By Teresa Willis

Though he and his wife, Gale Ford, are settled nicely in Venice, Matthew Niblock got his start at the Poets’ Circle at the Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood. Since popping in on a Sunday afternoon in 1991 with a few “clunky metaphors,” Niblock has grown to be one of the area’s most prominent and prolific artists. He is a veteran of the bands Larger Than Life and October, and a founding board member of the Dance of the Iguana Press. Copies of his independently produced spoken word/music cassette The House I Live In are almost sold out (though you can still find a couple at the Iguana).

Besides being published in local and national magazines (including Caffeine, Saturday Afternoon, Flipside, Speak Easy, Rigorous, InQUEERies, and The Moment), Niblock’s own book, God the Motion Picture (edited by Amelie Frank) was released in February by Dance of the Iguana Press. The book is available at many area bookstores, and in NoHo at the Iguana Cafe. Niblock has been a featured reader in the Laguna Poets Last Friday Reading Series and the Spoken Heard Series, and in virtually every coffeehouse and bookstore poetry venue in the Los Angeles area, including Midnight Special. He is the recipient of the 1993 Allen J. Freedman Poetry Prize for his poem, “Zoo Metaphors.”

Both on stage and page, Niblock’s work can he mesmerizing. He is blatant and utterly unapologetic. And he is good. The defiant charm is backed up with the solid craft of someone who has worked his ass off.

At a recent reading, Niblock read with five or six other poets. At a certain point, they all spontaneously started doing their “Matthew Niblock” poems. And most of them had one (or more). What is it about this guy that inspires his peers to laud and imitate?

TW: You were a Christian singer as a child.

MN: Yeah. I come from a very fanatically religious background in my immediate family that was surrounded, in context, by my extended family. My large, extended, drug-addicted, insane, abusive family. Not religious. Then this little cell of us that was going to save the rest of them.

TW: So you were this walking dichotomy that exploded on yourself.

MN: I hope so. When I was twelve years old, I found, in a terribly cliched fashion, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. All pretty much on the same day. It took a couple of years of really intense struggle between the two for me to decide to go with sex, drugs, and rock and roll full time. Rather than Christianity.

TW: Do you consider the L.A. poetry scene relevant? Do you think people are going to talk about this later?

MN: Yes. There are poets who are working now who are relevant and who are important, but there’s not a great continuity of style, there’s not a movement happening, not a Beat thing happening here. Which as far as I’m concerned, is good. The Beat movement produced a couple of very interesting poets who will last and lots of people who tried their hardest to sound like Allen Ginsberg. I would rather be a part of a community of poets who are good at what they do than part of a community of poets who imitate each other. There’s an enormous diversity of work going on. And I’m not including Dr. Suess rhyming journal entries. I’m talking about people who are real poets.

TW: Define “real poet.”

MN: Poetry has rhythm and some sort of meter. Even if the meter is wild, it should have some music to it. Some beat. Otherwise, it’s prose that somebody just broke up into lines because they decided they’d call it poetry.

TW: When did you start writing?

MN: When I was in the fifth grade I wrote a story. The characters were all other members of my fifth grade class. I’m sure it was horrendously bad. But, I remember that I read it in front of the class. And because I had written this story, I had all these people do whatever I wanted them to do. It was a very God-like experience. I felt very powerful. That is probably when I began to write. I published my first poem in the spring, 1990, issue of The Moment, which is a terrific magazine that’s not around anymore. I wrote it at five o’clock in the morning at a Denny’s in about three minutes and never made any editorial changes to it. Then I didn’t publish anything else for quite a while.

TW: I seem to remember you telling a story that you went to someone’s house, sat in front of a word processor for three days, and when you came out, you had a “voice.” You were a writer.

MN: That’s true. That would’ve been probably the spring of 1989. I did. I sat at a word processor for, like, three straight days. Drank lots and lots of coffee… and I wrote a very long poem which was not very good. I doubt if I have a copy of it today. If I did, I would be too embarrassed to show anyone. It was very awkward. I discovered in the process an interesting trick that’s served me well in my writing. I believe that if you tell the absolute truth about a circumstance or a situation, even in the plainest possible language, sometimes the truth is so unusual and so frightening, people interpret what you’ve written as symbolism or metaphor. When it’s not. And that’s when you begin to be able to, rather than using metaphors in your poems, you begin to use metaphors outside the poetry. So the whole poem becomes a metaphor for something. So I did come out of that experience with a “voice,” because I wrote something very true and very raw. But it was “God when I was a Kid” that really kicked me off. It was published in the first issue of The Dance of the Iguana in November of ’91. That happened because I went to a poet’s circle with my bad clunky metaphors. And my bad clunky metaphors were comparatively fresh and original. I met a poet named Allen J. Freedman, who was a very fine writer. I started working with him, and very quickly I began to write well. In just a matter of a few weeks, I was asked to be on the editorial board of The Dance of the Iguana. That experience was useful because I saw hundreds of bad poems. And we had to pick the good ones. That introduced me feet first to the ‘scene” in Los Angeles.

TW: Larger Than Life broke up soon after that.

MN: I gave my first poetry reading at the Iguana and the place was packed. I was a guest in someone else’s show. Maybe the best reading I’ve ever done. It was phenomenal. Three days after that first reading my band broke up. It was either I was going to be a writer or I wasn’t going to be a writer. I wrote a lot of poetry in that period because I wasn’t writing lyrics and I had to write something or I’d just blow up. I started to publish a lot then.

TW: In your last show at the Iguana, you put a lot of different mediums together.

MN: Yes, I read, I sang, and I did spoken word with music. I’ve also done spoken word with video and spoken word with live, multi-media type stuff. I have an album, if you will. An independent audio cassette that was released in 1993 called The House I Live In that is spoken word and songs. My friend Cliff Ulrich is a guitar player and songwriter who had an old, piece-of-shit, falling apart 4-track from the dawn of time and he set it up in my living room. He just started working and people came by. Whoever came by at a particular point was incorporated into whatever it was we were working on. There are, like, six people credited with percussion. For “Zoo Metaphors” we actually tracked it live. Cliff played new-agey music on his guitar while Kira sat on the couch and wailed. Casey and Erica Erdman ran around the house making strange noises, slamming doors, stomping on things, knocking on windows. I have a big metal stop sign that I stole hanging in my house. They took it off the wall and shook it so it sounded like an old, back-stage, thunder sheet. Then Erika took a bag of dried lentil beans and poured them on the stop sign. It sounded like rain. There’s also some Chapman stick on the tape, an a cappella piece with three-part harmony. It actually sold quite well, for an independent record. I think if I kept up with the demand for it and actually took the time to make more copies of it as the existing ones sold, I might’ve made some money. But It’s gone. I don’t have a copy of it anymore. I’ve sold about two hundred and fifty copies in a year.

TW: All self-promotion?

MN: All self-promotion. You have to do a certain amount of self-promotion. And in order to do self-promotion well, you have to be good at what you do. Otherwise, your self-promotion sounds like, smacks of and feels like… self-promotion. But you gotta do it. Nobody is coming around knocking on my door asking for poems. Actually, that’s not true. But people are knocking on my door and asking for poems now because of what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, which is submit poems to every fucking magazine in the western hemisphere. You can’t get published if you don’t submit. You get rejected a hundred times just to get an acceptance because that’s how you build this. I’ve already been published nationally a few times and I intend to be published nationally on a regular basis, eventually. There’s a systematic and methodical way of going about it. But it’s necessary because the end result is that people start coming to you, soliciting work. That’s a good thing. And that is beginning to happen with me. My work is being requested.

TW: It seems in many of your projects, especially those that involve other people, there’s kind of a mish-mash, hodgepodge sensibility.

MN: I’m more deliberate than that. Susan Heeger of the L.A. Times described me as a “free-associative” after hearing me read “Zoo Metaphors” somewhere. I wish I had the freedom to be free-associative. Ellyn Maybe is free-associative. Perhaps Scott Wannberg is free-associative. I’m not. I took an enormous amount of time making “Zoo Metaphors” work. The editing process — I worked on it for three months before I even read it anywhere. That’s this hodge-podge you are referring to. It seems accidental, but it’s not.

TW: Do you write poetry with one eye on the stage?

MN: I try very hard to compose work that works on the page and works in a performance. Occasionally I create something that works better on paper. And vice versa. Those are my failures. I have a piece called “The Chair” that reads terribly well. Goose bumps in the audience. Really not a very good poem. Then I have a piece called “Winter” that is very well constructed. Very academic, actually. Looks brilliant on the page, but every time I’ve read it out loud, it’s died. Neither one is really that good because they need to work in both contexts. “Zoo Metaphors” works both ways.

TW: So is the common denominator accessibility?

MN: Accessibility is an interesting idea. My emotional intent must be accessible for me to consider that I’ve done something successful. It’s been argued that my work is not accessible because I don’t use universal references all the time. I think that’s too narrow of a view. I would prefer poetry that has some mystery to it while imparting its tone, rather than poetry that spells everything out. In a poem of mine called, “I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees,” I use some very specific Biblical references. When I say, “I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees,” I mean that literally. People have thought that that’s symbolic for other things. That’s fine. As long as they get the tone. It literally means, I, from my fundamentalist Christian background, being engaged in this homosexual experience right now, if the Rapture happens — which is Jesus coming back to earth, claiming the saved, to catch them up into heaven and take them away before the Great Tribulation, blah, blah, blah — if Jesus comes back right now, I ain’t gonna go. A good 75% of my audience have not the slightest idea of what I’m talking about. If they’ve ever heard the word “rapture,” they aren’t cognizant of that very specific context. But because it’s real and truthful in fact, it’s also real and truthful in tone. So delivering that poem I can impart a sense of what I was feeling, which is guilt and regret and stuff like that. If people don’t know what the Rapture is, big deal. It doesn’t matter. In my other career as a pop music writer and singer, I’m not signed with a great big smashing record label because I’m not writing for the lowest common denominator. I’m trying to find a point where what we do can be accessible, but it doesn’t have to pander to “oh baby, baby, baby…” I believe that it’s possible to create intelligent art and expect and demand your audience be intelligent to know what you’re doing and to follow you. Without being erudite and too academic for your own good. And if there is a movement in Los Angeles at all, it’s that people whose work I respect — S. A Griffin, Scott Wannberg, Laurel Ann Bogen, Ellyn Maybe, Nelson Gary, Pam Ward, Nancy Agabian — they’re doing that. They are not coming down to “ooh baby, baby, baby… ” They’re not doing sex poetry just so they can say “fuck” so everybody in the open reading will titter along. They’re doing real honest work that is accessible because they’re telling the truth.

I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees

by Matthew Niblock

I thought I would sing hosannas.
I thought I would see the faces of the choirboy
in my sleep, his many faces. I thought I
would burrow down in feathers. I
thought I would find a map.
I thought I would be piercing with
eyelashes and treble clefs, setting straight the shadows
at vacation bible schools and singing choirboy hymns to his
tender skin and chaste brow. I thought
I would die there, then, touching him;
and his throated hum clenched in
my fists, my hands wringing dry his sweat.
I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees.
I thought I would bubble over with wedding songs and
show-and-tell melodies, whispering the words:
if Jesus still loves me I might still sing.

I was fourteen
so was he
we draped ourselves in tinsel and kissed
like boys do, all open mouths and stretched
tongues. maybe he ran
girl-pictures in his head when I took him
in my mouth, maybe he swam upstream. maybe
he chanted the choirmaster
chant. I knew where I was.
I remember where I was
when John Lennon died.
I remember where I was when the radio exploded,
spurted like heaven opening up, raining
nerve endings on my sleek and tenored
groin. if I took
my sweet time about it, remember that a whole
note is four beats long and I had stamina, then,
and I sang the choirboy anthem like an angel in reverie,
dancing, spinning on the head of a pushpin pricked
into photocopies of sheet music.

but I am not fourteen anymore.

Reprinted from God the motion picture C 1994, Dance of the Iguana Press