Matthew Jude Luzitano received his BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from Brilliant Corners and Weave. He lives in Mansfield, Massachusetts with his wife, Andrea, and his little dog, too.
His poem, "Cleopatra Recovered," appeared in Issue Fifty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer, Christina Oddo, about finding eventfulness in stanza and line, a new understanding of the word "recovered" in terms of art, and "natural" as an implication of order.
As a writer, and for this poem specifically, what helps guide your decisions as to where lines and stanzas break?
I tend to break before surprises, not necessarily in a cheep “peek-a-boo” fashion (at least I hope it isn’t), but more to keep from lulling a reader. For example, in the third stanza “armadillos / with samples of their calcified scat—” breaks before a surprise. It helps weed out weak lines. If I go three or four lines and there’s nothing interesting to emphasize, I look to cut or lean that portion of the poem.
The two-line stanzas behave similarly; two lousy lines are caught with their pants down when you set them on their own. It keeps me honest. I also like how two-line stanzas imply duality. The poem is sort of a one-sided conversation between the speaker and the statue.
In general, what I look for in both line and stanza is what I’d call eventfulness. Am I spinning my wheels? Is one line simply reiterative of the previous? How far do I travel from one stanza to the next? Those questions are my focus.
Can you speak of the relationship between Cleopatra and her history, and the role the word “recovered” plays in the title and in this poem?
As the poem was forming, it became clear to me that the tone was elegiac, and the word “recovered” speaks to the issues that an elegy faces: an attempt to both accept mortality while simultaneously creating a work of art that’s meant to immortalize.
In that way, the word “recovered” both means “to regain” or even “to bring back to health” but can be read as “to cover again,” a connotation you’re unlikely to find in a dictionary, but one that I hope gets illustrated in the poem. It means to question art’s ability to preserve a person’s legacy.
Cleopatra is an example of this: from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor, the specifics regarding Cleopatra seem to be in tension with what we really know about her. What we truly know is she has a presence, an allure, something more than a pretty face. There is no known statue of Cleopatra—the one in the poem is fictitious. So the Cleopatra in this poem is twice removed—it’s an ekphrastic poem about a fabricated statue. It’s absurd in that way, and I suppose the poem argues that elegy is absurd and imperfect, but somehow crucial.
I am drawn to the way the museum of natural history is highlighted: “natural because history is always cracking a nose off.” The juxtaposition between natural life, action, and the stiffness (“stone-mute”-ness) that surrounds preservation in a museum is significant here. In fact, even as the poem opens, Cleopatra is not stiff in preservation, but active in the natural splitting “from crown to nape.” Cleopatra is now past tense, but this tense is the “loveliest.” Still, her “expression” is “paralyzed,” and silence falls around the tomb and around her “fractured head.” What about this scene, if anything, grows romantic through diction? Is it that “she must have smiled once”—the romantic idea of her alive, or the way she continues to live through the stillness, by separating “from her body?”
Going to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, it struck me how our human history was placed next to the history of animals, and that if we had a skeleton of Attila the Hun, for example, we’d display it just the same as a tyrannosaurus rex. Literally, a natural history museum presents nature, of which humanity is a part, but the connotation of “natural” that I’m most drawn to is the implication of order. Writing an elegy is in part an attempt to control that legacy, to pin it down, a struggle many of us also face during life. In truth, only nature, only the “natural order” has control.
Art is more dramatic and exciting than life, yet never measures up to it. A statue draws our attention in a way no human being could, yet it pales in comparison to what a human being really is.
What are you currently reading?
I’ve been reading a lot of Amy Gerstler and Dean Young. I love how complex the tone is in their poems—all that dark humor. I love Gerstler’s “Touring the Doll Hospital.” I like reading Dean Young’s Bender: New and Selected Poems because it’s organized alphabetically. You stop thinking about what’s early career and what’s later—everything’s on a level playing field. It’s easy to try to hone in on a writer’s career to find the time he or she peaked, but I think that kind of narrative is oftentimes artificial. I’ve also been reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s Open House. Some poems she attacks with such abandon that I could only dream to emulate.
What are you currently writing?
I’m trying to think of poems more in terms of dramatic monologue, meaning a lot of first-person and a lot of persona. The only real agency the speaker has in “Cleopatra Recovered” is when he/she considers asking Cleopatra to coffee. I think a lot of my recent poems have featured speakers trying to get a hold on their lives in a more desperate way.