“There are some songs whose rooms I can walk through for hours.” (An Interview With Matt McBride)
To celebrate Matt McBride’s At the Mercy of the Flies, we’re grateful to the journalists, bloggers, and editors across the literary web who have spotlighted the book in partnership with Half Mystic.
Don’t miss reviews by Ellen Kirkpatrick for The Break (“Demanding, immersive, and fiercely attuned to the protean present, At the Mercy of the Flies is a book to read now, and to return to”), Izzi Holmes for The Star (“At the Mercy of the Flies arrives as a record both for and of the modern era”) and Tim Staley (“This book is so surprising the whole way through. In every stanza, McBride is flipping the horrors of the American modern condition into something new”). Also, an essay by Matt for the Half Mystic blog (“I wrote as a way to explain the world to myself—to feel like I had some agency, even if my only power was as a witness”)! Today, Matt joins us once more for an interview on the creation process of At the Mercy of the Flies…
H/M: At the Mercy of the Flies is a surrealist exploration of grief: for love lost, for ages long past, for all those who have been irreparably affected by the violence of the American project. How does writing surrealism shape your perspective on everyday life?
MM: Surrealism, for me, is a way of seeing. Much of my time is spent in places that are not particularly interesting: chain grocery stores, the inside of a 2009 Honda Civic, an imitation-wood desk in an office with neutral-colored walls. Surrealism is a way to find something in these seemingly empty places. By allowing my imagination to riff on what’s present, even mundane spaces can be made awful (in the truest sense of the word). There is both beauty and horror to be found in seeming meaninglessness.
That attention also carries over to the larger world. The choices we’re making as a country are profoundly strange to me, but we’ve become desensitized to them. Surrealism is a way to see them again, and to remake them into something that better conveys what they actually are.
For example, in At the Mercy of the Flies, on my experience of watching Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, I write that the audience “tore the pages out of books as applause.” While that didn’t literally happen, it is a reification of my emotional reaction to the willful ignorance that would allow for someone to support Trump, combined with my sensory perception—the applause was a sound that made me physically uncomfortable, which I translated that to tearing out the pages from books, as the sound and the embodied experience of hearing that were similar to hearing people clap for him. This way of seeing is a comfort to me. Even if it doesn’t “change” anything, it gets me closer to something real.
The first section in the collection, “The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At,” uses the cyclical demolition and construction the speaker observes in their surroundings to mirror the drudgery of their own life. Scaffolding is erected, torn down, and erected once more, a treadmill of progress ultimately leading nowhere. It’s a painfully accurate depiction of how depression flattens the days into the same skipping record. How did you ensure there was emotional and narrative progress within the narrative, despite the cyclical nature of writing about depression?
Early on when I was submitting the manuscript, an editor wrote in his rejection that the collection moved laterally but not vertically. To him, the collection didn’t offer the reader transcendence. I would agree—the book expands, but it doesn’t rise. It explores an emotional terrain but never ascends above that territory. And I didn’t want it to. The collection is not static—it moves towards understanding, not towards transcendence.
I once read a biography of Kay Sage, a painter I love, which described what I want my poetry to do. The author wrote that Sage was not an artist who reinvented herself. Once she found her vision, she kept painting the same thing over and over. Her progress was not marked by periods of change, but by an increasing clarity of her vision. That is what I hope “The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At” is doing. Each poem is a glimpse of the emotional world I was in, and those glimpses, when placed beside each other, begin to build a cohesive vision of what the inside of my head looked like at the time. That movement creates a sense of narrative through the work.
The color white pervades this collection, both on its own—“I bruised white / as a peony”; “I had a job / painting over / street signs in white”; “all flags came up white”; “white hair rained”; “everywhere / white eyelets mushroomed”—and via recurrent images that hold a strong association with it—milk, chalk, pearls, mannequins. What does this color symbolize for you?
I think of white as nothing. Not nothing as an abstraction, but the manifestation of nothing, an expansive nothing, bleeding into the picture and threatening erasure. I imagine, and am terrified of, a nothing that isn’t the passive degradation of entropy, but rather a willful eradication. I am afraid of what I see as an encroaching nothing. When I see acts of atrocious cruelty (of which there are endless daily instances), acts that seem to serve no end, I sense an invasive nothing behind them.
That nothing menaces from both without and within. Everyone experiences depression differently, but I felt it as an unshakable knowledge that there was no meaning. It wasn’t exactly that my life was meaningless (in a strange way, I could stand that), but rather that meaning itself did not exist. My life wasn’t just pointless—all life was pointless. These anxieties are painted white in my imagination.
Imagery of the American Midwest plays a significant role in the collection. We follow the speaker down the fluorescent aisles of the Dollar General and are invited to imagine their heart as a suburban “parking lot with many open spaces,” and “a Midwestern kid at a drum kit, starting into the most boring solo.” If the Midwest were music, what genre would it belong to?
If the Midwest were music, it would be a Top 40 playlist in the background of a chain retail store. It would be full of broad sentiments and repeated choruses. It would be both easy to sing along with and profoundly forgettable.
Part of what makes the Midwest interesting to me is its uninterest. It’s a place whose identity is predicated on not having much of an identity. And I say that with great love! As a white, cisgender, Midwestern man growing up in a suburb, much of the culture I consumed reflected my situation. The universalization of my experience in the media had the side effect of making it invisible to me—my identity was not particularly interesting because I saw it everywhere. Now that I’ve lived for over a decade away from the Midwest, I can finally start seeing it in its glorious uninterest.
I can really feel that observational shift in your work. Your evocation of suburbia in “The Age Of” is as unsettling as it is captivating. There’s an underlying sense of uneasy anticipation running through this section: “It felt like a crime scene / waiting for a crime.” Could you expand a bit on the “glorious” uninterest of the Midwest, and how your view of the region has shifted with distance?
The beauty of surrealism is the way it estranges the familiar, and distance is key to that estrangement. The closer you are to something, the harder it becomes to see how weird it is. Spending time abroad gave me this distance. When I lived for a year in China, I had to learn new social norms—and as part of my work I taught American culture, conveying rules that were never made explicit to me.
For example, in China, food service workers aren’t necessarily friendly. To Chinese people, getting food is a business transaction. In the U.S., food service workers are pushed to be obsequious, and as a customer, the expectation is that you will be friendly in return. But I had to explain to my students that this is for show. They aren’t necessarily interested in you as a person; they must put on a performance for their job. My students thought this was silly, even a little cruel. Conversely, I, as a Westerner, felt that Chinese people were rude to food workers and waitstaff, but that was based on my belief that we should operate in a default mode of false familiarity engrained in me as a Midwesterner. My students were right—it is strange. The longer I spent abroad, the more I saw these strangenesses.
There’s a commercial aspect to address here too. Corporate America, as much as it has an identity, is Midwestern: polite, apolitical, superficially tolerant, and vaguely Christian. As I moved to more and more places in America and as corporations colonized more and more spaces, I began to “see” the Midwest (and its gross capitalistic incarnation in chain food and retail spaces) more. I began noticing a perverse version of the Midwest everywhere. Commercial spaces designed to be welcoming enough for you to stay as long as the transaction takes, yet bland enough that you don’t want to stay beyond that, proliferated like a cancer. In my small town, the old, downtown core is almost entirely composed of mom-and-pop stores and restaurants. Down the road is an ever-expanding shopping complex of chain stores that has grown exponentially since I arrived eight years ago, siphoning away people and business from downtown. As my background has become a kind of pathology in America, I’m forced to see it in a way I never did before.
In a 2020 interview with Writers & Words, you said that you love poetry’s “willingness to be small.” The poems in At the Mercy of the Flies are characterized by tight lines that rarely exceed five words and are grouped in short stanzas. Does brevity come naturally to you in writing, or was it an intentional constraint you adopted for this project?
I’ve always tended towards short poems. I enjoy moments where the poem exists in the spaces between its images, where the reader must fill in the associations. If I can’t convey what I want in half a dozen images or less, I haven’t figured out the poem yet. When I do find a subject I want to sustain, I typically write multiple poems about it, each focused on a different aspect. I’m much more interested in three blind men’s descriptions of an elephant than a photograph of it from ten yards away.
The official playlist for At the Mercy of the Flies features songs by The National, Orville Peck, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to name a few. Could you walk us through how these songs impacted your writing process?
Listening to music is generative for me; few other things take me to such a deep emotional space. There are some songs whose rooms I can walk through for hours. As I listen on repeat, much of my writing process involves describing the images in my head as the music plays.
One of the first songs on the playlist, Dirty Beaches’ “Lord Knows Best,” is one of the songs I could listen to endlessly. It’s fuzzy and nostalgic and gives itself entirely to melancholy. The lyrics lay out an architecture of its sentiments, but so much remains missing. It feels like looking at a photograph of you that you don’t remember being taken. There is a charge to the song I can’t explain but can describe. "Lord Knows Best” was a distorted echo of what I wanted to convey in the first section of the book, “The Mourners Forget Which Funeral They Were At.” I would listen to it over and over, watching memories of dreams I’d never had play in front of my eyes. These became landmarks in the poems.
“The Party,” the final section of the book, suggests a clear interplay between violence and celebration—“nooses made of Christmas lights / swayed from the trees”; “and when we ran out of confetti, / we used broken glass”—that I found deeply reminiscent of the ways American culture glorifies and perpetuates violence. What do you hope will emerge in the aftermath of America’s party of violence?
You know, I can’t really imagine an America without violence. It’s baked into our past and our present. It is a way of life. This past Halloween, I went to a trunk-or-treat party at the local grade school with my daughter and her friends. The police had a car there. Two armed officers in bulletproof vests handed out candy, with a card table next to them laid out with their riot and crowd control gear. What was the purpose of that? Violence is so ingrained in America; I don’t know if the two are separable. But I’d like to think so.
Politics is like religion in many ways. Some people use religion to not think; they seek religion because they want to be told the answers. For others, religion is a question, or a series of questions, that push them forward. American politics are all about answers. An answer is closure, and that closure is enforced by violence. I’d love to see us turn to a politic rooted in questions: What do we owe each other? What does it mean to serve your country? What does it mean for your country to serve you?
That story gives me chills. I used to work in education, and on occasion I would see police officers operating in a similar capacity—beginning to desensitize children to violence at such an early age. I don’t have children myself, but becoming an aunt two years significantly changed how I view the world. In what ways, if at all, has parenting affected your writing?
I became a dad later than most, and many of my friends had children before me. I remember feeling resentful when a friend would tell me that I couldn’t understand something because I wasn’t a parent. Now that I’m a parent myself, I avoid saying that to others, but there is truth in it. Being a parent changes your perspective irrevocably (though, to be clear, it’s just one of a number of things that can change our perspectives!). I’m now vulnerable in ways I wasn’t before. I’m keenly aware that there’s more at stake in my life than there ever has been—while, ironically, seeing my life as less important at the same time. That depth of feeling is a capacity I can write from.
One thing I could point to is thinking more about inheritance. Prior to becoming a dad, I was pretty solipsistic. I cared about the world and its inhabitants, of course, but I didn’t think much about how the world would carry on when I ceased to be here. Now, the unsustainability (in more than just the environmental sense) of our path as a country, and the lives we lead within it, is a persistent theme in my work. I worry constantly about my daughter’s experience growing up, and that anxiety is manifest in my newer work.
At one point, the speaker’s heart begins to spoil “like any fruit left out too long.” The image of rot evoked here feels closely connected to the title of the collection. Flies are often a sign of decomposition, a process closely associated with death and ending. But decomposition is also necessary to restart a life cycle. It is a very literal return to the Earth – a transformation. How has writing this collection transformed you?
One of the reasons you write is to discover something about yourself. The nature of writing more or less requires this—much of your time writing will be spent alone, and much of what you write will never be read. I learn not only from the content of my poems, but also from the process of writing them. And what I learned from this collection is that I am a poet.
While in China, and for some time after I returned, I thought about giving up on writing. It had lost all meaning for me; I even asked friends not to call me a poet, and not to address the fact that I once wrote poetry. But even when I consciously stepped away writing, I couldn’t help but take notes. I couldn’t help but craft my feelings into images. In other words, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t stop being a poet. While writing may constantly oscillate from being a deeply satisfying to profoundly frustrating process for me, I’ll always return to it. Whether I want it or not, this is who I am.
Matt McBride’s At the Mercy of the Flies renders the mundanity of daily life as a series of dislocations. In brief, lucid scenes, these poems map estrangement and excess onto surreal worlds where ambulances play Katy Perry, pearls rain from the sky, and every screen glows with impossible promises. What emerges is a record of survival written in the margins of collapse. Anchored in the author’s experiences with depression and the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, At the Mercy of the Flies charts the cartographies of a life and a nation in freefall. No party lasts forever—not even America. The collection is out now.