There are many reasons I feel lucky to be a Detroiter. My hometown taught me to be audacious, to be resourceful, to be too much and proud of it. My city also gave me lineage: I am the daughter of Katherine, of Gloria, Lucille, and Mama Carter. I am also a daughter of the Detroit School of Poetics, and am so proud to say I have been studying their craft and ethics since I was a teen.
It is through this lineage that I met Airea D. Matthews. Detroit-made poet. Scholar and professor. Sharp, witty, and so generous with her time and attention to detail. Once, I reached out to her to ask for some craft resources, and she sent me a folder with every essay she had ever been given access to. This same generosity extends to her exquisite lyric, bursting with keen observations and evocative images. Her first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Airea D. Matthews was Philadelphia’s 2022–2023 poet laureate. A Pew fellow, she is an associate professor and codirector of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College.
When I learned that Airea’s new collection Bread and Circus was forthcoming, I immediately reached out and asked for the opportunity to discuss what I knew would be a masterful work. She said yes. I was not wrong. I am so excited to share our conversation with you!
Brittany Rogers (BR): Something that I noticed as a major thread of Bread and Circus is the link between consumerism and class (social class, financial class), marriage, and addiction. So I was wondering, when you began this book, were you intentionally setting out to write about how consumerism intertwines itself with our daily life, or was that something that came about as you were writing?
Airea D. Matthews (ADM): I think I intentionally wanted to think about how consumerism intertwines with our everyday lives. We don’t think about it really, because we’re so in the midst of it; we don’t think about how capitalism has evolved and how it really impacts us and how it impacts our interpersonal relationships. One of the things that I was interested in was examining how capitalism has impacted my interpersonal relationships; how can I look back on my life and read a thread of consumerism or capitalism? The first thought that came to mind was the idea of marriage.
If you think about the early institution [of marriage] a lot of it is about having a need met in some way, and consuming another person in order to get a need met. This is a cynical view, but you can think about that in terms of the story of Adam and Eve. Eve was created so that Adam wouldn’t be alone, so it [marriage] wasn’t necessarily to Eve’s benefit, it was for Adam’s benefit. And then you think about how the institution of it as a whole evolved. Think about royal marriages, and how they come to be: they come to be because the institution fulfills some sort of royal mandate that you have to keep the bloodline pure, that it has to be someone of a certain stature. Then you think about agricultural societies, and how they married: they married as a benefit of work, to have another set of hands to help you work this land.
So I was thinking about marriage in that mindset, of how it has always somehow been intermingled with these ideas of consumerism, consumption, class, and capitalism. From the very start, it’s always about filling some sort of need. Which for me seems kind of extractive. And this is not to be down on marriage; I believe 100% in the institution of marriage, and I believe it’s a beautiful thing.
BR: Oh no worries, I always say that marriage is a contract.
ADM: It’s a contract, exactly. And in terms of it being a contract, I started thinking, “What are the other instances in which you have a contract, and how is that tied into economics in some way?” And I was hard-pressed to find examples where it wasn’t, so I just used the personal example where it very much was.
But I wasn’t necessarily thinking through extraction. Showing extraction visually through the text as a way to symbolize late-stage capitalism and its extractions came later, but the ideas together, and how they intermingle and kind of sat together, was of interest to me. I wanted to pluck that out and make that the primary (at least at the beginning of the book) and kind of graduate throughout to whatever comes next, if that makes sense.
BR: That does make sense! So I’ve heard you describe Bread and Circus as a memoir-in-verse. Is that process different from the process of writing a poetry manuscript like Simulacra?
ADM: Yeah, I think it was different in that Simulacra was really an anti-confessional, and I was trying not to forward the personal narrative so much and trying to shroud it, kind of in communion with, but also in resistance to Anne Sexton’s work.
With this one, I just wanted to come forward. I wanted to offer—I think there is still the mystery that’s inherent in poetry, but there is still a certain type of vulnerability that I wanted to capture that the anti-confessional doesn’t capture. The anti-confessional was really concerned with not coming forward, shrouding mystery, whereas the pure confessional memoir-in-verse is really concerned with subjectivity. It’s concerned with the person being subject to themselves and to the world, and I was interested in that level of vulnerability, which is why I moved in that direction.
BR: Were you concerned with potential pushback regarding some of the more personal narratives in Bread and Circus? When you switched over to the more subjective, did you have any concerns with other people’s reception?
ADM: Yeah, but I think you always think about that. You always think that as a subject you will become an example of navel gazing. And I actually don’t believe in navel gazing; it’s a fancy term that’s been bandied about, but people haven’t really thought about the purpose of poetry. Poetry is personal, and the personal becomes political—to me. So to supplement the self, or supplement one’s experiences is to make the self-invisible in some ways.
I’m really interested in what it means to be subject; to be subject to ourselves, what it means to be subject to other people, what it means to forward an experience. When you think about it, you can’t get away from the idea that you are still a subject—even in the most highly metaphorical prize poems, you’re still a subject. Why? Because it’s through your gaze. The metaphor that you’re using, the turns of phrase, the rhetorical devices—you’re using them at will through your gaze, so the self is still inherent in that.
I wasn’t really as concerned with what happens when the personal narrative becomes fodder for poetry, because I think every life is a poem. The difference is whether you are articulating that poem through text or whether you are articulating that poem through your actions or whether you’re articulating that poem through more visual means. It’s still a poem. And so, I think my loose definition of what poems do and can be guided the permissions I gave myself to be more present in the poems.
And that’s also a part of my evolution as being empathetic. I think it’s hard to be empathetic to other people when you haven’t first extended that kindness to yourself. For me to grow in empathy, that means that I have to grow in acknowledgment of the things I’ve been through myself. And give myself some space to feel through that and say without shame—this is mostly a project against shame, to be honest with you—to say without shame, this is where I am from, this is who I am, this is what I’ve been through, and I don’t want to shroud that. I want to have that come forward because all of those experiences have culminated into me being who I am. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our experiences, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of labels. People will call you what they want, but that just shows the measure of their own needed growth. And, it really has nothing to do with us, it has to do with how they see the world.
So I guess I risked it to see what would happen and what could happen when I come on a page more fully. Also, [I wanted to take] how I see the world and my experiences in the world and to make those known, and to see those as important, right? This is not to say go ego trippin, because that’s not the point; it’s to say that you have to see yourself as a subject and you have to subject yourself to yourself under the white-hot light of interrogation. You have to interrogate yourself. It’s not just narrating the self; it’s interrogating the self. That’s where the sublime can happen. It’s not just saying “I’m a person” it is to say “I’m this complex person because of these things,” and that for me makes the difference.
BR: I appreciated seeing that happen in this text. I’m thinking about the poem [Cost of the Floss] when you went to the thrift store and bought that Hazmat suit that you didn’t need, but it was a push back against the person who felt like you couldn’t buy it—that implication and awareness really did something for me as I was reading the poem. It made me think about where I get defensive and what makes me feel defensive in this way.
ADM: It’s weird and interesting how people class you—not even you are classing yourself—but the perception that people class you makes you uncomfortable. Unless, of course, they’re classing you up. When you get classed up, it’s like “Oh yeah, of course.” But when you get classed down, you think, “What difference does it make? Will you ever see this person again? Who the hell are they even? They know nothing about you.” It’s interesting to me the kind of importance we give to the opinions of people who we may never see again. We care about how people perceive us rather than who we actually are. And who I was at that moment was really someone who couldn’t afford to spend $500 on a Hazmat suit. Like I got kids, I don’t really need a Hazmat suit. And the thing is, it became fodder for squirrels anyway, which is what I knew it would become, which is why I didn’t want to spend that, but I did it because I wanted to flex. So who got the raw end of that deal?
BR: I’m over here empathizing, but also, a Detroit girl loves a flex, so I understand.
ADM: I know, but the flex always leaves you on the other side of the rung of the ladder, do you know what I’m saying? You’ll be one ladder rung up and then the flex drops you down like two ladder rungs financially. Nobody else has to know, but like we know.
BR: It set me back a little bit.
ADM: It set me back a little bit! And the reality is when I left the house that morning, I was going to go grocery shopping. I really shouldn’t have bought that big thing when I’m on my way to try to get food for my family, so it was just stupid, but it also shows how the system gets in us. You start internalizing those messages. This is what it means to be this. This is what it means to be other. This is what it means to be poor. This is what it means to be working class. If you have aspirations to transcend the class you were born to (which is really hard to do in America), you definitely don’t want to be perceived as a class you were born in. You want to be perceived differently, and it’s just so weird how we care about other people’s perceptions, particularly people who don’t matter. I mean all people matter, but people who don’t matter to our daily lives.
When I was crafting that poem, I was really thinking about perception, which is connected to what Guy Debord was talking about with images. If you read his 1967 book, The Society of a Spectacle, he was talking about what would happen in late-stage capitalism. The reason that book is so prescient and important is because he saw what we’re doing now. In some way, he saw the Instagrams and the TikToks and the idea that the image becomes the currency of trade. You care more about the image than you actually do the thing that’s being imagined. You care more about how you’re being perceived, how you’re being seen, and that becomes reality. Truly the currency in late-stage capitalism is how you’re perceived and that becomes more important than anything else. It becomes more important than your substance. It certainly becomes more important than your true identity.
BR: I’m going to be pondering all of this as a person who grew up poor and is now moderately poor, I really think about class all the time.
ADM: Yeah, it’s hard. You think about it all the time, right? Do you think about information signaling? Do you think people will presume that you’re something that you’re not? Or that they will presume that you are something other than what you are? It’s always this idea of information signaling.
BR: It is! The struggle for me is usually that people assume that because I have a job that I’m not poor so then they want to do all these things, and I’m like I cannot afford that, you have to leave me alone! [laughter]
ADM: For you, is there the struggle to want to do the thing? To prove to yourself or others that you were not who you see yourself as, that you are not classed as you are? Is there still the urge to want to do the things to prove that you can?
BR: I want to do the things usually, because I like the things. I like adornment, I like fancy stuff. So for me, it’s a struggle between I cannot afford this fancy stuff and I like this fancy stuff. I would love to be able to clear debt, but mostly to buy things that I like. So usually my line straddling is if I have to choose between putting this $100 on a bill and putting this $100 on my nails, it’s going on my nails.
ADM: Right. And there’s immediate gratification with that too.
BR: Right! But then I internalize the message that if I just saved and penny pinched, then I wouldn’t be poor, and I know that logically that’s not true. So I think that’s where all of my internalization of class things come in at. How much of this debt is inherited? How much of this debt is because I’m just wasteful or because I spend too much? Figuring out how to navigate that balance is difficult.
ADM: I feel like a lot of debt is inherited. When you think about Black people and how by and large we have not had the benefit of inherited wealth. We were removed from the system. People don’t think about what slavery actually did. They removed us from a system of ownership, which was actually the thing that skyrockets you across classes in America. [There is a system of] homeownership and having equity in some sort of fixed capital like a house, and we were removed for many years, even into the 20th century with red lining. We were removed from the main source of wealth accumulation. And we also didn’t have the benefit of having inherited wealth. I don’t know about you, when people in my family die, they just leave bills.
BR: SAME!
ADM: There was no “grandma died and we each got $100,000.” That doesn’t happen by and large. It can happen, but it’s not the usual story. And that is actually the thing that gets us to wealth. There was one study that was done, I think in the early 2000s, so it’s probably outdated, but there was this one study that was done by this economist at Michigan, and it was looking at how people get the money to get into homeownership. A lot of times it’s a gift from family members. Like you get married, and someone gives you a down payment on a home. Wow. Just wow.
BR: The idea that my family members would have money to give me, let alone the down payment for a house is unthinkable.
ADM: So when you think about what you inherit—do you inherit a wealth generator, or do you inherit debt? And a lot of us inherit debt. And since you kind of know that that’s what it is, you think, “Yeah, I’m going to get my nails done. I’mma feel good in this moment.” Because you don’t know what the next moment holds. Some folks have been divorced from that system for many reasons, mostly folks raised in America.
BR: In a recent interview between yourself and Phillip B. Williams, you mentioned, “I have this view about restraint where I think sometimes restraint is cowardice. Because there’s more that you could have said that you didn’t say, because you either didn’t know how to say it or you didn’t want to. And if you sit with it, you’ll figure out a way to say it.”
First, I want to say that I’m never going to forget this quote, and how it both challenged and empowered me. Second, I’m wondering if you’re open to talking about how you draw the line between restraint and privacy, particularly with this collection.
ADM: When I was in grad school, I started thinking about restraint, because it was like the buzzword. “Oh this poem is so restrained.” I think that there’s a way that you can show restraint while still being transparent. I think for a long time that restraint was seen as some form of opacity. My thing is, what if restraint isn’t about opacity? What if restraint is about other things like control of the line? Or a rhythmic control? That’s a kind of restraint. But when a restraint becomes about how much you share or how little you share, that feels like there is an opacity there, that there is a fourth wall you can’t break through. I wanted to think about how you can use restraint as a craft tool, but not necessarily by cutting yourself off, not necessarily by not saying the thing that you wanted to say. How can we be transparent yet restrained? That was one of the challenges for me with this collection. I will always share what I want to share, and I won’t share what I don’t want to share. There’s a lot of things about my life, my family, the way we choose to live, that I would never ever share because it’s not for public consumption. But the things that have passed in my life, that are history, that I recognize as shaping me in some way—shaping my thoughts, shaping the way that I enter on the page—those are up for discussion because those become about experience at that point. Experience is so important. When you get to the page, it’s important to document yourself. So many different voices have been silenced, invisibled, for so many reasons. So you see how important it is then to create a document of a life. And I think poetry can do that. I think the best poetry does. I think the best prose and nonfiction does that. I think about poetry as a container to create a document of a life, and then you share what you feel comfortable sharing. Here’s the thing: you share what you want to share and the rest is not up for public discussion. Which is not to say that I want to have a close frame or a lens on every aspect of my life; just to say I’ll let you in here. I want to be transparent about my life. There’s still this idea that you can be an incredibly private person while sharing fundamental truths about yourself. You don’t have to be an entire mystery. You can feel free and be vulnerable enough to share the foundation of what makes you you, you know? What are the most important things that make you who you are? That’s fodder for a poem, I think. That’s fodder for any poem; that we share some universal truths about ourselves. We share truth about who we are together, about who we are apart. But I still think privacy is important.
It’s interesting. I’m reading this book called The Yoga of Discipline and in the book it talks about three types of happiness. So there is sattvic happiness, which starts off bitter and ends well. This one is the happiness that you have to be disciplined to find. You have to adhere to some form of restraint, in order to find sattvic happiness. Tamasic happiness is when people find happiness by putting other people down, by being petty or harmful to other people. It is still happiness, but tamasic happiness. And then there’s Rajasic happiness where it starts beautiful, and you’re like “Oh my god this is my forever ending,” and then it ends miserably, and that’s because with rajasic happiness, you enter into it with no restraint whatsoever. And so I like to think about restraint as controlling the narrative and that’s okay.
You don’t share everything that needs to be shared, you share what’s most important to be shared—where there’s a lesson, where there’s experience that may be helpful to others or helpful to you along your journey. When people share too much information, a lot of that for me has to do with too little control. It has to do with people pleasing, with thinking that you’re being 100% vulnerable when you’re being like a dam with a hole in it. Just letting all kinds of information out that other people don’t need to know. I think it’s good to keep something to yourself and to let other things go. So that’s how we flow with energy too, we keep some things that are dear to ourselves and let other things flow. A lot of that is wisdom and a knowledge base, knowing about what stays and what goes and why.
I enjoy mystery but I also know that poems have to expose to some degree. It’s kind of that fine line. You have to know when to hold and when to flow. But if you’re constantly like hold hold hold, that’s cowardice. You don’t want to say what you need to say or what you can say, and you know you can say it, but you’re just not ready.
BR: What are you most proud of with this collection?
ADM: I’m proud of myself as a Black woman, for being able to see and give language to a part of my life and experience and to not allow myself or people that I love to become a blank part of history that no one thinks about or considers. This book was also for me to be able to forgive my father, and I completely forgive him. He’s now on my ancestor altar. I hold no hurt against the man. He’s been dead since 1996, it’s been a long time. And you get to the point in your life when you realize you can be angry with someone and you can also feel empathy for them, for the battle that they’ve had, and know that most of what happens in this life is not fucking personal. It’s not personal to you. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Getting to the point of it was never really about me, it was about them, and the struggles they projected onto me.
And I accepted those projections, but now I refuse those projections. I forgive my father and I love him, and I wish his spirit well. I wish that for all of us. There’s a sense that when you get to the idea of forgiveness, you recognize that a lack of forgiveness only harms you. You’re not harming the subject of your unforgiveness, you’re harming yourself. And so to get to the point where I didn’t want to self-harm, I’m so proud of that. I just wanted to forgive and see a certain space of oneness in life. I’m not saying that everyone is the same, I’m saying that we all have struggles. We all have a life to live, and if someone else’s life and living imposes on yours, can you forgive? It’s a fucking incredible gift that I gave to myself, and that’s what I’m most proud of.
BR: I’m proud of you, that’s beautiful!
