthew
Welcome to my writing blog, which will mostly be a repository to keep track of my published writing, with perhaps the occasional blog post.

Photo credit: Jesse Braver

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