Farid Matuk on Mirroring, Poetic Artifice, and Complicating Sensuality in Verse

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Farid Matuk. Farid Matuk is a poet and translator and the author of four poetry collections, most recently Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). His work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.

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Poets.org: What themes do you explore in Moon Mirrored Indivisible? 

Farid Matuk: I live near an Air Force base. That and the various ways capital and state violence coordinate with one another has had me thinking about the ways in which masculinity and nationalism intertwine, and how that relationship has been carving its initials into the barks of trees for a very long time.

Mirroring shows up enough in the book to make its way into the title. As a friend reminded me, mirroring is a fuckboy technique in which someone creates a shortcut to intimacy or real relation by affirming and matching the energy of their interlocutor. It doesn’t cultivate much beyond the frenzy of instant connection.

The mirroring I’m interested in through the book is different. It’s a way, first, of signaling a dependence on artifice. As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe in the real because poems can’t be made of anything else, but having come from long lines of displaced, migrating, colonized, and colonizing peoples, I don’t have communities that would authorize the real into the authentic.

I don’t mourn this, nor do I extol it. It’s simply my condition, my possibility, and my limitation. Given all this, poetic artifice becomes an interesting way for me to explore what circuitous paths I might make toward the real.

Artifice is also something I’ve thought through by way of translation. I’m not the first to suggest that rather than a poor imitation of an original, translation might be a mirror, and the reflection doesn’t minimize or cheapen the original but instead extends it into new and slightly differentiated forms.

In these ways, mirroring might be not a tool of manipulation but an ethic in which we try to tune and calibrate toward one another to offer the other somewhere to turn, places to extend, to help each other see what we think we know, but differently. The state, by contrast, wants us to show up with a finite set of feelings (scared, enraged, callous) but always urgently.

Toxic masculinity elevates the virtues of integration, intent, and self-control until they deflate and become the vices of singularity and domination. Mirroring one another might offer places to linger, to preen, to eroticize, to disintegrate.

Poets.org: What is your approach to the craft of poetry, and did it evolve while working on this book?

FM: I think it’s important to say that sometimes we react against our own tendencies, our own competencies to reawaken our practice, but that each new stylistic or thematic attempt isn’t necessarily a declaration of loyalty to one or another way of writing poetry or of imagining our poetics.

Moon Mirrored Indivisible reacts against my previous book’s commitment to resist or exceed the singular lyric “I.” In The Real Horse I wrote sequences of fourteen-line poems where the long lines often practice a rhetorical figure called anacoluthon. It’s a way of changing the grammatical construction within a sentence. Common examples include declarations that morph into questions: “It’s raining—are we gonna let that stop us?”

I adapted that grammatical slide to write in a way that a given phrase might be read to modify what preceded it just as easily as it might modify what followed. For readers willing to track and suspend those multiplicities, that book offered a slippery kind of experience.

In Moon Mirrored Indivisible, I wanted all kinds of seemingly contradictory things. I wanted to resist what I think are commonplace and unconvincing claims we sometimes offer to legitimate “experimental” poetry (as if any poetry needed to be legitimated).

I didn’t want to settle for “a lack of closure” or for “ongoingness” either in my aesthetics or in my handling of the ethical stakes in the stories and lived experiences I was considering. Maybe I wanted to be a bit more exposed? More accountable?

I also wanted to feel and to practice being supremely entitled to my own sensory pleasure in language. I wanted to dare my own exploration of elegance. This manifested as an obsession with what Alice Notley noted about the verse line: that it is its events.

She means, I think, that more interesting than whether a line ends or enjambs is how a line organizes the variable stresses that occur inside it. She advocates not for strict meter but for each poet to develop their personal “ear” for how variable stresses in our verse lines might linger or quicken the vocal (which is to say, embodied) energies they offer.

Yet I still wanted to resist the convention of a singular, lyric “I.” That resistance happens explicitly in a few poems in the collection where a new and unidentified voice interrupts the speaking voice, usually to interrogate the speaker, but this isn’t a defining characteristic of the book.

That resistance manifests again in less explicit ways: how the “mirror poems” reflect and refract phrases from other poems, how certain poems emerge from personas, how the sections organize poems sequentially so that in their totality they form essays, of sorts.

Lastly, there’s a poetics of the sensory that I’m trying to work out and haven’t quite articulated yet. It has to do with my mother, and, I think, with mothers generally. I’ve written about how I find a strong resonance between Audre Lorde’s exploration of the erotic (“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) and James Baldwin’s more passing mention of the sensual (The Fire Next Time).

Both authors are careful to distinguish what they’re interested in from projections of excessive sexuality used to dehumanize and police Black and brown people. To name what they mean, both authors ultimately fall on imprecise but compelling formulations like “the force of life…itself” and “the lifeforce of women.”

I’ve written about how I find in lyricism not shallow decoration but a technology for resisting impacted layers of power’s projections. I’ve written about how lyricism is a technology for weaving the speaking/reciting/singing body into a broader field of subatomic presence and constant differentiation.

But I’ve also been thinking about how for me these intuitions emerge in strong sensory impressions I had as a very young child, impressions left on me from my time with my mother who was loving, gentle, and, though she experienced traumas that left her with some codependent tendencies, at a sort of energetic level, she was pretty good at giving me my space, at keeping a distance that allowed for a billowing kind of going and returning.

NourbeSe Philip writes about how breath is prepositional: we begin life with someone, a mother, having breathed for us. I’m wondering if the kind of sensory work I want poems to do, ultimately, is an extension of what I feel my mother did for me—not just to breathe for me as a fetus but also to be in dynamic relation to the Earth’s sensory energies in a casual, almost entitled way, and to weave me into that field.

Despite living through gender-based intimate partner violence in the context of Peru’s conservative religious patriarchy, she practiced various pleasures, ranging from indulging in and heightening her femme looks, to building a sisterhood of friends, to going out dancing.

Maybe what I remember is nothing more than a relatively healthy attachment between a mother and a yet unindividuated child, but those memories feel more like what some of my favorite poems do—disperse me across a field of sensory awareness.

Poets.org: What did you learn from curating this volume that you would like to share with someone trying to publish their first collection?

FM: Don’t be afraid to get curious about the book as a particular form. A loose collection of poems with little formal or thematic resonance can also be a pleasure to read. Sometimes a light touch is all that’s needed.

If you’re interested, though, there’s so much thematic, narrative, intellectual, and linguistic complexity that you can explore by sequencing, by exploring sections, by incorporating peritext, glosses, and typographic interventions, to name a few. The key is to be willing to revise poems that previously did well on their own but that now may be doing too much or too little to serve a given section or the overall arc of your book.

Poets.org: At what point did you know that this collection was complete?

FM: Only after having declared it complete many times. I mean, there’s that quote by W. H. Auden, paraphrased from a maxim by Paul Valéry: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I’ve been lucky to receive maybe two or three poems that arrived “finished.”

But most of my poems, and certainly the books I’ve made, are iterations that could have kept evolving. I’ve only abandoned my tinkering when the publisher’s production schedule forced me to.

The specific case here is that I was in Brussels to give a reading and have a public conversation with the writer Filip Jakab at a terrific bookstore and project space called *rile (shout out Chloe & Sven). I had already been revising the book in earnest for two years, so I went into the reading confident the book was done.

The reading went okay, but from the podium I still wasn’t convinced the last poem did enough to gather and bring the book to a close. It was a poem that circulated in a prominent venue and garnered enthusiastic reactions, and that maybe left me a bit complacent about it, but walking back from the reading my brain turned over ways I could still desecrate the poem.

In bed that night I opened the manuscript again and tried flipping the order of the poems’ two stanzas. That presented the possibility of doing something with flower imagery that was already there (and throughout the book). When I realized I could rhyme “a flower thrown” and “After a life unafraid, no smaller than our poem,” I knew I’d found a way to land the whole book.

It’s a book that pushes (gently, quietly) against its own form as a book and its life as a material object separate from communities and rituals. I associate the book object with the discipline of literature and the cultural formations (e.g., nonprofit literary institutions, particular habits of public readings, literary prizes that celebrate individual makers) with the academic discipline and cultural field of literature.

And that’s all fine, as far as it goes. Poetry, I think, goes farther. Maybe poetry overlays but ultimately exceeds what we commonly accept as “literature.” I think poetry goes so much farther that it begs for new ways of gathering, new rituals. We’re still trying to catch up. So, it felt satisfying to land on that word: poem.

The revised ending is also a callback to an earlier moment in the book when I mention that my friend Fady Joudah said to me that [Mahmoud] Darwish said something like “a people are no smaller than their poem.” Fady and I have been talking about incompleteness in poems. How a poem might paradoxically find its truest form by falling short of its aspirations, but also how citing our own previous poems and/or the words of one another can be a way to resist the promise of a complete and integral poem that finds its fullest self-realization alone.

Seeking others, Moon Mirrored Indivisible is also a kind of invitation to those who would be my people. And one of the ways we’ll know one another is by our comfort, even entitlement to sensory pleasure in language, one of the manifestations of which is rhyme—rhyme that mirrors sounds, rhyme that mirrors friends.

Poets.org: What was your “gateway” into the craft of poetry—the poem or poetry collection that made you fall in love with this literary form?

FM: There were many. I had to be invited more than once before I finally stepped through.

I wrote a poem about rainbows when I was maybe ten or eleven and it won a district award. Knowing my name had been added to a plaque kept under glass in the town’s main library, that stayed with me. We were immigrants and we were poor. This recognition was the first terrible promise of exceptionalism. I was so young and scared I can’t now hate myself too much for believing in it.

In my early teens, I found the poem “Eleven” by Archibald MacLeish. It’s about a “mute child” who finds refuge from his family’s ableist aggression in the gardener’s shed. The boy sits in the shed’s corner, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness until he sees the outlines of the tools, registers the smells of bulbs and dung. Eventually the gardener enters the shed and doesn’t acknowledge the boy, allowing him his privacy.

I couldn’t have articulated then that I resonated with the ways the poem offers sensual experience as an experience of safety. And that such could be presided over by an adult man who knew well enough to maintain a respectful distance from the boy—chef’s kiss.

In college, I found myself in Portland at Powell’s Books. Clinton was running for his second term. I found [Pablo] Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, bought it, and read it as I explored the city by bus.

This led me to get a Fulbright in Chile after college. I spent a year interviewing Communists and literary figures who still remembered Neruda. I studied the idiosyncratic architecture of his homes and the depoliticized way the Neruda Foundation packaged his legacy. I had daily private access to his writing studio in Santiago where I read the books he’d kept in his library and transcribed interviews.

I thought I was a budding cultural theorist there to think about how poetry and institutions mediate power, but I also allowed myself to be taken with the romance of the people I met and the books I read, the rain and the fish market, the smog and the mountains—at least enough to try a few lines of my own verse.

When I came back to the States, my friends from college were doing MFAs in visual art, but since I felt I couldn’t draw they told me about MFAs in writing. I didn’t really know these existed. My striving immigrant sensibility understood academic achievement more than I understood what an art practice might be, so getting another degree was an imaginable next step. The MFA nearly stomped out my desire to write.

Finally, when I started hanging out with Hoa Nguyen, Dale Smith, Scott Pierce, and the painter Philip Trussell I saw life and writing, conversations and lineages all intertwine. I could see why and how I might keep going.

Poets.org: If you could pair one of the poems in Moon Mirrored Indivisible with a work of art, song, recipe, or some other form of media, which poem would you choose, and with what would you pair it?

FM: I listened to a lot of Pharoah Sanders while writing this book. The poem “The Moon in Cancer” would pair with Pharoah’s track “Moon Child”; the poem “Arts & Craft” would pair with Pharoah’s “Love is Everywhere”; and maybe the book as a whole would pair with Pharoah’s “Harvest Time.”

My attempts to create intertextuality at the level of the book’s sections would pair with the richly layered production on Digable Planets’ last studio album, Blowout Comb. Sorry, that was more than one pairing.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

FM: I feel lucky to have just read two manuscripts that are amazing. One is by the artist and writer Mariel Miranda, and it offers a portrait of the unincorporated community/colonia where she grew up outside of Tijuana. The other is by John Zawawi, who’s exploring nothing less than the nature of reality through his experiences as a stand-up comic. Both manuscripts have found original styles that match their huge hearts.

I’m also making my way through the essays in Poetics and Precarity, a collection from a few years back edited by Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller. It has essays on breath by Nathaniel Mackey and M. NourbeSe Philip that are already shaping the ways I think about my next project—a memoir about friendship, sex, mentoring, freedom, race, and breath.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

FM: So many. I’ll name [Emily] Dickinson’s “Revolution is the pod (33)” for the way its referent slips between revolution as agitation and revolution as turning. In a tiny poem, she acknowledges the will and yet renders agency as something that surpasses or occurs beyond a single will.

Also “Those Various Scalpels” by Marianne Moore for the way it lands on a question that seems to undermine exactly what the poem’s been doing. If I started naming all the site’s poems that I love by our contemporaries, this interview would never end. I’ll only add Marwa Helal’s “revolution of angels” as a friend to Dickinson.

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.