JANUARY INTERVIEW – Matt Blesse
Greetings. Ahem. Exciting news:
I just spent most of my unemployed and copious free time in January learning how to conduct and edit audio interviews and now I present the results to you!! My January interviewee is Matt Blesse, and over the course of a few Skype sessions, he read me two poems and said lots of smart and lovely things, some of which you can listen to RIGHT NOW! Here you go:
Thanks for listening/reading. If you’re moved to do so, you can me know what you think and feel about it with this handy page.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, this is Sarah Dayley and today, for my January Interview, I’m speaking with Matt. He’s a thoughtful, candid writer and good friend of mine. I’ll let him introduce himself to you:
My name is Matt Blesse and I am a spoken word poet and an educator and I am currently living in my homeland in South Korea. . . .
Here’s an example of his writing:
When you are adopted
some things are given
my eyelids passed on by mothers and fathers of the sun
my sudden waterfall of nose
my cheekbones that hold Corea’s mountains
My face
that is everywhere in this shopping mall
but on the mannequins and billboards
and then my tongue
When I speak to the salesman in hangul
“hello” and “thank you”
Are loose stones tumbling from a fortress wall
Then there is only tremble and distance
Something in history snipped
The chest’s skin peels back in rough patches
My insides feeling the air between his lips and mine
it is a cold slap of guilt called bloodline
remember the first giving
follow it back through time to
the moment I do not remember
but always carry with me
I become him
The child too young to know
the birthmother in the doorway
the decision, something she is plummeting into
her hands reaching toward him for the last time
as if love was a kite’s string spooling out from his tiny heart
as he is carried away in someone’s arms
that hold him like wind
Matt, how did you come to be a person with creative habits?
I think that all humans are born creative. I think it’s part of who we are. For me, rediscovering my creative process has been intertwined and inseparable from rediscovering my humanity, and for me that’s what writing is–has always sort of been. My creative habits have come more in these–kind of–bursts of need, whether it was emotional need, or like an explosion that needed to happen, as simple as voicing things that I had never been able to voice before.
So, I know you grew up in the mountains in California. How would you describe Truckee, the town you grew up in?
So, Truckee’s a tourist town. Mountain resort town in the winter and Lake Tahoe paradise town by summer, and it’s a tourist town which means that there’s everything from second-home-owners who paid half a million dollars for a quarter acre of land to the folks that built those houses and are scraping by. It’s a complicated town to grow up in as a person of color. It’s a town with a really interesting racial history that’s not talked about and a traumatizing racial dynamic that’s never talked about. . . . There’s a small town feel. . . . We get a lotta snow, though. . . . It’s beautiful. . . . There’s nothing for youth to do past 9 o clock. There’s no movie theater. The only thing open is the 24-hour Safeway. . . . A lotta people describe it as a good place to grow up. . . . [I] think it’s a little more complicated than that–
–Were those people white?–
–Yeah. All my friends were almost exclusively white. A few were Latino.
One thing that I did not realize about myself then, I think, was the extent of self-hatred that I felt. I think somehow I had taken my racial identity, and the way I had survived in that context was to use it as this point of uniqueness—I guess, [a means of] finding validity for my existence through my uniqueness. Which was something that was threatened, then, when I came to UC Berkeley and was all-of-a-sudden surrounded by Asian-Americans. . . . I felt this anxiety and desire for separation whenever I was around other Asian-Americans. So there’s been a process of undoing a lot of things and re-learning connection and re-learning humanity. Growing up there’s also been good in a lot of ways. I mean, I grew up comfortable. But, you know, homeland’s always a complicated thing.
Do you feel like there’s a part of you that’s, kind of, always in Truckee?
Yeah, I mean I think I’m always dealing with parts of myself that were created there. I’ve come to this realization over the past couple years that I need to and want to return to Truckee, the place of my upbringing—which, if you know me, is a really big statement because I’ve always showed a lot of anger and resentment towards where I was brought up. Not to say I wasn’t grateful, but I think within that, it’s my right as an adoptee and as someone who has been displaced to also have anger towards the place that I didn’t choose to grow up in.
I really want to go back there. I want to create arts programming that’s centered around a rural experience. It’s something that was missing when I grew up there. It’s something that [I think can] provide a space for a lot of youth to work through who they are. It’s something that is really, really needed in small areas. Really, there’s only sports—[it] is one of the only ways to articulate yourself in that town and I think it’s gonna be something that’s gonna become increasingly important as folks of color are pushed out of their historic communities due to gentrification, due to disaster. So it’s something that these towns are having to deal with [and] I’m not sure in the most constructive of ways. That’s a journey that I really want to make and something that I think could be really healing.
The way that I tend to view my decolonial work is–a lot of it is through a process of self-reflection and that’s something that never really stops. You don’t suddenly stop becoming a racist; you don’t suddenly stop hating yourself. I think it’s why I need to go back, is because Truckee is not something I can say, “fuck you” to and leave, because it’s something, like you said, something that’s in your body, that you carry with you. Even going back home and visiting is difficult sometimes. But also when it works it’s that much more rewarding because of it.
How would you define spoken word?
The art form of spoken word is just, you know, poetry that is spoken. It’s something connected to our peoples’ stories, to the ways that we have existed in the world, the ways in which we hope to continue to exist. It’s knowledge, it’s family, it’s lineage—I mean, you know, we can get into the conversation of written history versus oral history—but one thing that oral history does, is you have to be talking to someone or with someone. In that sense it is always relevant because it is always for someone.
–Yeah, there’s always a relationship involved that you can’t pretend isn’t there.–
–Exactly, exactly.
How did you get started with spoken word?
I took a spoken word class at UC Berkeley taught by Aya de Leon. I took the class in the first place kind of on whim, thinking, “This will be a good chance for you to grow personally, it’s something you’ve never done before, and it’s credits for your major. Sounds like a great, all around deal.”
UC Berkeley hosts a slam….UC Berkeley doesn’t host it–Cal Slam hosts it…at UC Berkeley–
–UC Berkeley would probably get rid of that shit if they could–
–Let’s not give them credit for that—And their event was extra credit for our class so I guess I had a sort of similar mindset when I thought, “Oh, well, I’ll go to this and I’ll read a poem for extra credit.” I guess would’ve never really guessed the other benefits that I would end up receiving from it, emotionally and personally. So I went there with my friend Jorge and we both read a poem and then we ended up being on the UC Berkeley team that year, and from there I got involved in the adult scene and kind of got into that world.
What is a poetry slam?
So, slam is competitive poetry. It’s poetry where poets will go up and then the audience will give them a score from 0-10. Zero being something that they really were not moved by and ten being something that maybe, you know, transformed a part of them. The space [at a slam] is incredibly powerful in that it provides an identity for you, which is a really transformative thing.
What do you mean by that?
It gives you a place where you can articulate who you are without needing to apologize, a place where people who have had similar circumstances can understand you. I think I’ll always remember this time when I was very new to spoken word poetry and even newer to slam. Our team was performing at UC Davis and I remember I went up to go do my poem and—someone who’s always been a mentor and a good friend to me has been Isaac Miller, and I remember him saying like, “Yo, just let all that shit out! This is a pissed-off poem. It comes from an angry place. Just be angry with it!” Even in rehearsal it had never really worked this way. It was the first time that I’d really kinda just let the filter go and poured what seemed like 21 years of anger and frustration and whatever out into this performance, and I think that was a really beautiful artistic moment for me. . . . Which is why I can maybe never get on the bandwagon of hating on yell-y, yell-y poetry, because for me that was maybe one of my most powerful experiences with poetry, was the first time I screamed at a room. (laughs)
I feel like much of slam is very centered around itself. It’s a very self-interested sort of environment so that often times I feel like it loses relevancy to the issues and for the people that it often times wishes it was addressing or speaking for. I think it’s something that I needed [in order] to grow, and I think I eventually gravitated away from . . . .
And so, I guess for me I felt this lack of relevancy, this lack of connection to a greater sense of struggle or commitment to social justice and change and decolonial work and so it was something that I . . . I didn’t remove myself from, but that I started needing to find other avenues in which to grow artistically.
Why does creative expression matter?
Oh wow… I think in the context of political work it’s absolutely necessary because I think key to political work is the idea of imagining a new set of values, imagining a new set of principles, and a new way of manifesting those principles for our survival—in more humanistic ways, right?
The act of art is really—is about imagination, and so I think political work can’t ignore art if it’s gonna make the changes it really needs to make, in the same way that creativity can’t ignore humanity or you’re losing the point of creating in the first place. So I think maybe that’s where the importance of art lies, is the fact that for our survival we will need to imagine new ways of living, and that is a creative process; activism is a creative process.
What inspires you? What are some of your creative inspirations?
I think the biggest influence for me has always been the strength of the community and the people I’m surrounded with. It’s individual pieces of art, but at the same time it’s also the greater sense and feeling of connection that results from sharing—spaces like the ReWrite, which is the local APIA poetry space, or a slam, or a workshop, or a small writing circle. That’s where I’ve always really drawn a lot of my strength. The art of spoken word has always been something hard to separate from my experience with other people and in that sense what has inspired me is always the collective rather than a particular poet who I read or who I saw.
Are there any specific books or pieces of work that inspire you?
Something that really changed my perception of the written word was a book called Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She’s a Korean-American artist. It was really powerful for me at first because it was the first Korean-American poet that I had read and it talks a lot about experiences of migration and experiences of displacement, which I think gave me a new way of looking at my experience as an adoptee, even though she wasn’t explicitly talking about adoption.
The book is this autobiography but at the same time the book is this connection, through all these different folks experiencing different things at all these different times. It’s this sort of temporal web put together in this book of just experience. . . going back to the idea that we are all lineages in these various forms. On an artistic level, the book is fuckin brilliant. It doesn’t do it justice to call it a book, because it just completely ignores the rules of what books are supposed to be–in the way that pages are organized, in the way that sentences are structured. . . . It’s an incredibly powerful read on the emotional level and then incredibly powerful on a purely aesthetic, artistic level too.
What do you struggle with as an artist? Like, when it’s just you and a blank computer screen, or you and a pen and a page, what are the things that come between you and that blank space? How do you work through them?
I always over-edit things. There have been several poems that I’ve just edited to the point where they no longer make sense to me, or I just stop myself like, “Why did I write this poem in the first place?’” Part of it I think comes from this desire for perfection, right? That is… this focus on product rather than process that is ingrained in us as consumers. Part of it is also just the magnitude of trying to communicate your experience to someone. I’m not just communicating my experience. I’m communicating my lineage and how do you do something like that justice in language? Which is something I’m always having problems with. Everything seems to fall short of what the impulse (that made me write it in the first place) is telling me it needs to say.
In terms of dealing with that, I guess it’s just, you know, reminding yourself that you are something of process and that you are something that is growing. And really, the only way to grow is to be vulnerable and uncomfortable in the first place. So: Posting things that maybe sound bad to you; reading things aloud that maybe are fresh; finding the subjects that are difficult to write, or finding the subjects that are easy for you to write and finding a difficult way in which to say them. I just wrote a poem the other night and it started off in this really angry tone of me just judging my peers and I thought, “That’s easy. It’s probably more difficult if I write this in the tone of judging myself” and so I switched that and it was more difficult but I think ultimately it was more rewarding and transformative for me . . . although sometimes I do just need to rant against people . . . that feels good too.
How has your experience living as a Korean-American person in the U.S. as well as in South Korea influenced the way you approach your craft?
More and more, I’ve discovered that my activism is an intimately personal thing, and that that process is similar to a process of search. I talked to you earlier about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book and she has this quote, “Our destinations are fixed on the perpetual motion of search”—meaning that our life isn’t this place that we’re trying to get to, it’s this process of always trying to get there. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of searching, in terms of—You know, at first I was searching for my identity, and that’s something that I still go through. And searching for home, especially, is an interesting thing, as someone who’s been displaced through processes that were out of my control. Now I’m back in Korea on my own—kind of—terms and it’s been an interesting experience looking for, like, what does “homeland” mean, and searching for better ways of living, for healthier ways of existing, spiritually and emotionally and physically. I think a lot of my writing–especially lately–has been trying to answer these questions for me. Not necessarily even with a focus on the answers but more with a focus on processing, concentrating on the process of searching. And valuing that, even when you can’t find something, you’re still growing.
Where can we find your work?
If folks wanna see the stuff that I’m writing, they can go to perpetual motionofsearch.wordpress.com . . . and I stole that title from Theresa Cha. “Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search.” Sort of the idea that like, we are process not product. We are discovering; we are growing; we are migratory; we are displaced; we are building home, kind of all in one.
Before we close this out, I just want to say, “Thank you” to you, our listeners, for your attention and interest, and I especially wanna thank Matt for his patience, openness, and time throughout this process. This is Sarah Dayley, and I’m wishing you all love, friendship, and inspiration in this new year. Here’s Matt, with one last poem:
Alright, I’ll read this one. I think this one’s most reflective of my process right now.
When I am most angry
sometimes I wish for a piece of land to farm
I would scream at the empty of my house
Then step outside and
crumble earth between my fingers until
summer turned my skin into a husk
I would plant and grow
cabbages and sweet potatoes and 고추
while anger would pour from my hands like falling pearls
into that great vessel, the soil,
that would take what the soul could not hold
Harvest would arrive overnight
As if while I slept,
God’s long fingers were dripping honey over the fields
I would wake to the sound of family brushing dew from the leaves
and run outside to receive these gifts.
We would watch as peppers would ripen in time
lapse as they were plucked from their branches
At night we would cook
together, laughing like cutlery chattering against porcelain
we would eat and eat and eat
as if we were trying to gather in all the missing pieces of ourselves
and everyone
would be full
