"I’ve made so many mistakes in my life—especially in processing familial grief." (Matt Mitchell on Sforzando)

Matt Mitchell (he/him) is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s eighth issue, sforzando. He is an intersex writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Boiler, NPR, The Shallow Ends, Indianapolis Review, minnesota review, and Passages North, among other places. His chapbook of etymology poems, nobody told me how to gracefully disappear in a room, is forthcoming from Grieve Land Books sometime in the fall. He was the winner of Gordon Square Review’s Spring 2020 Poetry Contest. Find him on Twitter @matt_mitchell48.

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We asked three of our Issue VIII contributors to share with us their personal definitions of sforzando: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Matt Mitchell’s vision of the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering…

In the early 2000s, my grandmother and I would often listen to 1940s jazz standards and talk shows on AM radio. For some reason, I have only been able to reckon with her passing through popular music, though she had no affinity for it. “a poem in which carly simon says the song is about me” in Issue VIII: Sforzando is mostly an imagined narrative. 

When my grandmother died in late 2016, I was a freshman in college and essentially uninterested in grieving. My grandmother had had Alzheimer’s. By the time she passed, she had been living with the disease for eight or nine years. The thing about Alzheimer’s is: it’s such a degenerative disease that by the time the person who had it passes at last, you have very little grief left to give away. There wasn’t any sforzando of grief the end. All my volume had been spent on nights in my grandmother’s upstairs bedroom sobbing as she paced throughout the house, pulling on every window to make sure it was locked, cutting up every box in sight to make sure the house wouldn’t get cluttered with trash—even though my grandmother had once been a profound hoarder.

But the events of the poem are technically fictional. I’m sorry for that. The problem is, I’ve made so many mistakes in my life—especially in processing familial grief. Poetry, for me, is a space where I can live through a moment like I ignorantly didn’t when it was actually happening. And this poem, in particular, was formed out of a yearning to make things right between me and my grandmother in a way I can’t anymore.

I started dancing around the time my grandmother started losing her memory. Let me be clear: I am a terrible dancer. But sometime in the early years of the Alzheimer’s, my parents introduced me to 1970s soft rock, and we would dance around our fire-pit outside, prayer-like, until the early hours of morning. Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” obsessed me from the first piano note. The phenomenon surrounding it, the question of who exactly is so vain—so much that they believe the song is about them!—swallowed me up. When Carly Simon told Taylor Swift who the song had been written about, I prayed the name she had whispered was mine. Not because I see myself as particularly vain but because I, for once in my life, wanted to know the answer—the ending sforzando—to a long mysterious narrative.

So, the poem. Making things right. I wanted to go back to her death and cremate her body and dump her ashes in the ocean. Because when I was at the top of the Nobska Lighthouse in Cape Cod at seven years old, I called out her name. Even though she wasn’t there. I carry her with me. 

My grandmother couldn’t play piano. She never owned a piano. But this poem has travelled to a different universe where she could and she did. And maybe, in that other universe, I know who “You’re So Vain” is about, too. 

My grandmother introduced the piano to me through AM radio. She didn’t know piano, but she knew piano. This poem has already been so many places, and I hope it has the energy and the volume for its own sforzando, to travel so much farther in its bursts of grief. Maybe even more than that, like the song that means so much to so many, I hope this poem becomes a different thing each time it’s read.

Just as the first piano note hits in “You’re So Vain.” Just as our pockets full of birds slowly and surely grow too heavy to carry. Just as my mother and I continue spending all our years decoding who “You’re So Vain” is about, I am taking every story my grandmother told me that doesn’t make chronological sense and filling in the gaps. It’s a sforzando of erasure: the power of creating your own story is you have the ability to write the narrative you always wished you’d lived. And still, in boxcutters and fireside dancing, there remains gaps to skip over, places where in other universes, your grandchildren sing their whole lives into answering the questions you left behind.

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Matt Mitchell’s “a poem in which carly simon says the song is about me”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando, a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. It is available for preorder now.