This week’s guest on “Poetry from Daily Life” is Matt Mason, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Matt, who served as Nebraska State Poet from 2019-2024, began writing in high school and learned soon after that through poetry he was better able to understand his own feelings. Today, he says he likes many ways of looking at poetry, but he prefers narrative poems. He loved working on the recent book, “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros,” “which started as a lark (poems about roller coasters and such) but turned into a significant project.” ~David L. Harrison
I am a fan of narrative poems, poems that tell a story. In my opinion, that’s how poetry began, with epic poems that had to be memorized to be passed down, because people didn’t yet have printing presses or perhaps even the written word. This is why these poems have regular rhymes and/or rhythm, so that the author can convey them in a way that is easier to remember word for word. These poems are still with us today, along with Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Ramayana and others.
But sometimes it seems that most poems have to be translated for us by a critic or a teacher. Sorted and explained so that we can understand its deeper meaning. This has led to poetry too often feeling like something difficult rather than something to be enjoyed.
Not that a difficult poem shouldn’t be written, I certainly write some, but I love that there are more poets in publishing, in poetry slams, in cowboy poetry gatherings, with poems that require no explanation – and then if you look deeper, you may discover surprises and wonders, because writing an “easy” poem is usually far from easy.
Robert Frost was like that, you can read a Frost poem once and get something wonderful out of it. And then, if you read it a few more times, you might see more and more things going on beneath the surface. But this first reading opens the door rather than leaving readers perplexed.
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That said, here is one of my poems from my book “At the corner of fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros”. The book is about, yes, Disneyland, which was a fun subject to play with in these poems, because I was telling, ultimately, a larger story about aging and life after my parents died. This poem focuses on describing a particular part of Disneyland park where two “lands” intersect:
Corner of New Orleans and Frontier
Under the Old West guitar and the trumpet of the Jazz group,
where the steam horn of the riverboat sounds,
you order a corn dog.
∘
Donuts and smothered
I’m on my way, cowboy,
you don’t have to put up with this.
∘
But the sun sinks into everyone’s eyes,
strollers full of screams pass
And you
∘
start looking, at the popcorn cart and in your life,
for something more
that everything
∘
you settled down
For.
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Matt Mason’s poetry has been published in The New York Times and Matt has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His book “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros” was published by The Old Mill Press in 2023. You can find the book wherever books are sold, includinghttps://theoldmillpress.com/product/at-the-corner-of-fantasy-and-main/ and find out more about Matt on his websitehttps://midverse.com/ as well as more about his events and how to support him in his work athttps://www.patreon.com/MattMason.