Dialogue:
Matthew Isaac Sobin & Michael Robins
Matthew Isaac Sobin on Michael Robins’ “In the Meantime”
Michael Robins’ poem, “In the Meantime,” transported me to another time and place with atmospherics, its smart word choices, and carefully calibrated rhythms. It is at once a poem and a habitable environment. We arrive at the end with a particular feeling. And wonder how exactly the poem conjured its magic. The desire to return to the beginning, to continue inhabiting the feeling the poem has, in a sense, wreathed around the reader.
Part of reading poetry, perhaps the most important part, is discovering the entry point that transforms us from superficial reader to consumer. Sometimes that means reading a poem several times before we find the element – a word pairing, a hidden image, a memory within ourselves, etc – that serves as our portal into its secret world. My first impulse is almost always in the opposite direction: to put on my detective’s hat, arm myself with an analytical magnifying glass, the subconscious goal being to figure out what it all means. Then I remember why I am reading poetry in the first place. To be transported as well as transformed. To develop a symbiotic relationship. Opening myself to the poem enables a mutual exchange.
“In the Meantime” had a special advantage that disarmed my brain and accelerated symbiosis. The opening line: ‘Hour of the homemaker, cherished Studebaker, horse bones crushed to glue.’ It’s a wonderfully intriguing opening salvo, rhythmic and peculiar. But setting aside the poetics for a moment, I latched onto the word “Studebaker” immediately. A word I don’t recall seeing in a poem before, and a word which has special meaning for me, and my family.
Most people, I expect, see a car. Possibly a car from 1950s America. And though close reading suggests Studebaker may be the name of a beloved horse, I see a teddy bear. A stereotypically warm, brown teddy. Because my father, who was born in 1950, had a teddy bear named Studebaker. I can remind myself that the poem says ‘car’ or means ‘horse.’ I can force myself to think and visualize either of these things. But I don’t think this is how poetry is meant to work. My subconscious already has a deep-rooted association to ‘Studebaker.’ A subconscious which knows a crucial fact: three quarters of a century ago, there was a little boy who had a stuffed bear named Studebaker, he loved that bear, and his mother famously got rid of the bear, threw the toy in the trash, thinking her son had outgrown such things. Studebaker was cherished, just as the poem says, and became more so through loss, and the retelling of the story in the following decades, which is why I can see Studebaker’s image, though I never actually saw him with my own eyes. When my father passed in 2022 following a yearlong battle with the disease ALS, my poetry began a journey into who my father was. Every time I discover a new poem that transports me back in time – whether to a phase of my poetic journey, or into a period of my father’s life – it feels like an unexpected gift.
I love poems that perform their duality through language choices. Many of the lines in the poem contain conjunctive word pairings, while other pairs are subtly sprinkled in. After ‘homemaker’ and ‘Studebaker’ in the opening line, we have ‘Barrels & barrels’ (of cabbage) in the second line and ‘Kneeled & knelt’ in the second to last line. These two pairs seem to serve as anchor points that draw the eye directly downward. I love that the poem is unafraid to pair the same word, or forms of the same word. The linkage between “seam” and “sun” is enchanting (‘fabric torn from the seam’ / ‘or better yet the sun,’), giving us one place where fabric is commonly torn, and another that’s strange. I wondered about alternative readings of the word fabric (such as: of reality, familial).
As the poem’s title and its first word (“Hour”) suggests, this is a poem which takes us on a temporal journey. I’m enamored with the title, which is at once understated and also seductive. It is seductive in the sense that the word “Meantime” makes us think about an interlude, something happening in passing, moments that come and go. But this feels like quite a lot more. We are transported, what feels like decades, through the poem’s language (homemaker, Studebaker, July cometh, junkmen, knelt). A new month arrives, July, further emphasizing the passage of time. I really love the use of “knelt,” though it’s hard to pin down why. I think it is partially because it is an atmospheric word. Atmospherics make us feel a certain way. As I played word association, I noted the past tense of feel rhymes with knelt – and while this may be a reach, I think this unnamed rhyme helped drive home the emotional resonance of the final lines.
But ultimately, it is the poem’s incredible lines (and I feel that I am coming to them a bit late, so I hope to do them justice) that demonstrate the temporal nature of the piece, and serve as its heart and soul: ‘we cannot stop the leaving,’ on the heels of the ‘fabric torn,’ is as close as the poem comes to speaking to its reader directly of its meaning. Then we read: ‘Reattach the bells & training wheels of regret’ – another pairing – a somber reminder that we are never truly prepared for the end, if only we could put such safeguards into place. It’s all a ramp leading to this stunner: ‘I’m talking again to squirrels, a spiderless web, anything to swerve the little gravestones under the surface of each of us’ (italics my emphasis). This line robbed my breath. It’s so perfect that analyzing it feels unnecessary. We can just hold the language for a moment and admire it.
Perhaps it is not so coincidental that I am writing this response on January 2nd, on what would have been my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. It is usually a difficult day. I still anticipate hearing his voice. He had such a big personality, making it hard to comprehend how it was silenced prematurely. I want to thank ballast, and especially Michael Robins, for the opportunity to live with “In the Meantime.” I spent time with my father (and Studebaker) in the best way possible, and for that I’m grateful.
Michael Robins on Matthew Isaac Sobin’s “Every Time We Visited Whole Foods You Asked If I Wanted to Buy National Geographic”
Given the choice between email or the slow, sometimes arduous journey of a letter, I’ll choose the letter. And so it comes as no surprise that, upon Matthew’s poem appearing in my inbox, I’m carrying my laptop to a far corner of the house where my printer lives. But even with the poem safely on paper, I avoid eye contact until I have both the time and attention that art deserves. An accidental glance, sure, and my first impressions include the word “God” (capital “G”)—flashes of high school youth group—and, oh yes, “National Geographic” somewhere near the end of the poem’s title. I wonder if it’s possible for a poet to see a copy of that magazine without thinking of “In the Waiting Room” by Elizabeth Bishop.
A few days pass and then a few more. The square of January replaces December on the walls where calendars still hang. Now becomes now becomes now. There’s fresh coffee in my favorite mug, a gift from my love, and the letter “M” repeats in horizontal lines of red, pink, yellow, and blue. I push a draft of my own work aside and finally read the poem’s title: “Every Time We Visited Whole Foods You Asked If I Wanted to Buy National Geographic.”
I’m immediately drawn to the intimacy between the “you” and the “I,” the “we” who navigate domesticity and have browsed—more than once in that “every time”—the aisles of a grocery store. The world of Whole Foods is not the world of Elizabeth Bishop’s adolescence from a century ago, and here, reading this poem in whatever “now” exists on an early morning of a brand-new year, I’m acutely aware of time and our lives pushing forward. I have not read beyond the title of Matthew’s poem, yet the past tense implies absence: what was is no more, what was passing is now the past.
The poem begins and I wonder momentarily if the first line is a continuation of the title. Then my focus shifts to Matthew’s use of anaphora: that “because” repeated at the left margin. In this poem, the anaphora might be linked to the title—you asked because, you asked because—but I get the sense the repetition could just as easily answer a question that has not been asked. I pause on “lacrimation” then tumble line after line down the page, not a single comma or period to stop the momentum. And maybe “tumble” is an especially accurate verb, for my imagination somehow places this poem among other poems on a playground. Just beyond a row of red seesaws, I find “Every Time We Visited Whole Foods” on a swing, moving back and forth like a pendulum between the scientific and the human, between the concrete world and the ever-expanding universe. The “connective tissue” between these realms is exemplified in the eighth stanza: “how the only seafood that tempted us was the pink / pastel of the Crab Nebula.”
Of course, as most of us know, no one gets out of this life without suffering. Not you or me, not the child on the playground, and not the speaker of this poem. The “rivulets” of the penultimate stanza echo the “tears” of the preceding line, as well as the “lacrimation” (an abnormal or excessive secretion of tears). Part of me wants to know if the subject is love or illness, none of the above or both. It really doesn’t matter for there’s so much to admire in the atmosphere that Matthew creates through imagery and language. The past tense resonates again in the ending, where I ultimately feel gratitude for the journey shared by this couple: gratitude for their intimacy, gratitude for their curiosity, and gratitude for their hope. As a reader—as a human who’s no stranger to loss—I linger in the pulse of the final lines and welcome the lack of punctuation as an invitation to circle back to the heart of the poem: the fleeting glimpse of a flowerbed and the wren “unearthing the tiniest life / sequestered within.”
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.