The Spoils
Author Interview

On The Spoils: Ted Mathys in conversation with Chris Martin

Chris Martin: Beckett was particular to cricket, Buster Keaton to baseball. As we all know now, Barack Obama is a pickup basketball enthusiast. What do you make of Kissinger’s soccer obsession and what do you make of our penchant for using sport to reflect certain structures (often political) of existence?

Ted Mathys: A small library has been written about the sociopolitical import of sports, and another about Kissinger and the “realpolitik” with which he became synonymous. The first section of the book spirals out from an anecdote in which the two collide, where Kissinger becomes both a specific, historically-rooted statesman-criminal as well as a general metonym for a way of conceiving of the world. I am interested less in his soccer obsession, which is common enough, than with our obsession with his obsession. During the 2006 World Cup, a number of foreign policy community publications and large newspapers actually printed embarrassing, obsequious interviews with Kissinger about his thoughts on team strategy and his picks for the tournament. The realist paradigm of inter-national relations theory is based, crudely, on the (dubious) assumptions that the nation-state is a proper unit of analysis in global affairs; that states have “interests” which are calculable, primary, and not to be confused with “ideals”; and that the governing force in states’ interactions is the acquisition and maintenance of power vis-à-vis each other. The World Cup is realpolitik in microcosm, each team a neat little country fighting to the death in a zero-sum game. Our participation in this game gives it definition and momentarily disambiguates our lives. Modern athletic spectacles find their lineage in ancient theater, but whereas theatergoers are observers of an unfolding drama, in sports the spectators are triangulated directly into the drama. When their team wins, they win; when their team loses, they lose.

CM: It’s clear from “Sphere of Influence” and the other “Lieber Henry” poems in the opening section of the book, “A Soccer Ball for Dr. Kissinger,” that your relationship, both personal and philosophical, with Kissinger is complex to say the least. Did you have some ambivalence about making him a central figure in the first section of this book?

TM: Of course. But rather than shy away from the ambivalence, I decided to throw myself directly into it, to try to fully inhabit that space of personal conflict. This poem cycle is one that contains multiple subjectivities, and I am interested in their collisions and collusions. I often find that the most fertile lyric terrain exists at the periphery of decision, that space where instinct, intelligence, experience, and calculation are all at work but where each person is ultimately alone.

CM: Often your poems approach a sort of logic problem patterning, ifs and thens spiraling toward absurdity or back in on themselves in a crisis of self-interrogation. Is this a mode you consciously employ?

TM: These logical conceits are part of a more general interrogation of the role of language in the production of meaning. They make intentionally false syllogisms to point to what is taken for granted in instrumental discourse, particularly in the political realm. In a few poems the figurative meanings and habitual understandings of phrases are pushed aside and the words are “taken literally.” It’s a gesture that is elementary enough but can produce absurd conclusions and justifications for just about anything, which I think is apropos to the violence and zealotry and literalness of our historical moment.

CM: As you allude in one of the tournament poems, sporting riots are “more common than an earthquake.” The Spoils repeatedly returns to The Throng and its economic, political, and military force. Can you say more about your fear of and fascination with the ubiquitous crowd, perhaps touching on the second, eponymous section and its environmental collisions?

TM: Poetry and philosophy are perennially wrapped up in the role of the individual in society and the composition of the general in particulars. Depending on one’s angle of analysis, each is always obliterating the other; they form the recto and verso of the human coin. For me the most interesting part of this are the ethical implications. Sacrificing personal desires or momentarily suspending one’s code of ethics for the assumed betterment of the universal is a deeply entrenched Enlightenment ideal. It’s also what has formed the basis for capitalism’s appeal to inevitability and what was seized upon after September 11 to institute a permanent “state of exception” in this country. In the first section of the book, the crowd is treated literally—trends, actions, and decisions emerge variously from the tide of fans, protesters, soldiers. Sometimes these are calculated, often they are spontaneous, always they affect individuals in turn. In the second section, the crowd is global. Erasure of personhood happens on a grand scale as individuals are codified as “consumers” in the global economy. This section repeatedly returns to sites of irony, hybridity, and confusion where traditional ecological and economic boundaries collapse. I am interested in deep ecology in the context of globalization, so these poems are neither environmental nor pastoral in the traditional sense, but search for the place of humans in an environment which both controls us and is continuously controlled by us.

CM: In “Adaptation,” the opening poem to this second section, you conclude with the statement: “I was an ecology.” How does the lyric, which is ostensibly individual, function in the realm of ecology, which is ostensibly communal? Is there something presently necessary about the collision of these two modes?

TM: The poem collapses the Luddite’s desire to return to an original (and imaginary) wilderness into the technophile’s faith in progress and belief that science and education can solve the environmental dilemmas that economic development and trade create. So the lyric speaker is perpetually trying to unscramble these two impulses and discern “my nature,” both inner and outer. The human “nature” constantly changes as the external environment changes until the speaker literally becomes the environment, becomes “nature.” But the nature he becomes includes all—from golf courses to chicken breasts to MapQuest. I think this erasure of boundary between inner and outer, part-icularly as it pertains to the natural world, has been at the heart of the lyric mode at least since the Romantics. I am reminded of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Whitman saw the lyric “I” as essentially polyvalent, democratic, diffused into the grass and dirt. I’m still a subscriber to this idea that wilderness is more than an ecological concept—that it is primarily interior, shorthand for imagination.

CM: Twice in the second section a curious presence intrudes—a kind of small caps prose rant that continuously interrupts and repeats itself. They remind me of the prophetic highway LED display in the film L.A. Story, but instead of prophecy it spits out a garbled play-by-play of contemporary environmental crisis. What did you intend with these strident, mesmerizing excursions in form?

TM: “Intrudes” is the right word. The section as a whole employs three or four forms that recur more or less regularly. In working within the frame of each poem and across frames between them, I intended the section to be, like the environment, free-flowing and various while having an overall systemic logic. These two poems come as deadening, sudden intrusions into this system. I wanted their bluntness and hyperactivity to echo their subject matter. The first treats a coal mine that alters—in literally 30 minutes—a landscape that took millions of years to form. The second deals with technology and agriculture, where every crop is a bumper crop and experimental piglets have tongues that glow green. I was concerned with what we often think of as the “slowness” of nature and humans’ relationship to it as our knowledge and technology progress and our temporal horizons readjust.

CM: This is a book that revels in polarity—natural/artificial, athletic/aesthetic, personal / political—yet seems to point toward the middle as its site of critique and recuperation. How does the middle, especially in the wildly exuberant “Breakdown Cover,” serve to reenergize, complicate, and remix the poles? In terms of the near- election timing of its publication, do you see The Spoils as a reproach to black/white or red/blue thinking?

TM: The middle is a site of critique and a site of complexity, but should not be conflated with a politics of compromise or negotiation. “Reform” is by definition amelioratory, and that’s not at all what I’m after. My hope is that the middles in these poems serve to complicate traditional hierarchies and categories. I think doubt is at the heart of poetry and that one of poetry’s chief functions is to obstinately refuse to provide the quotable answers that society otherwise demands. To continuously defer judgment is a kind of judgment of its own. In “Breakdown Cover” the middle is a temporal concept—the now. The poem is set on a long road trip I took through the Midwest and Deep South in 2005. Throughout the piece various objects are taken back through their histories from the present or projected into their future uses. That the history of everything is in every “thing” became increasingly important to me, and the movement of the car through the landscape contributed to the overall defamiliarizing and disassembling of the present into something like a sensory phenomenology. It seems pedestrian, but the question I repeatedly returned to is: What would it mean to use the objects before us for purposes other than those for which they were intended? Once freed from the expectations of the past, the present is available to be imagined otherwise, but it is also devoid of the safe passage from past to future and day-to-day that habit and routine provide. The poems occupy this unstable space and seek to position movement as central to an experience of time and being.

CM: Can you talk more about the specific structure of “Breakdown Cover,” which alternates between dynamic, profane, dual-field ramble and rectangular, religious, measured prose?

TM: The loose narrative frame of the road trip plays out in lineated sections with a caesura of several spaces in the middle of each line. As the lines accrete, this visual break forms a wending path through the text, suggesting a road. These sections are interrupted periodically by prose blocks, many of which focus on an object that has appeared previously in the textual field or will appear to the speaker in the lines to come. I was interested in shifting the frame continuously so that sometimes the reader experiences an object, a song, an image, several lines before the speaker does. The whole piece has three long passages separated by poems concerning the most basic of substances—earth, fire, water, and wind.

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