This interview with Mathias Svalina about his poetry book Destruction Myth was conducted during the month of May, 2010 by seven poets: Wendy Burtt, Cory Phare, Robert Petrick, Robyn Sablosky, Claire Potter, Sean Thomas and John Rossiter.
Q: I found Destruction Myth to be, for me, one of the most readable and accessible books of poetry I've read. In your book I found a lot of the characteristics I enjoy in fiction. I felt connections between the individual poems that pulled me through, almost like chapters. Also, much of the poetry reads somewhat like flash fiction. I'm very interested in the ground between poetry and fiction. So, do you set out to intentionally write poetry, or do you just write what comes to you, no matter the form?
Mathias Svalina: Thanks for the kind words! Not to be snide, but I'm actually not very interested in the boundaries between fiction, poetry & non-fiction. They seem to me ways of creating false senses of expertise & exclusion rather than better allowing a writer to express something that is particular to their experience of the world.
I wrote a lot of these creation myths, about 150, I think. Many of them were in prose, many in lineation. As I cut back to the set of them that I wanted to be the book, I found that I more often liked the prose ones more. Many of the ones that are in lines in the book could easily have been in prose as well -a few, the registrar one, the one that begins "Human life begins / at the moment / of contraception," & the one that ends "No one can feed the baby" needed to be lineated. The line breaks make some of the meaning in those poems.
Then again, I have work that is more open, more complex in its meaning-making, that to me needs the terse attention that short lineation brings to it. To me writing a book is about creating an inhabitable world, with its own logic (or illogic), its own parameters & its own language. Therefore what form the texts take inside the book is a secondary consideration. I wanted Destruction Myth to be fun. I wanted it to reflect the form of religious myths. Those desires seemed to fit with the prose form better than the lines.
Which is to say that the ideas of the poems & the ways I want a reader coming to those ideas dictate the form in my process. For instance I'm currently working on a manuscript entitled It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. It's generally working around themes of how humans have an innate need to fuck up anything that is reflective of themselves. I'm not nearly done with it, but parts of it contain transcripts of confessions given under torture, parts of it are pure nonsense. I want these poems to be stand-offish. To be kind of awkward & so I have them all in prose blocks with tight crenellation, like a medieval theological text, so that a reader sees them first as blocks & then as text.
Q: Destruction Myth features a lot of violent absurdism. People gnawing their hands and feet off, trees soaked in blood, an ant eating his own thorax, etc. I personally enjoy such vivid imagery, but I imagine other people could be turned off by that. How do you see violence functioning in your poetry? And, because of the force and intensity of violence, how do you use it without it overtaking the rest of your poetry?
Mathias Svalina: Violence is an ever-present human condition that induces change. It's deeply seeded in religious & political mythos; the fear of its revolutionary potential is one of the guiding forces of civilization. Something erupting out of nothing is a kind of primal understanding of violence. The violence of birth, of the skin opening up & revealing all the insides. All that stuff is the material of myth. In the pedagogy of life lessons, no one learns without violence. Yet violence is inherently absurd. The disconnect between all forms of civilizing, ameliorating human socialization & the violence needed to keep them in place is absurd. I'm not choleric by nature, so violence on a personal level fascinates me. If I remember correctly, no one benefits from violence in DM. Violence is part of how people interact & make sense of one another.
Q: Larry Bird is a very specific pop culture figure, obviously. I immediately think of jump shots, the Celtics, and Indiana when I read his name. Why start the book off with a poem using his name so much, and having that name reappear on the second to last page?
Mathias Svalina: This was the first "Creation Myth" I wrote. I sat down one day & wrote it; I think the exact version that ended up in the book. It took me maybe five or six minutes. I liked this poem so much that when I sat down the next day to write another I wrote another Creation Myth & then I kept writing them every day for three or four months.
Therefore, out of personal obligation, I wanted to keep the Larry Bird poem first. I have no special affinity for Bird. I'm a basketball fan, but in an abstracted sort of way. I love to watch any basketball game ever, but I do not have what it takes to root for a team. Bird is a goofy looking dude, which I guess is the extent of the symbolic resonance I intended at first. It'd be funny if everyone in the world looked like him, but instead of it being normal they were all kind of ashamed of their bodies. That makes me laugh, yet it also doesn't seem all that different from a lot of body image today. I repeated his name so much because I wanted "Larry Bird" to mean something equivalent "human." I brought back Larry Bird in "Destruction Myth" because I wanted that poem to destroy everything that I'd created in the book - though most of the poems, of course, destroy themselves.
However, as I was putting the book together out of the poems I'd written, I realized that this poem taught me what I was doing. That illogical way that many myths create out of nothingness & also have an established world, something like "In the beginning there was only the raven & then the raven said to the coyote...," that was what I felt like I was doing for a lot of these poems, creating something that purported to be new in places where there was already something old. That was one of the absurdist tropes that was continually exciting for me.
I also wanted these poems to be a kind of free-floating commentary. I wanted them to have a sense of nearly-wisdom, but then to continually undercut any chance at wisdom with the stupidity of the situations. In addition to creation myths, I was also reading a lot of Daniil Kharms & Eastern European Yiddish folk tales. The way story & logic works in these all resonate with me & I wanted to do something similar in a contemporary pop-culture-inflected way. So Bird is a recognizable pop culture figure to start the book off. Though when I do readings with undergrads I realize that it's a very dated cultural reference, since many of the 18-year olds have never heard of him. Here's a digression: When I was giving a reading to an ex-pat community in San Miguel De Allende in Mexico I read that Larry bird poem & then said "One time when I read that poem for an undergrad audience, during the Q&A afterwards the first question someone asked was 'who is Larry Bird?'" Then immediately this guy in the audience, a world-famous ceramicist & one of the pillars of the arts community there, said "So who is Larry Bird?"
Q: In the beginning, there was a serial poem. Why this rather than a collection of your other poems for your first book? Was this conceived as a book initially? Or did you start with a single poem that then spawned this quirky, wonderful family of poems?
Mathias Svalina: This is the second manuscript I'd written. The first one has yet to be taken & may never be. It's full of poems that were mostly occasional or inspired by something in my life. It's not a really great book, to be honest with you. I think all the poems in are good & I think by now they've all been published in journals. But it doesn't do any recognizable thing as a book. Serial poetry allowed me to stop thinking about each poem as a kind of important thing unto itself. It allowed me to think of writing as my work. When working on this book I began to fancy myself as a strangeness machine, rather than a poet per se.
I wrote the basic stuff that became Destruction Myth over the course of three or four months & then I revised it for about a year & then tried to get it published. It was taken about two years after I first began sending it out.
Like I said above I wrote these as a series because I liked the first one I wrote & decided to write another & then another & so on. I had decided to do one of those write-a-poem-every-day-&-post-it-to-a-blog things during the month of April that year. I had no plan to write these, but I ended up doing them every day & then more than one a day. I started collecting all the things that would be fodder for poems during a normal day & then framing them inside this myth form. For some I would just sit down & write in the beginning there was __________ & fill in the blank with something silly & see what I would have to do to make sense of that world. It was a fun process, as I was trying to make myself laugh & trying to write something every day that I could read to my friends Ashley & Zach & make them laugh.
Q: Destruction Myth is entertaining, imaginative and fun. And yet, it's easy to draw serious implications, and tempting to impose an underlying meaning, i.e. the implausibility of scripture or the naivete of children's parables. Please share your basic intention of this collection and what the source inspiration was for it.
Mathias Svalina: I've always been interested in myth & religiosity. When I was young I had a deep, deep faith in Catholicism. I have no idea what happened to that religious faith. However, faith is still important to me as a practice & a concept. It's believing in that which does not exist. That's so weird & yet necessary. Like I said before I'd been reading a lot of Native American & Inuit creation myths. Once I realized I was in the middle of something I went to the library & read as many books of creation myths as I could find. They are, each & every myth, amazing. I'm also a big fan of The Golden Bough & I think a lot of the way Frazier thought people functioned showed up in these poems.
The rhetoric of a creation myth is absurd. Something from nothing. Or something believing it is the first, when in fact it is already part of a world. Origins are tricky situations, as they often imply correctness or purity & they almost always have a political use to them. I wanted to spend sometime with the pure, disconnected silliness of the form. But as I said above, I think these poems do have something like profundity to them. But it's a profundity that refuses itself & constantly undercuts itself. Perhaps that's the only kind of profundity that I can believe in. I mean, is there anything stupider than profundity?
Q: Is there significance in the numbers: 44 Creations Myths and 1 Destruction Myth? Or are these numbers simply the point at which you arrived and said "I'm done."?
Mathias Svalina: I wrote something like 150 of these myths & then cut out about 110-120 of them, mostly because they were too silly or too repetitious of similar poems in the book. Later in the revision process I wrote some new ones. I was consciously trying to think about how to make a book out of them, but a book that didn't feel too deliberate. I wrote "Destruction Myth" because I couldn't figure out how to make this seem like a book. I tried at first to write many "Destruction Myth"s, thinking they'd be an equal section to the Creation Myths. Makes sense, doesn't it? But I quickly realized that whatever had made that process interesting for me as a writer had passed. I was writing shit. Then for a few weeks I'd keep a notebook on me & asked friends how they thought the world was going to end. I kept notes, after at 1am people's answers tended to get more interesting. I'm not sure how many of these I kept in the poem, as this went through extensive revision, but that process helped me to envision the "Destruction Myth" as a kind of big jamboree.
As for significance to the numbers, yes, there is a significance.
Q: In your poems, you rely heavily on ampersand to connect ideas and propel your poems. Why did you choose this symbol over "and"? Do you employ the ampersand in all your poetry, or was this choice specific to Destruction Myth?
Mathias Svalina: I use ampersands in all my writing in which I am allowed to use them. I use them because Larry Levis used ampersands. He's my hero. Also I think they are pretty. These are stupid reasons. But they are true.
Q: Destruction Myth has an obvious arc and theme. Can these poems be read as stand-alone pieces, or do your creation myths necessitate a book form?
Mathias Svalina: I think most of these poems were published in journals & such before the book came out. In that respect I think they work as stand-alones. I hope people get something out them that way. And I think there are better standalone poems in here, ones that don't need the formal exploration to be considered interesting. But they definitely mean differently as a grouping. The conceptual part of the book that (hopefully!) makes it rise above its inherent goofiness comes out of the grouping together & the repetition.
Selfishly, I'm happy to hear you say it has an arc. Often when I think of the book, I think of only ways that I could write a totally eviscerating review of it. I have that review in my head a lot when I have to read from it or think about it, all the people I'm ripping off, all the stupid shit I do in the book, the fact that there is a Jurassic Park 3 reference in it. Its lack of an arc is something that factors into my internal bad review of the book. I spent a lot of the revision time trying to think of how the book could have an arc in addition to the presentation of the texts. I'm not sure if what I see as the arc is what anybody else would see, but I'm happy to hear that you think it has one.
Q: When reading the poem "Destruction Myth," I thought that it might be a cento of all the preceding poems in the book. Although some of the language is different, many of your most memorable images present in both. How did you construct "Destruction Myth"? Did you write it after the "Creation Myth" poems?
Mathias Svalina: You can see above for the process of "Destruction Myth." A cento is a good way of thinking about it. I wanted the poem to respond to the book. I wanted it to fail as destroying what was there. I wanted it to be a bit more rhythmic & oracular than any of the "Creation Myth"s.
Q: In your book you mention your parents are chemists (scientists). What is the role of their profession in your poetry? Similar: Most people would consider science and poetry polar opposites, but you seem to have married the two together. Why is it so important for you to combine science and poetry?
Mathias Svalina: In Holmes' bio of Coleridge he says something about how when he was asked why he went to all of the London talks on the burgeoning scientific explosion he responded "To improve my stock of metaphors." That's one of the things. The metaphors that make sense to me are often scientific ones. And these metaphors seem like they have more resonance for contemporary culture than traditionally rich images. I really love the work of Arthur Sze & TR Hummer, who both use science in very different ways. Stein studied under William James & to understand that is to understand something important about her work. There's a pretty decent pop-science book called Proust was a Neuroscientist that discusses some issues of the relationship between art & science in a somewhat convincing way.
I love science & contemporary technology. I run an online poetry journal. I use computers for every aspect of my life. My father was able to live as an adult thanks to technological advances that saved his life. I am fully a part of it. I'm interested in all cyborgian progress. I don't think science & art are ever really that separated, though that CP Snow lecture from the 1950s claims that there are two entirely different cultures at work with them in America. It seems to me that artists mostly become artists because they are unable to understand the science stuff but have the same urges to make sense of the world in some way that science can't do. Creativity is always predicated by its technology. Can't have writing without the tablet, books without the technology of binding, modern literature without the internet. On the other hand, the technological era & the industrial era are perhaps the greatest catalyst of global atrocity on many fronts. I have at times been swayed by the ideas of deep ecology, but I have not been committed enough to enact them in my life. And therein lies the absurdity - I love technology in daily practice & I find it disgusting conceptually. Lived experience, in my opinion, is one of absurdity. There's only a small difference between an iPod & a talking raven.
Q: Can you speak about the placement of your poems? How did you choose the order of which your poems appear? How important is narrative flow in a book of poetry?
Mathias Svalina: Hmm. when it comes to individual choices of the poems, I'm not sure I want to answer that. As I said above, I have an arc in mind (actually a few) with the movement of the book, but obviously it is not a book with a throughline narrative & I don't want to dictate readings of it. Somehow I'm happier talking about the book in abstract concepts than in direct particulars. Mostly because I don't think a writer is the best reader of her or his work. I know some of the things I'm doing & their intentionality, but there are other choices I made in the book for absolutely no reason or for reasons that I did not think out. Much like the above question about grouping these together, the narrative flow is important to me, but I don't think it has to be. I guess I was hoping that the book could be read as a sort of absurdist candy, & then it could be read for some of its intertextual comments about storytelling & mythos, but if one wanted to dig into it a bit more that there would actually be a personal & psychological level to it as well. There are a few poems that are obviously biographical, but even the ones that aren't also are, in the sense that we can never escape ourselves. Sadly.
Q: Why did you name your book Destruction Myth when you spend most of your time discussing creation? Destruction Myth seems to carry a tone of sarcasm (perhaps even irony) in itself. Likewise, your "creation" poems, though wonderfully written, never end on a note of absolution. Creation begins without a clear ending; destruction ends abruptly. It is not until reading your book in its entirety that I discovered the ending to all "creation" is "destruction" and even then, it isn't completely the end. Many of your poems depict a world that grapples with comfort and danger: everyone is eating honey, then everyone eats each other, for example. This is a common theme in your creation myths. Why do you use themes of destruction, loneliness, and isolation in your poems? What made you decide to include such sad notions in a book that discusses creation?
Mathias Svalina: To be honest, the book was originally called Creation Myths, however, I had a chapbook entitled Creation Myths, which contained about 20 or so of these "Creation Myth"s, & my editor didn't want the full-length book to have the same name. I batted around a few other possibilities, The Beginning, Forty-Four Creation Myths & One Poem of Destruction, maybe some others. But when Michael Dumanis said he thought it should be Destruction Myth that made so much sense & made me like the book more. It seemed to bring out the folly of what these "Creation Myth"s were trying to do in the book, the folly of thinking one can create something new. So it was fortuitous that he balked, as Destruction Myth is a far more interesting title. One of the early reviews of my book mentioned that I keep doing the cliché of every creation contains the seeds of its own destruction, which was a relief to get that out of the way. Most of the "Creation Myths" end in either a standstill, a destruction, nostalgia or failure. It's actually a pretty bleak book, now that I think about it. But isn't that the heart of absurdism? There is no way to understand the world that fits logically. I guess I focus on dark things in my writing, though often through light modes. Maybe it's all I can do.
Q: Your poem, the creation myth on page 7 of your book, details a world created without adjectives and it is the best poem in your collection. The reliance on contradictory, humorous, and even dark descriptions in the beginning of this piece contrast well with latter half: a world with adjectives is both beautiful and dangerous while a world without adjectives is numb yet safe. I would love to know the creation of this poem (no pun intended).
Mathias Svalina: Hmmm. I know I wrote this poem while I was revising the book, not during the initial three or four months of writing. I cannot recall anything about the process or why I wanted to add it to the book. I apologize for that.
I like this poem as well, which might sound weird, but so much happens between writing a poem & getting it published in a book & then talking about it months later that there are some poems in the book that I think are good poems, but that I don't personally like any more. I think I like this one because it's fun to read out loud & because that simile of the coat racks is so weird, but to me really exact. I'm not sure I agree with your reading of it, though. The world without adjectives is dangerous for the injured child & yearningly sad for the wife. To me it seems like a government-language version of life; one that attempts to be objective in lieu of being correct. Apparently I have nothing interesting to say about this poem.
Q: You employ a great deal of specific images in your poems, yet you inevitably describe them in abstract (at times confusing) ways, such as: the gun and the baby monkey. Do you prefer the abstract? Do you use common, detailed images to counterbalance your abstractions or are you making concessions to the reader? Were the specific images easier to write or the clouded symbolism?
Mathias Svalina: George Oppen once wrote "I write about things which may be abstractions to many people. I do not write about them if they are abstractions to me." I'm not sure if that's really my response to your question, but it's something like that. The things that are abstract in this book don't seem abstract to me. In fact I tried my hardest to be as concrete as possible, in the sense that if there is a soft-serv ice cream machine in a poem I really want the reader to envision that, likewise with guns & monkeys. It's tough because I don't expect any reader to "suspend disbelief" & imagine that these worlds exist but I really want the visual to be a gun & a baby monkey.
So yes, I do try to keep things in Destruction Myth balanced in the sense that you're asking. I tried to choose things that could resonate as my "protagonist" images, for instance in that poem, it seems important to me that one of them is the symbol of aggression & the other the symbol of absolute cuteness. But once I even point that out I start to hate the poem for its intentionality. It becomes only moralistic & no longer bizarre to me. This is why I dislike explaining my intentions for poems. it robs them of whatever makes them interesting to me. To me the encounter of a baby monkey (who seems to be a player) & a needy gun is far more intriguing.
Q: Your poems are very surreal, with a fascinating array of abstract images and ideas. Where did you find inspiration, not to write the poems, but for the intensely creative (though occasionally bizarre) subjects of your poems?
Mathias Svalina: I don't really see myself as being very creative. I work at the things that end up as poems. I try to write every day. I trash the majority of what I write. I've been reading contemporary poetry & writing since I was 16 & taking poetry pretty seriously that whole time, but I don't think I wrote what I consider to be a good poem until I was 25 & even that one was a piece that started off as a longer poem & ended up as something like 20 words. I'm not one of those silly blood-as-ink people who think the actual act of writing is something like "work" or "suffering," but facility with poetry is a result of deep immersion & practice. Sometimes poems come to the page or screen fully formed & totally done, but that's a result of practice. I read a lot of surrealism & absurdism & as an editor & a poetry fan I read a lot of what comes out that is in keeping with my aesthetic. All of that is, in a way, to try & narrow down what it is that I can say that no one else can say. I wrote probably a few hundred pages worth of generally uninteresting surrealist poetry in the year or so before writing this book. I realized much later that those were essentially practice runs. So the turns I have, all the silly shit, have a level of aesthetic calculation to them. I don't feel that when I'm writing, but it's in me.
As far as inspiration, that's one of those words that means something different to most people than to me. I don't get inspired to write poems, I find the disconnections in language & generic form fascinating & usually it is these disconnects that I want to play with & write through & then when I do that it's what might be called a poem. Additionally, I find the basic tropes of surrealism & wrongness endlessly delightful. When a fork recites a limerick, I'm interested. br/>
Q: I'm very intrigued by the process you underwent to create these poems. I love the idea for the repeated Creation Myths and the final Destruction Myth titles. Did you create the idea to fit the poems, or the poems to fit the idea (the chicken or the egg, so to speak)?
Mathias Svalina: I sort of answered this above, but in keeping with the spirit of the book, I'm going to give an alternative creation story for it. About ten years ago or so I wrote a poem called "Creation Myth #4,203." At the time I thought it was really a funny idea to number the myths. My friend GC liked this poem. Because he's a better poet than I am & he liked it I thought it was a good poem. I'm not sure if it was. I wrote a few more of these around that time, I can't really remember. I lost all those poems at some point, due to carelessness. Years later when I sat down to do that poem-a-day thing I must have had that idea filed somewhere & brought it out then.
But as for fitting poems to the idea, once I decided I was doing this serial project it became a way to free myself from having to think of some rhetorical turn or a Romantic twist to a poem. Even though I disliked them, I was still modeling what I though a poem was on all those Wordsworth-biting, largely white-male poems that present a situation & then with half the poem to go turn on "isn't that just the way, though" or "I still think of that today." I thought these poems were the worst, but I had internalized this mode of poem creation. With a serial poem that has a ingrained arc to it I no longer had to obey this present-turn-reflect mode; all I had to do with mutilate the form, which is the fun part.
One of the most instructive things in working on this book was that I was teaching Shakespeare's sonnets & Berryman's sonnets at the same time. I kept looking at how both of them continually do new things inside the old rhetorical structure of the sonnet & thinking about how I could try new ways to distance my poems from the expected form, while still iterating the form. So I tried to put everything into these poems: strange things on TVs half-glimpsed, things my friends said, references to what I was reading, my family, my fears.
Q: I really like the use of absurdisms; from the beginning, we're introduced to a world populated by Larry Bird lookalikes and the alienation of the real Larry Bird. From where do you draw your selection of these kinds of characters?
Mathias Svalina: I like the way fables, like children's books, present a character that can be an animal but it's mostly human. There's something about the naïve confidence of character-creation in fables that is more correct to me than the supposedly in-depth psychological development of so much modern fiction. I wanted to have a sense of this primary color tone to the book, as I wanted it to read as fable very clearly. But I also wanted many of them to be patently ridiculous, the way a garden as the beginning of the world would be patently ridiculous if it didn't have cultural significance. Though some of them I wanted to seem more serious & some of them I think of as actually me.
Q: It feels like you really had fun writing this! More than that, it READS well... I feel that writing toward catharsis doesn't always translate into my best work; do you have any suggestions of how you can let yourself unfurl in a way that ends up reading in a playful way like this (I know, vagaries abound in this one).
Mathias Svalina: I'm glad it feels that way. I did have fun writing this book & it's a book I know I could not write at this point in my life, for a variety of reasons, so I relish the fun I had. However, it took a lot of work to get some of these poems to feel like they are carefree & spontaneous. Some, like the opening poem, are in virtually the exact form that I wrote the first draft of them. Many, however, are unrecognizable from the first drafts. I wanted it to seem like the poems are being made up as you go along as a reader, with a lot of bizarre turns that then try to make sense of themselves for you. I wanted it to feel like the next page hadn't been written until you turned the page & set your eyes to it. I'm pretty sure that I did not accomplish that, but it was my goal.
As for writing toward catharsis, I don't feel like advice is ever very interesting, but for me, there is catharsis in everything artistic. The only art of merit, in my opinion, is art of transformation. I'm a cheeseball Romantic in this respect; I stick close to Shelley's defense of art as the only means by which one can ever understand another human. But the art of catharsis that feels like catharsis to you in another's work has already been done, so there's no need to do it again. The trick, it seems to me, is to find what it is about you that is broken, silly, ridiculous, so obvious that you think it is not aesthetic & to cultivate that. People should write the way that seems bewildering & interesting to them, despite the fact that those word came out of their own heads.
I think it was Nabokov who gave the advice to a young novelist that one should collect everything that is said negatively in reviews & cultivate that, as it is the only thing particular to the individual. In some poetry workshops I have taught I tried to use this model & have my students develop the things that their peers do not like in their work, rather than the things that the peers respond to. As for me, I wanted to be a Southern Narrative poet. When I was in undergrad my favorite writers were CD Wright & Robert Penn Warren. I still love them, but I know that I can not do the things that they can do. I would be trying to write their poems, rather than my own. So I guess I don't recommend that one try to be playful, so much as if you can't help it then find out what is interesting about playfulness & try to develop it.
Q: I thought the Reinkordt video of your work was amazing: all aspects of it seem perfect, but clearly your words take center stage. The Creation Myth poems are so well suited to narration and cinematic interpretation, do you have any plans to pursue this route further?
Mathias Svalina: Elisabeth Reinkordt is a documentary filmmaker & video artist. She's done a film on sustainable agriculture & is working on one about educational reforms in Nebraska. She also does video art & installation pieces. Anderson Reinkordt did the sound on that little video. He has an ongoing band Man's Last Great Invention that is an all-improv epic-minded band; I used to sing with them for a few years. Patrick Wilkins is an actor who's had a lot of success in national-market commercials. All of us were living in Lincoln, Nebraska at the time & Patrick was doing a one-man show & wanted to use a couple of my "Creation Myths" for the performance. He read them in a way that I never would, but which I think is really fantastic. Afterwards Ande recorded the sound for these & Elisabeth did the video. We were all friends, part of a small but supportive arts community in town that was so diverse it naturally led to a lot of collaboration.
I don't have any plans for more of these kinds of videos, but I'd be up for more. Not that you asked, but my friend Nathan Young (not the guy from Wolf Eyes) did a video of a section of a long poem of mine called Above the Fold that you can see here: http://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/mathias-svalinas-the-hospital-by-nathan-young/ I really love this piece (if that doesn't sound too arrogant) because of how disorienting the relationship between the images & the words are. He doesn't even give you enough time to combine them in your head before he moves on. We have vague plans of doing a film that would be of the whole book in a similar manner, but no definite dates.
Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago, where his parents were both chemists. He is the author of five chapbooks as well as five collaboratively written chapbooks. His work has been published widely in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Diagram, Jubilat, and Typo. He has won fellowships and awards from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Iowa Review and New Michigan Press, among others. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He currently teaches writing and literature in Denver, Colorado. Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Press, 2010) is his first book.
CREATION MYTH
There was a bunny with a broken leg
& a mink with an empty stomach,
Somehow they coexisted peacefully
& were able to create the world.
When Hollywood heard about this
they sent a team of idea people out to meet them.
The idea people were so crass
that the bunny & the mink uncreated the world.
They drank up all the oceans
& hairdried all the clouds.
They knocked down all the mountains
& flicked the switch that turned the sun off.
They sat together in the darkness
neither one really knowing what to say.
The mink leaned over to the bunny,
put his paw on his friend's shoulder,
said: Well it's been a wild ride
& bit the bunny's throat out.
CREATION MYTH
In the beginning there was a book
but every time a villager read the book
it meant something different to her
than it did to her friend or her mother.
The villagers fought over the correct interpretation.
Mothers ripped earrings from their son's ears.
Children stuffed their parents' mouths with gauze.
Priests bludgeoned bakers. Twins disagreed.
Eventually someone decided to throw the book
down the well, but when she picked it up
a shower of keys fell from its pages,
each key labeled for a particular villager.
There were no locks at that time
so the villagers took their keys home
to their basements & garages & built locks
& locked up everything they owned.
They locked up their houses & bikes first.
Then they locked up their drawers & their pockets.
One villager built a lock for his mouth
& then another built a lock for his eyes.
Years later a team of scientists in white coats
discovered the village. All the villagers
had locked themselves completely still
& only a few sneezes revealed that they were alive.
The scientists radioed in for a team of pickpockets
who stole the keys from the locked villagers.
But even the pickpockets could not be of help
because none of the keys opened any of the locks.