An Interview with Matthew Thorburn, author of The Grace of Distance

Marcene Gandolfo: I read The Grace of Distance in the summer of 2020, and your poems, which meditate so eloquently on the very nature of distance, spoke to me with a profound immediacy and relevance. Of course, I know that you composed these poems long before you knew of the impending pandemic or the social distancing that would ensue. Still, can you speak to the collection’s current relevance? From writing these poems, have you acquired insights that help you face challenges in these uncertain times?

Matthew Thorburn: Thank you for asking—that’s a very timely question, and something I’ve thought about too. The poems in The Grace of Distance have to do with a variety of distances—between people, between cultures, between different physical places in the world, between faith and doubt—as well as the sense of perspective and understanding that can come with distance, whether it’s a matter of physical distance or time passing. That’s what I was thinking about as I wrote these poems over quite a few years, and certainly when LSU Press published this book in August 2019.

But it is strange, isn’t it, to think about how the word “distance” has taken on such a different meaning this year? So many people are enduring all kinds of terrible hardships right now—whether it’s sickness, caring for a loved one who’s ill, financial hardships, loss of employment, or other personal difficulties. I can’t help thinking of distance in terms of the loved ones who I’m not able to see right now, such as my parents and aunts and uncles, as well as many friends. Spending time by yourself has its virtues and can lead to a kind of grace, I think—as a writer, or even as a reader, this seems especially true—but being separated from family and friends is a hard (though right now very necessary) thing to do.

However, I also know I am immensely lucky that my parents and other loved ones are healthy and doing okay, and I am very fortunate that I’m able to do my work from home. Spending most of this year working from home has meant much more time with my wife and son—the opposite of distance—which has been an unexpected gift. I try to keep that front and center in my mind and just take things day by day.

MG: Can you say something about your composition process?  Do you write daily? Do you engage in writing rituals? In particular, what role did this process play in the construction of your book? In particular, how did the theme of distance emerge?

MT: Prior to the pandemic, I did most of my writing on mass transit, during my commute from my home in New Jersey to my office in New York City, and back. I also had a good routine of working on poems during my lunch hour. Each day I would carry printed copies of poems I was currently working on, and I’d mark these up with edits during those times. Then I’d type in my edits at home, print clean copies, and do it again the next day. Or if I was working on a manuscript, I’d carry a copy of that in my briefcase to reread and mark up. It might not sound ideal, but this writing practice worked very well for me. It’s how I wrote many of the poems in this book—and these days I sometimes daydream about my favorite spots in midtown Manhattan where I could sit outside to eat my lunch and work on my poems.

The Grace of Distance originated in a file folder where over the years I saved poems that didn’t make it into my previous books—mainly for thematic reasons—but that I thought were still very good poems and wanted to keep. (There were also a handful of shorter poems I’d written while working on my book-length poem, Dear Almost.) Eventually, as that folder grew thicker, I read through these poems again and came to see that they hadn’t fit into those other books because almost all of them were about something else—those different kinds of distances. Once I recognized that, I continued writing new poems with this theme in the back of my head.

MG: In “A Poem for My Birthday,” you write, “ . . . “Whatever happened / to longing, you ask, but I long for that / red barn town where I was born . . . ” As these poems continuously travel, do they unremittingly search for home, escape from it, or simultaneously do both?

MT: I think they probably do both. As someone who grew up in one place (the Midwest), then lived for nearly two decades in a very different place (New York City), and now lives in still another different-feeling place (small-town New Jersey), my sense of “home” is complicated. I find myself looking back to Michigan, as in the poem you quoted, as well as writing poems that are set in and focused on the landscape where I live now. When it comes down to it, if you said “home” to me I’d probably picture Lansing, Michigan, where I grew up—though I have to tell you, after nearly three years here in central New Jersey, I feel very much at home here too.

Having said that, though, I find that it often works best for me to be somewhere other than the place I’m writing about—to be looking back at where I’ve been, to have that distance. And certainly, as I get older, I find myself writing more about the past and childhood memories. This is probably why this theme of distances came so naturally to me—why I discovered I’d actually been writing poems about it for years!

MG: In the collection, several poems explore the role of art in bridging interpersonal distances between time and space. Could you elaborate your thoughts on this subject?

MT: I love writing poems about visual art, especially paintings, as well as about music. I’m really drawn to the stories that works of visual art can suggest. And it amazes me to stand in a museum and look up close at a painting and think about the fact that Vermeer once stood in a similar position and put this paint on this canvas. To me that suggests a distance that expands and contracts all at once. As I describe in my poem “Forgotten Until You Find It,” seeing the Girl with A Pearl Earring at the Frick Collection was a powerful experience for me.

In writing a poem I want to share something—to try to enable the reader to see what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling (even if those sights and feelings are ones I’ve imagined). I think it was Philip Larkin who said a poem is like a river you can step into in the same place again and again. There’s a sense of connection I feel in reading the poems I love best, or looking at paintings I love, and I hope I am able to create something like that in my poems too. Paintings are made to be seen, usually, just as poems are usually written with the intention that others will read and hear them—so I think that’s something we have in common.

MG: In a number of the poems, you speak of language in relation to space and travel. For instance, in the poem “No More,” you write “As though many little doors, slow to close, / are closing now: how the doctor speaks of her dying. / Stepping over the puddle of each period / the reader lets each sentence slip away . . . ” Could you comment on this metaphorical connection?

MT: Well, language is one of the main things that connects us, one of the ways we make connections with other people—and I see metaphors like those as not only elements of poetry, but also one of the ways we can understand complicated aspects of life—or in this case, of death. In “No More” I was writing about my grandmother, who had a stroke and lost the ability to communicate verbally. Over time she regained quite a bit of her speech but was never able to talk the way she once had. I think that’s a metaphor—those closing doors—that I came up with in thinking about her last days in hospice and how the human body can go through a process of shutting down. Turning off the lights in a house, room by room, is another way I pictured this, though that didn’t end up in the poem.

MG: What is next? Are you engaged in any new writing projects? If so, would you like to share a bit about your current work?

MT: Thanks for asking about this. Right now, I’m working on two projects I’m very excited about. The first is a book-length sequence of poems about a teenage boy’s experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family, friends, virtually everything, but somehow survives to tell his story. This book is a real departure for me, stylistically, because the poems are written almost entirely without punctuation—except for a period at the end of each poem. “Go Together Come Apart,” my poem about Matisse’s collage “The Swimming Pool” in The Grace of Distance, is a preview of how this mode of writing works for me. For years I was resistant to poems without punctuation and didn’t like reading them. But then the experience of reading my friend Leslie Harrison’s amazing second collection of poems, The Book of Endings, completely changed my mind. Seeing what she did without punctuation—the possibilities that open up when you remove punctuation—inspired me to try writing this way. (You can read a couple of poems from this manuscript online here and here and here.)

The second project, which is still taking shape, is turning out to be a book of elegies—looking back to childhood, as I mentioned earlier, as well as trying to remember loved ones and hold onto memories of them in words. The manuscript is anchored by two sequences of poems—one about my grandmother, Majel Thorburn, and one about my mother-in-law, Fong Koo. This manuscript is also somewhat of a formal experiment. For years I’ve thought about trying to write more prose poems—and in fact quite a few of these poems are prose poems and Haibun. I’m still writing and revising these poems, so I’m excited to see how my imagining of this book will gradually come to life over the next few years. I find with each book it’s a little different, but always a process of discovering.