I read Matt Mauch's second book, If You're Lucky is a Theory of Mine, while sitting in the waiting area of an auto repair shop (new tire). The wait went more quickly with these intense, funny, high energy poems, and it was one of those the world-inside-the-book-became-the-world-outside the book moments. I noticed wheels, and gears, and pulleys everywhere in the book, and I asked him some questions about this. His response is FASCINATING--read our exchange below.
Note: After the interview below, read “Brilliant machine that I am” and "When you start your car and remember you left something you need in the house, think of engaging the emergency brake not as means, but as end," both of which appear with permission from the author. Order your copy of If You're Lucky is a Theory of Mine here.
Q: While reading your book, I kept noticing machines, gadgets, and mechanical systems (often, these are related to cars). What are your thoughts about machinery? What, if any, is the relationship between poetry and machinery?
A: I grew up in a place where it wasn’t uncommon to boast that you’d rebuilt an engine. While I only ever rebuilt a lawnmower engine, in shop class, under expert supervision, I knew people (quite a few) who rebuilt car and truck engines, pretty much all on their own, sometimes to spec (pickup engines, say), sometimes for higher performance (Mustang, GTO, and Road Runner engines were likely to be rebuilt this way). No matter what you’re rebuilding, no matter the purpose of the final product, the questions that hang over everything you do are, “Will it start?” and “If it does, how well will it run?”
Those questions are analogous to the questions I ask myself when I write poems. The meticulous work one does (fractions of fractions of fractions of an inch make all the difference in the world) when rebuilding an engine is like the meticulous work one does when making a poem.
I knew a guy who had 1968 Mustang fastback, with an engine rebuilt for high performance—so much so that it could barely idle—and he used it to leave tire marks (two of them; it had some sort of limited-slip differential, and you can Google “limited-slip differential” if that sounds like gibberish) from the main doors of the high school (in the small Midwestern town where I grew up) all the way to the street—about 30 or 40 yards total. The rubber melded to the concrete, or so we all believed, given that none of the industrial cleansers the janitors used could remove the marks, which stood for years (for all I know, they could still be there) as a testament to the engine-rebuilder’s perseverance, luck, etc., in the same way that a great poem stands as a testament to the poet’s perseverance, luck, etc.
Rebuilding an engine, though, I suppose, analogy-wise, is more akin to writing a sonnet than it is to writing the kind of organic-form poetry I write. But I had people in my formative years who taught me about that, too—about organic form—the most influential being my grandfathers (especially my maternal grandfather, Greg Kass*) and my dad, who saw every broken thing as an opportunity to test their ingenuity. If something mechanical broke, they studied it, looked around their garages and basement tool shops for wire and whatnot (Vice Grips® were often used as both a tool and a working part of the final solution), and set about to fix the thing. More often than not, they succeeded. A broken window fan, in their hands, might enter its next life with an unorthodox switch on it, but you could still turn it on and off and adjust the speed from low to medium to high and back.
