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MATRIX, Matt Bialer. Saint
Julian Press, 2053 Cortlandt, Suite 200, Houston, Texas 77008, 2023, 60 pages,
$18 paperback, http://www.saintjulianpress.com
Matt Bialer’s Matrix is a book-length poem. The table
of contents provides four sections of three listings each with titles such as “On
the Friday night before my 60th birthday,” “The monster of grief,”
and “Jiminy Cricket taught me about sex.” These entries function merely as
place markers, given the unfortunate circumstance of the reader not having time
to finish in one sitting, this well-crafted, poignant, yet celebratory poem
that mourns loss and rediscovers love. In crisp short lines with spot-on images
drawn from popular culture, science, literary history— you name it (New Coke,
an 82-million-year-old Mosasaurus tooth, Shakespeare)—Bialer brings to a casual
table setting, a fine meal that can be appreciated by those who devour
everything from formal poetry to prose poetry, word performance and blurred
genres, to readers who avoid poetry altogether for fear of not understanding the
genre.
And as in fine dining, presentation is as important as substance. Bialer has created a nonce-form structure that supports the enjoyment of Matrix’s themes. Everything matters to Bialer in his choices of form, from the short lines, lacking the interruption of traditional punctuation, yet double-spaced, leaving even more white space than is customary in a poem, both slowing down its reading and moving it forward, enacting content with its structure with lines such as “We are both forward / And backward in time” and “I’ve reluctantly / Continued my journey / Leaving you behind. // Behind.”
This repetition of the final
word “Behind” is a device that Bialer uses to season his sauce. In the hands of
a less experienced person in life or in writing, this repetition could be
overdone. In Matrix, it is
not—providing just the right pace to easily digest what is explicit in the text
and ruminate on what is implicit in the white space between. Slow down and take notice, the white
space and repetition are saying—take notice of the brevity of life, the
impossibility of foreseeing love, the importance of navigating the present. The
journey through Matrix is emblematic
of the poet’s journey of losing a partner to cancer, and then seeing the
resulting grief flooded with the exhilaration of a new love, sharpening vision
to see connections between narratives and images otherwise overlooked.
But I am excited
For the future plans
And
excited about
The
here and now
Of
being with Mary
Time does not exist in Matrix, at least not in the
chronological way it does in Newtonian physics—more as in the quantum wave that
can go backwards in time to change into particles depending on the observer and
whether that observer has knowledge of Jurassic World, has experienced New Coke,
the death of a life-long lover, or finding love again. Time is treated in a way
similar to the way Larry Levis treats it in his quintessential poem “The Spell
of the Leaves” with the woman whose “…husband left her suddenly” who would
“…climb in… / on the wrong side of the car, / And sit quite still, an unlit
cigarette in her hand, / And wait for him to come out and drive her / To work
as always. The first two times it happened / She was frightened, … because
waiting for him, / Something went wrong with time. Later, she couldn’t / Say
whether an hour or only a few minutes / Had passed before she realized she
didn’t / Have a husband.”
I
wonder
How
it is possible
For
something
To
survive
Tens
of millions
Of
years?
How
is it possible?
It’s
like
A
footprint across time
A
footprint across time
I
remember
How
after you died
I
felt like
I
was now extinct
You
certainly were
With
friends
And
your cousin
We
sorted through
Your
clothing
And brought 40 large black bags
Of your
clothing
To
Housing Works
In
our neighborhood
In
Brooklyn
Black
for death
Megan Fernandes, in an interview with
The Rumpus, responds to a question about narrative in poetry. “There are many
ways to think about narrative and for me, I like a narrative poem that resists
chronology. I like scenes that are nonsensical and outside of time.” And later
in the same paragraph: “These are narrative clips, sure, except they are not
held together by any kind of chronological logic, but more by this kind of
“poetic leaping.” Chronological narrative, in Bialer’s lines, “doesn’t exist
anymore.” It is “…both forward / And backward in time.” This revised prosody of
narrative places Bialer in dialogue with a new poetics, one in which, in the
words of Fernandes, “story worlds are abandoned by context.” Bialer’s “story
worlds” are not without context, they are recontextualized by appearing
multiple times, each time following or preceding new material that informs and
is informed by the previous narrative.
Borrowing from a
villanelle’s or pantoum’s repetition of lines to place them in a different
context, being both the same and not the same at the same time, early on,
Bialer begins a cycle of repetition of large segments of the poem. Among
others, the following passage appears multiple times:
When I was a kid
Dinosaurs were reptiles
The word itself meant
“Terrible Lizard”
I had a favorite
Named Brontosaurus
That doesn’t exist anymore
Doesn’t exist
It got renamed
Or was actually
Two different dinosaurs
That were no longer lizards
But birds
Discontinued
Like New Coke
I used to play
With toy T-Rexes
And Brontosauruses
And Pluto
Is not a planet anymore
The first time
we read this passage is on page six after a description of the Mosasaurus—a sea
creature like a dinosaur, but technically not one, capable of swallowing a
great white shark in one gulp. The second time, the passage appears after an
explanation of the habitat of
Mosasaurus. Between that description and the one on page
eighteen, we have this passage:
I remember
How
after you died
I
felt like
I
was now extinct
You
certainly were
With
friends
And
your cousin
We
sorted through
Your
clothing
And
brought 40 large black bags
…Black
for death.
And then immediately following
this third instance of the “When I was a kid” passage, we have
this:
So
I’m resting up
Because
turning 60
Makes
me feel
Like
a dinosaur
This repetition invokes music—both
the repetition of symphonic themes with variations and the hook or chorus of
popular music that is remembered long after the title or artist is forgotten.
In addition, Bialer brilliantly creates in Matrix
a form that works both horizontally and vertically to enact the dislocation of
a 60-year-old life having love ripped away and then unexpectedly returned and
of simultaneously living forwards and backwards in time. Notice that line
margins are slightly offset every other page, images and words appearing in
each of two slightly misaligned columns as one turns each page.
The poem ends with a
final celebration of the poet’s 60th birthday on Zoom—the go-to,
post-pandemic platform that has brought the world together even closer than
social media. Bialer’s lines are filled with sentiment, walking up to the
precipice of sentimentality, hanging their toes over the edge, but never
falling into the abyss—that imbalance of emotion in relation to the emotional
connection they have previously built as a safety net. The passage begins:
Everyone
Takes
a turn
With
a memory
About
me
Some
of it embarrassing…
After stories about writing letters from
camp and collecting Band-Aids, various family members and friends speaking
words of love, the poet resumes:
I
think of
The
old game show
Hollywood
Squares
With
celebrity contestants
Each
in their own square
Like
an onstage Zoom meeting
Paul Lynde
Phyllis Diller
Vincent Price
Joan
Rivers
Zsa
Zsa Gabor
Charles
Nelson Reilly
And
Benjamin
The
Brontosaurus
All
extinct
Discontinued
Like
New Coke
I
look at
All
of us
On
Zoom…
And then the poet closes with:
And
for
A
moment
We
all freeze
We’re
all
In
Bullet Time
Or
Frozen Moment
Dead
Time
Flow
Motion
Time
Slice
We
all freeze
We’re
all
In
Bullet Time
With straightforward, easy to parse diction, Matrix is deceptively simple, and yet capacious with fresh,
vivid concrete imagery, unfolding a clear, compelling narrative arc that allows for mystery—all
undergirded with a strong, unique structure that enacts timeless themes of love, loss, and life—quite
rare in these times of poems that often are devoid of emotion and in service of a pre-determined
message. In Matrix, readers and writers alike may find or re-discover their inspiration for all that life
and writing can bring.
MATT BIALER is the author of dozens of poetry books, including VIEW-MASTER LAND (Finishing Line Press, 2023), MAZE (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and ALWAYS SAY GOODNIGHT (KYSO Flash, 2020). His poems have also appeared in many print and online journals, including Retort, Le Zaporogue, Green Mountains Review, Gobbet, Forklift Ohio and H_NGM_N. In addition, Matt is an acclaimed black-and-white street photographer who has exhibited his work widely. Some of his images are in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and The New York Public Library. He is also an accomplished watercolor landscape painter with works in many private collections.
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