Alex Mattraw: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems

Alex Mattraw

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Alex Mattraw

Four Poems

Sand Dollar 

a star 

inside you 

crush easy

linen whisper

how tide 

dollars bleach 

mermaid tarps 

recall visible 

animals dawn 

common helix 

blush neckline 

orchids raised 

by degrees 

7-11 sage 

burns velvet 

mall climate 

ghosts tide 

antlers slow 

smoke pooling

underfoot

Behold! 

The cuttlefish 

jet sister 

ink skirted

whirlpool I

pray her

chameleon

holes blind 

us, coin

her story

Paternal Industrial Complex

For Jay Gatsby

In gardens, men

like blue moths

whisper of champagne 

stars. I watch the sun slit

draw cataracts, bear 

the city station

servant of orange toil

and lemon pyramids.

Halved, pulpless machines 

extract the hour,

garnish the gold 

bar and forgotten brass 

guests too young to 

know the last future

or the first thrown stone

sleeper tracks once dividing 

a country of railroads.

“Did you keep it?” 

a voice will ask.

Pitched yellow laughter

is easy, tipped out.

Coastline swells 

the century by 8 degrees,

dissolves the heart-slunk 

clink as its own 

coin of breath.

Too young to know 

the swimmers we'll make 

with our shawls

of exhaust, bobbed

cars like mouths

that swing and chatter

gin ice melt

naming the earth 

lurch away from 

the hottest day.

Already, here and there

become seafoam 

siege of an opal,

fruit rind sky 

soon to peel under 

this husky blue flutter. 

Each windshield town 

dances alive 

for one time. 

Epigenetics

at the injection

site I saw

white blood cells

finally admit their

bias and I 

who am already 

made of tests

pills reports and

nightly ledgers count

lab cotton balls

stored in glass

jars recall when

he yelled willed

me backwards falling

off the spooked 

horse before leaping 

over the farm’s 

old barbs leather 

arteries I open

for results numerate 

lead traces stuck 

like long pocketed 

gum sort feelings

with an index

of unpaid water 

bill my therapist 

for another hour 

think what happens

when a biopsy 

arrives at morning 

believe hope is 

also death is 

a daughter I 

cannot order around

what fences keeps

what is free

and what decays

grass growing yellow

from roof shingles

in me every

day winnows hills

I live from

arsenic seeds

rain stems

and metal under

your boot heels

I offer you

my child who

is also your

soil runoff

blood results are

not chemical truths 

but we are

are we repeating 

this familial 

witness

Land Scars

wed to water

and rapid debris

at the dump

she stains rebar 

blackberry and chin 

flash of children 

where windy songs

unearth trochee feet

darkening sand inside

tomorrow quiet hope

runs her tidal 

sweat of patterned 

marrow call out 

of the landing 

sea accident can’t

concentrate dynamite or

scour scrap metal

barbs flung from 

wishing trees gash

pine bled impact 

gapes her chin

aftermath sways how 

can I sing

through my stitches?

Interview

October 15th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Alex Mattraw, Poet

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: The confluence of your work is focused on art and poetry. Could you talk about the relationship you have with each, and how the written word influences visual elements and performance?

AM: I have a hard time separating the words art and poetry. In fact, I frequently describe my poems as best understood if a reader experiences them as paintings or pieces of music. My work often finds origin in visually or sonically stimulating events. Since my 20s, visual art and film have been ekphrastic starting places for many of my poems. And in the last decade, I’ve loved working with photographer Adam Thorman who provided the “source texts” for two of the poems you published (“Epigenetics” and “Land Scars”). Generally, I use an associative process when I write about Thorman’s work.

Memories and concepts emerge from my impressions of a given photo’s emotional shapes and juxtapositions. That process involves a feeling of  intimacy with the art, igniting a lexicon that becomes the basis of a new poem. For example, Thorman’s image of a retaining wall punctured with bolts reminds me of skin punctured with needles. So when I approached that image, I found myself writing a double narrative about what it feels like to wait for test results at a blood lab, and what it means when hope, like death, is inherent to what we can’t know or control. 

Photo by Adam Thorman, from VOIDS, a collaboration between Alex Mattraw and Adam Thorman

Many of my poems also emerge from conversations I have with other makers about life (and art, or are they the same?). What excites and scares us. Where we can find community in ever-troubling times. These talks spur ideas that find language in some of my poems, be they actual conversations or ones that surface between myself and the art that I’m writing about. (See “Ana” in Dreginald’s “Issue 24,” written about Ana Mendieta, photographer of Imagen de Yagul.).

Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, from the series Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–1977, 1973

DG: With Lone Glen, a quarterly reading and performance series for writers, artists, and musicians, curated by you, there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration. Could you talk a bit about how the series started and also which fusion of art forms you enjoy the most? Painting with poetry? Music with art? A combination of three?

AM: Yes, Lone Glen has been about collaboration since it began in 2011. I’d been out of my MFA program for a few years and found my writing community dwindling. I also noticed that a lot of readings get bogged down with formality– the awkward, serious reading of bios, the “one and done” / in and out urgency of some bookstore events. So in part, Lone Glen emerged from my own literary loneliness and desire for a different kind of space. It was an experiment: what if I could throw parties in my own home and host writers and artists who don’t usually work together? What if the features could introduce each other with a story of how they met, or an impression they have of that person’s work, even if they just met? The hope is that the audience and creators will vibe and then befriend each other, and those bonds will lead to more collaboration. I don’t really do favorites. But of many memorable events, one stands out: a combo evening with the electronica influenced band Turk & Divis, who played alongside poets and prose writers, some of whom improvised on stage and looped their work with recordings, dipping my then Oakland basement into what felt like a mystical, ecstatic state! Turk & Divis also recorded their first EP at Lone Glen: another unforgettable night. 

[Find Turk & Divis on Bandcamp]

These days I’m mostly running Lone Glen out of my Berkeley garden, which makes hosting a band a lot harder. The best nights are always about the charisma that readers bring to the stage, and the emotional response the audience returns to them– whether the response involves laughter, tears, or the excited insistence to buy X author’s book(s). And of course I love it when the unexpected happens: when a poet suddenly breaks out into a hymnal song (see live performances with poet and composer Kevin Simmonds!), or when nightfall or weather goes undetected and we have to run into the house to shield from falling dark or rain . . .

DG: There’s the first poem one writes and the first that one publishes—most don’t remember the former, but really the latter. How much time did you take to go from one to the other and how does your current work fit in relation to that first published piece?

AM: I’ve been writing poems since the age of eight, and I do remember the first one. I used the images of the California windmills between Tracy and Livermore as metaphors for court royalty and social conflict (you know, the usual third grade obsessions!). But the first poem I published in a “real journal” was actually an event unknown to me until 2003, when I egotistically did my first “Google search” of my own name and realized that the editor of the now defunct Comfusion online journal had apparently accepted a poem I’d sent and published it without without notifying me or at least going through the typical collaborative publication process. Maybe we should all periodically Google ourselves?And what was more bizarre: In that same Google search, that poem, “Writing the Body,” showed up on a syllabus for a poetry course at the University of the Philippines. In any case, the poem was an indulgent if imagistic (and fictional) narrative about two lovers painting each other with pomegranate seeds, obligatory Persephone references included. Taut, sharp lines. The next published piece didn’t happen until 2005, when Seneca Review took a prose poem I’d written about the unreliability of memory, with Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil being a source text. Both of these poems reflect what you can find in my work now: pieces that engage with other texts or art, filmic imagery, slant or scant narrative, and forms that either condense or explode outwards.

It’s more than twenty years later and the differences include much more experimentation with radical forms of constraint and erasure. In my composition process these days, I also tend to do a lot of research to find scientific language and data that I then attempt to adapt, or otherwise– “translate”– into a more intimate, relatable space for my reader. In the last few years, I’ve also tried to better ground my poems– avoiding useless abstractions– with the aim of  making them more accessible, or at least, sensical. More and more in this social climate, I feel poetry is indulgent if it doesn’t address what is happening now, and if it fails to be at least somewhat relatable to an audience that doesn’t regularly read poetry. So, my recent poems include more real-life images, even if they retain a surrealist or modernist casting. I allow myself in some poems to use conversational language that addresses, with trepidation, our currently ever-dizzying political “discourse.” The latter is especially true in my collaborative work.

Collaborators Tiff Dressen & Alex Mattraw

DG: To what extent do you still read the poets who first influenced you to start writing?

AM: I started writing poetry well before I started reading it. Honestly, fiction, nonfiction, film, and music most influenced my first decades of writing poetry. Music remains influential to the metrics and rhythm of every line I write, which comes from being a once serious musician and now a dabbling one (guitar, flute, some songwriting). High school and college mentors included Baldwin, Beckett, Faulkner, Joyce, Morrison, Woolf, and so many more. I still study (and teach) many of these writers.

As far as poets, I don’t always pleasure read the folks that  anchored me in my late teens and 20s, but I still thoroughly enjoy teaching them, and teaching them means I’m in constant conversation with their poetics: Blake, Dickinson, Eliot, H.D., Keats, Mallarme, Niedecker, Plath, Rimbaud, Stein, Williams, etc. That continued conversation means of course that their poetics remain bedrocks and counterpoints to the directions my writing takes. I’m very grateful to be employed at a progressive high school where I’ve been encouraged to design poetry courses for our 10^th-12^th grade English students. My dream? That my seminar students will take over the globe and reshape social spaces, using their language skills to persuade and reform where persuasion and reformation desperately need to happen!

DG: You’ve experimented with capitalization when it comes to the titles of your collections. Some are all lowercase, while others follow the more traditional formula. Could you talk about what influences those decisions?

AM: small siren is actually an image from one of the poems in the book. It just looks right without caps. But the implied paradox does mirror the book’s ideas: what can look minor can have major impact, just as a siren is a small thing but indicates emergency and pending collapse. We fell into weather has more theme leanings when read as a statement/sentence. 

DG: South Berkeley is the place where you live and write. What, in general, are the challenges and rewards of writing in the Bay Area and what are your favorite places—both literary and non-literary?

AM: As you know, the Bay Area is rife with multicultural aesthetic force. Just walking down an Oakland street means you’re witness to conceptual street art—graffiti, mural projects, etc—and though these kinds of images can be found in all big cities, you get the sense that in the Bay, the growing chasm between tech folks and everyone else feels impossible to navigate but also imperative to address in some creative way. Walking around San Francisco or Oakland also means listening to the echo of our  historical contexts: the Gold Rush and 60s counterculture. I often think about the Free Speech Movement and the sentiments of the Beats. Truly, northern California is an incredible place in which to live and write. We are home to some of the safest and most ecstatic queer places in the world. We have amazing local bands (see: The Reds Pinks and Purples, The Paper Cuts, and Hypnotic Pattern), rad music venues, and some of the best reading series (see: Woolsey Heights or The Racket!). And we’ve got the Sonoma coast, so close and so breathtaking. But of course many are suffocating over the rising cost of rent and housing prices. I’m privileged to be able to make it work for now but might not be able to for the long term. This stress plagues so many of my artist friends to the point that many have moved through the following pattern: Mission, SF to Oakland to—somewhere else: Portland, Seattle, the Midwest, or perhaps wiser, out of the U.S. If you have to use most of your waking hours to labor to make rent, the laboring doesn’t leave much space for making. 

Fave bookstores: City Lights, Dog Eared, Moe’s, Wolfman Books (RIP). 

Fave “Nature” places: Sutro Bath and Lands End for cliff and cave walking; Bernal Hill and Buena Vista Park for walks with a view in SF (Claremont Canyon in Berkeley); Caesar Chavez Park for all things; Albany Bulb for the surreal; Steep Ravine Trail / Stinson Beach for beauty.

Fave Other faves: SF’s Lone Palm or The Royal Cuckoo bars; SF music venues– Bottom of the Hill, Great American Music Hall, and The Chapel; East Bay’s Stork Club and Ivy Room for local bands; Longbranch restaurant, Berkeley (RIP); Babbette restaurant, Berkeley (also RIP at the end of October 2025!). The darkened Musée Mécanique magic under the old Cliff House (also RIP).

The RIP notes tell you plenty about what’s happening in the Bay Area.

DG: If you, on the other hand, could have the opportunity to be taught by any poet (living or dead), who would that be and why?

AM: This is an impossible question! If I had a chance to catch Dickinson in a social mood, she’d be the ultimate dream. Maybe it would be a class based on letters we’d write to each other . . . Feast of the Epistolary!

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

AM: I’m in the middle of several projects. One is a series of dramatic monologues based on The Great Gatsby, which was published exactly one hundred years ago, but in my opinion, still feels relevant to these times. I’ve taught the book forever and can recite several passages, so it’s fun to reanimate and contemporize some of the scenes in original poems, considering diverse ways to interpret the characters (is Daisy a victim or does she victimize? Has Myrtle’s internalized misogyny made her a misunderstood person, even to herself?). I usually start the process with a few pages of the original text, radically erasing until I’m left with maybe 10-15 words at the most. Then I use that language only as a starting place, writing into images and lines with lines and images of my own. In another project, which has become another anchor to what will be my fourth book, I’m using a two words per line constraint to compose poems that address my experiences as I live through this climate changed time. Some of them resemble what I prefer to call “guillotined” sonnets, but others are much longer. All emerge through Niedecker’s condensory method of distilling emotion through image to evoke concepts.

At the same time, I’m steeped in my collaboration with fellow poet, Tiff Dressen. We have written about twenty haibun poems that explore, among other things, the resiliency and adaptability of animal and plant species. My hope is we’ll have our book length manuscript of these and many other poems completed by spring.

Reading: Just finished Out There (incredibly weird and wonderful stories from Bay Area author, Kate Folk) and the novel Orbital (Samantha Harvey), which is becoming a source text for my newest poems. In the middle of: Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler); Like Love (Maggie Nelson); new work by  Kevin Simmonds; the “crown” series (danez smith); a new collection of  experimental essays by poets Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal, One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer; and Julie Carr’s new book, The Garden, which I got to feature when she read for Lone Glen on October 10^th!

Author Bio:

Alex Mattraw is a queer poet, parent, and educator living in Berkeley. Her third full length collection of poetry, Raw Anyone, was published with Brooklyn’s Cultural Society in 2022, and two of her four chapbooks live at Dancing Girl Press. Recent poems and reviews are featured or forthcoming in Action, Spectacle; The Brooklyn Rail; Lana Turner; Jacket2; Posit; Tupelo Quarterly; and VOLT. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, Alex is also the founder and curator of the Bay Area reading series, Lone Glen, now in its twelfth year. alexmattraw.com