A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW J. ANDREWS, AUTHOR OF POETRY COLLECTION THE HOURS
I recently had the pleasure of reading The Hours, a new poetry collection from Earth & Altar contributor Matthew J. Andrews. It’s striking, disruptive, earthy, and contemplative; delving into midrashic biblical imagining, travel journaling, and mystical attending to quotidian realities, all organized by the pulse and rhythms of monastic life.
Andrews graciously agreed to hear and respond to my reactions to the text in the interview that follows below.
Terry: I was intrigued by the description of the collection as "drawing inspiration from monastic patterns of liturgical prayer and the book of Psalms,” and I could certainly feel the rhythm of intermittent prayer and contemplation as the book progressed. Could you talk a bit more about how monastic life inspired and shaped both the content and the formatting of this work? And if you’d like, please refer to some of the images from the eponymous poem “The Hours,” such as the “lusts,” the “slow drip,” and the “silence” that characterize the monk’s days.
Matthew: When we think about monks, from the original Desert Fathers to those in monasteries today, we tend to imagine them as spiritual superheroes, people who have somehow climbed higher up the ladder than we ever could. But the more you spend time with writings by and about them, the more you understand that what separates them from the rest of us is their sense of persistence. They are not exempt from sin and temptation—in fact, they experience the pull of some of them far stronger than we might—but in the absence of distraction, they face these things head on. And regardless of where they may be mentally, they pray the prayers they’re supposed to pray because that’s what it means to see a commitment through.
That’s the spirit I wanted this collection to embody: a constant yearning for God despite the various circumstances of life, a sense of seeing things through even if heaven feels impossibly far away. I love “The Hours” as an opening poem for the way it sets the tone for the rest of the work through its embodiment of a struggling monk, who comes face to face with, as you note, his “lusts,” his “ frantic soul,” and the reality that “in silence the devil / too can be heard most clearly,” yet prays regardless. The stunted ending to the poem (“And yet:”), with a colon leading to the remaining white space, both leaves space for the reader and ushers in the rest of the collection.
Terry: The collection is divided into four sections: Vigils, Lauds, Sext, and Vespers. What are some of the significances of this organizing motif for you, and how does it relate (if at all) to traditional ways of organizing monastic prayer, such as morning, noonday, evening, and compline?
Matthew: There are historical and denominational differences in the exact number of hours of prayer, but I condensed it to these four because of their broad representative coverage. In short, these hours cover one metaphorical day, with each section organized to thematically correspond with that time of day and track the progress of a spiritual journey. Vigils are prayers for the night, and these poems are consumed with that sense of darkness, with sin and doubt. Lauds relate to the rising of the sun, and as a result, these poems deal more with themes of repentance, joy, and other forms of illumination. Sext represents the middle of the day, when the heat of the sun beats down, and these poems deal heavily with a sense of work and toil, of the spiritual end to the honeymoon phase of morning. And as Vespers are said in the evening, those poems anticipate the darkness again, aiming to find some sort of peace with what has come before and the sort of death that comes soon.
Terry: In pieces such as “Bedtime,” “Isaac at Twilight,” and “Unfinished Psalms from the Private Notebook of David,” you extend narratives and pull imaginative threads issuing from well-known bible stories. How does poetry facilitate your interaction with biblical motifs and the ways that those stories shape you? And I’d love it if you could refer to some particular lines from any of those pieces in your answer, if you would.
Matthew: I’ve long used poetry as a way to inhabit biblical stories, as a way of making the characters feel real and trying to map their emotional landscapes (this was explicitly the subject of my previous book, the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember, which included two of the poems you mentioned as well as a few others that ended up in The Hours). Biblical authors had their agendas in writing their books, but often the aim was not to produce literature with complex characters, as we would in our novels today; I’m simply trying to carry on the longstanding tradition of imaginatively filling in the gaps.
The interesting thing that happens when we do that is that we create interesting intersections with these characters. Let’s use “Isaac at Twilight” as an example. Isaac is a strangely silent figure in Genesis; he’s not absent, but he’s featured much less prominently than Abraham or Jacob, and he’s something of a victim of both his father and son. I’ve often wondered how much of his relative inaction has to do with the trauma he must have experienced and being nearly killed at his father’s hand. This poem, written from his perspective, catches him at a down moment, amidst “growing darkness / and the begetting pain of memory,” where he lets his imagination drift to a fantasy about reenacting the sacrifice with his own child. I wrote this poem years ago, in a time when I was struggling as a parent, finding myself repeating some of the same patterns and behaviors that always bothered me about my own parents. Ultimately, this poem served as a strange bridge between me and this reticent patriarch, and together we explored our tendencies to revert back to the comfort of the ugliness we know in times where we feel lost and overwhelmed.
Terry: In the piece simply entitled “Psalm,” you put forth two arresting lines:
“Lord, rescue me from the jackals encircling my house, but please, let me keep the bones lodged in my teeth.”
“This is a town…where our flags name no country because they’re always at half-mast…”
As an anarchist, I have my own fairly immediate interpretation of these lines that you may be able to surmise. :) But I am very curious to hear you expand on who, what, and where are lurking behind these stunning images.
Matthew: There is certainly a lot that can be read about our country today in some of these lines, but the ultimate inspiration is, as the name suggests, the book of Psalms, and in particular some of the psalms that transition really effortlessly from asking for God’s blessing to wishing horrible violence on Israel’s enemies. Perhaps the most blatant is Psalm 137, which calls for the infants of enemies to be dashed against rocks, but there are many others that devolve abruptly into violent jingoism. We often speak of things like Christian Nationalism as rising threats to both America and Christianity, but these psalms show us that the impulse to marry faith and state in really unhealthy ways is timeless. In “Psalm,” and specifically in the opening lines you quote, the speaker recognizes this instinct in himself and then takes a step back to see how this attitude infects every aspect of the world around him. So, as is often the case, the lurking danger is really the poisoned hearts within all of us.
Terry: In “I’m Not Sure I Have Ever Prayed,” you put forth this striking idea of “shadows of prayers unsaid;” prayers that come to exist in some nascent form but fail to reach full “prayer-ness.” What, in your experience or poetic imagination, makes this distinction?
Matthew: The big presumption for the speaker in this poem is that there is a specific way to pray, and that the requirements for what constitute prayer are not being met. At the same time, it’s a poem filled with spiritual earnestness that manifests itself as really arduous non-prayer. At its heart, I think the poem wants us to see that prayer is a much bigger concept that we know, that it breaks out of the walls we build around it, that our connection to God is not brokered so severely and that He is listening in more places, and in more ways, than we think.
Terry: If I understand correctly, this collection includes reflections on travels to the Holy Land, Brazil, and a few other locales. How did travel play into your writing of these poems and your compilation of this work as a whole?
Matthew: It’s a little cliché to say travel takes us out of our comfort zone, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Travel, and specifically travel to cultures very different than your own, puts you in this place of heightened attention; everything is chaotic and unfamiliar, and as a result, you have to realign what you understand of the world to accommodate all this new information. There are a few poems in this book—“On the Bosphorus,” “Reaping & Sowing in a Minefield,” and “An Activist’s Diary”—that stem from a trip I took to Iraq with a faith-based nonviolence group back in 2010; this was a pivotal life experience for me, mostly for the way it shattered my youthful idealism and exposed how naïve I was about the complexity of the world and the solvability of geopolitical problems. These poems reflect that sense of gravity and dislocation, and while I didn’t intend to make travel any sort of specific theme in this book, they individually felt like they belonged in the grander narrative.
Terry: Out of countless examples of striking wordsmithing in this collection, two especially stopped me in my tracks. The comparison of city folk to city birds in “Work Song” was one. The second was the image of “disco-ball mouths… [that] shade reality into sparkling hues, spraying it all over the walls as they dance to the rhythm of their own falsehood…”. In your creative process, how do memory and present attentiveness interact to lead you to these images, metaphors, and analogies?
Matthew: It’s an interesting question but a hard one to answer because so often the process of writing poetry still feels mysterious to me. Most poems I write start with something specific—a memory, an image, a juxtaposition—that finds its way into my gaze and refuses to leave, with the poem slowly emerging from an interrogation of that specific lingering. Why does this image matter to me? What do these two things have in common? Why am I suddenly thinking about this thing that happened when I was a child? In short: what is the larger truth buried beneath the surface here? It can be a frustrating process because it never works on my timetable, but when the conditions are right and something jumps at you, it makes you feel the whole world is endowed with a sense of depth, or, dare I say, holiness.
The Hours is available everywhere now. For more on Matthew J. Andrews, see the author bio on any of his other pieces for Earth & Altar. Interview by Terry Stokes.
