Hanif Abdurraqib In Conversation with Matt Mitchell: A Look Into “The Neon Hollywood Cowboy”
Design by Nina Raj
by Hanif Abdurraqib
When I get questions about younger writers that revolve around looking for mentorship, I’m never entirely sure how to answer in a way that honors the question or honors what their needs seem to be. This, in part, because I’ve been lucky. Anyone who I’ve counted as a “mentor” is someone who was also immensely interested in me as a person, beyond whatever I might produce. They’ve all been people who have not been that interested in the somewhat arbitrary nature of success, and have been present directly alongside me in my work, and not concerned with positioning themselves above me. And when I think about it like this, I think that what I’m actually saying is that these people are, simply, my friends. To remove those things (productivity, achievement) from the equation means that, with any luck, you are in an equitable and generous relationship, free from hierarchy.
I say that to say that Matt Mitchell is, first and foremost, my friend. And he’s someone I learn from, consistently. Sure, yes, I look at his poems sometimes and offer feedback sometimes, but the actual foundation of our relationship, even beyond our common pop culture investments, is that we are tasked with (and happy with) learning from each other when we can. I say this, especially, because I have gotten to watch Matt rapidly evolve as a writer and a person and thinker (about himself and others) over the past couple of years. I don’t take being able to witness that lightly – I witness with immense gratitude, for how that witnessing shakes me out of a desire to be stagnant.
The Neon Hollywood Cowboy is not the peak of Matt’s evolution, but it is a book that I love and, more importantly, it’s a first book that was patiently crafted by a writer attempting to mine the self for a statement about their living. I sat down with Matt to have a conversation, as we normally would. This has been edited for length, it has been edited for clarity, it has been edited to remove me telling my dog to stop trying to lovingly jump on Matt’s lap.
Hanif: So I think the first thing I was interested in general was the project of the actual working on the book and finding a home with Big Lucks because we're both Big Lucks authors. I was so excited to work with Mark because I think they have such a clear vision for how to serve the writers they work with. Was BL a place that you wanted to go always?
Matt: I've always wanted to be with BL because I read Vintage Sadness freshman year of college. And it was mostly because of the cover.
Hanif: Layne did the cover, yeah! Still perfect. Layne’s work on the cover is so memorable to me because it was like ... I'm so bad at giving descriptions for what I would like a cover to look like, and I can’t believe we got THAT. Will you talk about the process of the cover and what it was like working to fight for the cover you wanted?
Matt: Yeah. Well, the cover is a huge thing for me. I think that covers mean more to me sometimes than people would think. I think that a great cover shows how much care is put into the work as a whole. It's not only just a good representation of the writing inside, but it's also a good representation of the relationship between the press and the writer. I was worried about it going in because I do art myself, and I wanted a lot of say in what the cover ended up looking like. I knew I wanted it to be a record. I think that speaks to what's inside pretty clearly. I'm really attached to commercial media and how that's promoted. So, I like book covers. I like movie posters. I like vinyl record covers. I think that I want my work to be treated as a clearance bin vinyl record. Ten years from now, I want people to maybe stumble upon it and think that the cover looks worn and the cover is different than most book covers, and that makes them pick it up, not necessarily because of some striking art.
Hanif: What record stores are you hitting up in town or elsewhere now?
Matt: I haven't been to enough record stores since I moved to Columbus. There was this shabby, rundown place back in Niles, Ohio near where I grew up called The Record Connection. The same guy has run it for 30 years. He's one of those cool guys that seems like he doesn't care, but he remembers who you are. I had gone a few times, and then I'd come back. He remembered I liked Springsteen, because, the first two times I’d stopped by, I picked up a Springsteen album. I like albums that have people's names on the front. People will write their names in pen. So I look for those, and he had a couple. He had Born to Run with the name Peter on the top. It’s so personal.
Hanif: I know that spot – you know, After every breakup, I give away my record collection and then start to rebuild it, which mostly is because I want to start shrinking the things I own. I buy so many records I don't need, where it's just like I'm somewhat of a completionist. Do I need every Springsteen record? Certainly, I don't need fucking Magic or whatever. And I'm trying to get better and more thoughtful about what I buy. What's your strategy as a record collector?
Matt: I'm a completionist too. I like to collect at least the areas of certain artists that I really dig. I've got every Springsteen record I think I need, which is everything from Greetings to probably Tunnel of Love. Maybe one day I'll get The Rising, but I'm not as jazzed about that as my dad is. He thinks that's a quintessential American record, but I don't. Eh, it's fine. I feel like the artists that I really love, I try my best to complete the discography. The one that I'm working on right now is Dylan, and that's a hard one. He's got way too many records, and he's got too many eras. I love his Greenwich Village era, and I love his electric stuff. But then I'm also a huge fan of the '70s. And then I also really love the late '90s.
Hanif: I really fuck with Infidels.
Matt: His voice on Infidels is probably one of my favorite Dylan voices. I think that he goes through so many different voices on his albums that it's a turnoff to people. I've seen people on Twitter say Dylan is terrible because he has the worst singing voice ever, but I'd argue he has the best. He's so versatile. He changes it all the time.
Hanif: I’m interested in that coming from you though because I think that in your work there's a real versatility of voice and a real ability to shift between tone, which I think happens in the book really generously. You're [not] a bad singer, so to speak. But, it's interesting to me that you don't seem to find yourself overly committed to the pursuit of one sonic presentation or vocal presentation in your work, which makes you, in a way, more reliable. An interesting thing about Dylan is I think he's actually an immensely unreliable narrator, which I like. I like an unreliable narrator, though when pressed up against Springsteen, who was immensely reliable as a narrator, almost perhaps to a fault. You take after the great unreliable narrators of our time, which is interesting because your poems are so well-populated by, not just people, but places and geographies. How do you come to that?
Matt: Well, I think using Dylan as a metaphor for that really works well because I love the Rolling Thunder Revue era Dylan. He would come on stage wearing just this white paste. It's really weird and fascinating because he would start out a concert wearing such a disturbing clear mask with the rosy cheeks, one of those masks that someone would wear to rob a bank in the '70s. Then he would take it off after a couple of songs, and then he'd be just wearing this disgusting white paste. Then as the concert goes on, the paste starts rubbing off because he's sweating so bad. It's weird because when you're a new listener, don't you think he's the most personable person that you've ever heard sing? His son says Blood On The Tracks is his parents talking, and then when you hear that quote and you listen to the record, you're like, "Ah, maybe it is more conversational like that." But I agree. He's unreliable, and I think that I'm more drawn to the areas where he is unreliable because it seems like he's playing a character. A lot of people think he's not. They think that he's being himself. But I think that he's very much character-driven, at least in the sense where he's always wearing a mask. I think long before the Desire album came out and before the Rolling Thunder Revue tour was kicking off, he was hiding behind some masks, which would probably explain why the voice has changed so much. I like that idea about being so present in a narrative, but also wearing a mask at the same time, because there is a scariness in being vulnerable with people who you've never met. I mean, the subject matter in The Neon Hollywood Cowboy is so personal to me.This is the first time I'm telling people about it that aren't my immediate friends or my immediate family. So, there's a real sort of terror in myself right now, knowing that people will be reading it in a few days and then they will formulate their own opinions. A lot of people have been treating the Neon Hollywood Cowboy as a character, which I've always found interesting because I think I've always been that person. So, to see people talking about it as an extension of me, more so fictional than non-fictional, is weird.
Hanif: Well, yes … but also, the book is cinematic. It feels very much like a movie, and so I think the idea of a speaker not being the writer feels a little starker. It feels like you don't really give people a choice but to kind of sink into the scenery, almost like, the scenery itself was more of a character than the speaker at times, which I thought was a really generous choice.
Matt: Well, yes. I wanted it to be like a movie. I talk about this briefly in a few of the poems, but the problem with writing about being intersex is [that] there's no benchmark to measure yourself against. There are countless books written by intersex people. We just don't know who they are, and they don't know that, because it can be such a complicated thing to be if you don't have the privilege of having specialists that you can go to. I'm lucky that my mom had such a good job that she could have health insurance and we could go to the Cleveland Clinic and, by an off chance, a doctor discovers something wrong with my feet that leads to a DNA exam that reveals, "Hey, you're missing a Y chromosome." So the fact that there's not a benchmark to measure up against, it has to be cinematic, because so much contemporary poetry is responding to what's already been laid out and what's already there, but there's nothing there yet for me. I almost feel like you have to make it a movie before you can respond to the movie.
People have asked me, "What's it like, being the first intersex poet?" I'm like, "Well, that's just not the case. It's not true. I’m just the first one you know exists.”
Hanif: It's interesting. Sometimes I feel like vulnerability is talked about in this really blanket way that dismisses the actual work that goes into being vulnerable. I think vulnerability's a bit romanticized, but there's something really labor-intensive about initially approaching vulnerability, and then living in that window of time where people are going to have access to your vulnerable thoughts. When working on the book, how did you continually kind of tap into a space that felt vulnerable to you, or were you not even aware of it when it was happening?
Matt: No one has asked me about that specifically, how you get to that place, because this isn't something I've been aware of for very long. It's been three or four years. I mean, there's an extension of that with the hormone therapy. I've been doing it since I was 15, but I didn't find out until I was 20 what it was for, and what the name of it was. I didn't start writing the vulnerable poems until I spent three weeks on the West Coast, [I] took a trip for college. We were studying trees. We started up in Seattle and ended in LA. It was right after I had gotten the diagnosis officially from my new endocrinologist. He told me, "This is who you are, and I don't know why people have been so vague with you for the last six years." I'm like, "Okay. That's weird." Then, three days later, I had to fly out to Washington. So, I'm on this trip, and it's the first time I'm using hormone therapy around other people. I was always trying to find a secret moment to put a needle in my stomach. When I was on this trip, and I was using needles, and I started getting more comfortable. I started being away from Ohio for a little bit. [I was] around my roommate and some people that I'd become friends with who were pretty open about certain things and not judgemental. I felt better about myself, and I think that's where the ‘Hollywood’ in the title comes from. I started really writing the intense poems on that trip. I wrote the Neil Young poem in a treehouse in Southern Oregon. We were in this treehouse, and from our window, you could see the part of the mountain range where California and Oregon meet. It's a really beautiful place, and I felt like I'd found a place where I could give myself the space to be vulnerable. I'm interested in knowing what the book would look like if I hadn't had that month of time to really process it. If I had had to process the diagnosis in Ohio, what would the book look like, and how would that take shape? But, I think that being in a different place, not surrounded by as many people who are in your immediate life does so many wonders for allowing yourself to just kind of let go. At the same time with letting go, you're also bringing in. I'm so thankful, for all of the trans poets and trans poetry that I've gotten to read in the last three years, they're really like the blueprint.
Hanif: I feel you – I think, broadly, it’s important to have a place where you can see gender being challenged in books. For me, not even entirely as a blueprint, but as something that widens my perception of myself and my living in the world.
Matt: Oh my gosh. It's great to know that my vulnerability is just an adjacent vulnerability to other groundwork that's already been laid. I mean, I'm really thankful for that, because it made the process a lot easier. It was hard writing, but it was easier knowing that there are already factions of this idea out there.
Hanif: I love hearing you talk about how there's an awareness that you're not the first, even if people imagine you as the first. I think there's a humility in realizing that you're not the first to do anything or that you're not the first to pursue an idea and to understand that even though you're not the first, you're still inviting a unique perspective.I remember before A Fortune for Your Disaster came out, there was this window where I was like, "Oh, I wrote this really hard, vulnerable book, and I feel great." Then I was like, "Oh, shit. People are going to read this," which [is] a tough spot to be in.
Matt: It's weird. I'm fine, I guess. It's actually kind of a struggle because I don't know. When an individual poem gets published, it's so easy to just put your focus on that and hope for the best, hope that people vibe with it. But now that it's a whole book of poems, it's so different. I've put out chapbooks before, but it just doesn't hold a candle, because I'm putting so much energy into this book, and I feel like I might not put as much energy into any other book that I write. It's important because it's the first, but it's also important to me because it's a story that I'm just so desperate for people to hear, but I'm also terrified of people hearing it.
Hanif: The book is anchored by an intersex narrative that reads pretty clearly to me, but have you noticed people leaning heavily on the pop culture references, instead of addressing the intersex narrative clearly
Matt: A lot of people are afraid of saying the word ‘intersex’ when they talk to me about this book, which I find really weird. It makes me even more afraid of the response after the book, because, I mean, I've read a few reviews for the book so far where they're hesitant to say that word. That's kind of off-putting to me sometimes. I love people reading the book and liking the book and giving their thoughts, but I think that when they're doing a review, they don't mention the essential-
Hanif: I can tell this is your first book because you’re still reading reviews.
Matt: I know, I know. But there’s a review coming. It's not out yet, but it will be soon. It's a five-page review that cites queer theory with a focus on intersex theory, and I was blown away. It was one of the first reviews that had said those words and actually dug into them. I literally cried.
Hanif: We are obviously writing from different perspectives, different identities, different concerns, but we both have this problem where the pop culture references that we fall into out of sheer appreciation and affection for our pop culture memories and our pop culture archive becomes the story when the work is actually asking for something else. I have yet to find a way to circumvent that, and I don't think I need to anymore. But I remember feeling so much anxiety about it. We’ve talked about the cinematic nature of the book and all the aesthetics, but it's still very much a book that's driven by an intersex narrative, and complicating gender, right? In a way that I think is nuanced and thoughtful. Sure, there's some pop culture scaffolding. Maybe it's because I write in the way I write, but it's just easy to see through the scaffolding. But, I also think that it's sometimes hard for people to get past the, "Oh, Neil Young. I like Neil Young." I remember feeling so guilty about that part of it when my first book came out. But I’m hoping you don’t?
Matt: I only feel guilt when someone calls me a pop culture poet because that's not what I want to be. I love pop culture. I love music and I love writing work that interacts with it. I always return to the Neil Young thing because a lot of people associate that poem with just Neil Young when it's more about his bandmate, Danny. It's more about Danny and the idea that sometimes, it's not a bad thing to define somebody by the thing that ultimately kills them. I don't think that's a horrible thing to do. There's a good chance that the needle could kill me because, being on hormone therapy, my risk of aneurysms and strokes goes up. You're pumping so much steroid into your body that sometimes your heart can't really fuck with it. A lot of people focus on the, "Oh, this is a Neil Young poem." Well, no. This is a survival poem. Danny Whitten, he used heroin because he had such bad arthritis in his wrist. He had such bad rheumatoid arthritis and he needed something to cope with that. I return to the Neil Young poem because that's what a lot of people bring to me, but a lot of people look at the Freaks and Geeks poem and they think it's a Freaks and Geeks poem, when it's not just that. It's the idea that media has sort of ingrained this idea of ‘getting fixed’ into you when it's just not possible, sometimes, to be fixed. So I think that there's a lot of fear. When we don't know how to talk about something we're not familiar with, we're afraid to even mention it.
Hanif: I do think that as an entry point, there's something about pop culture that lets people off the hook, or that maybe gives them the other thing that I think actually will happen with this book because I think this book, the pop culture, people will say, "Oh, shit. I know, I'm sinking into the book now, and now I'm ready to engage." It might take a little time because I sometimes think that people need pop culture to feel comfortable, and then they're ready to engage with the content. I also thought the book really honestly and genuinely confronted your own fears or the speaker’s own fears about just being alive in the uncertainty of being alive in the requirements of living with intersex identity, particularly with needles. I thought this book does such a good job of very plainly, but also very tenderly, capturing the fear of uncertain living. You're just so young. I just have not seen a lot of young writers tackle fear as succinctly and thoughtfully in like uncertainty and living where when you do it, it's not this romantic, ‘I want to burn out early’ kind of thing. I think the [phrase] old soul is kind of ridiculous too, but in a lot of ways you do have like an ecosystem which you operate that is generationally diverse, but I don't want to bury that in pop culture either where it's like, "Well, Matt listens to music from the seventies, so he's an old soul." But I think what I'm actually saying is you engage with the world in your fears and anxieties seem far beyond the years that you've lived.
Matt: I kind of just got thrown into it. I feel like I was living such a vastly different life so far before anyone else I grew up around. I spent so much of my high school years refusing to go shirtless because I had rashes on my stomach from injections, and I had that in college too. But in college, I was a little bit more comfortable with just letting it go because I was surrounded by people who were just cool. I grew up in a town where, if they caught wind of that, it's game over. It's weird, being forced to basically live a life that you shouldn't be living for another 30. I think that happens a lot with illness too. I think, whenever something devastating or maybe, tragic wouldn't be the right word for what's going on with me, but just something that's really rushed and hurried, you kind of have to reassess everything that you're doing. This first book is about the uncertainty of living this way and getting used to it. Then I'm working on the second book, which is really about the uncertainty of becoming a dad. I think that, at least from a male gaze and a male perspective in poetry, I think a lot of men, even now, are afraid of admitting that they can't be a success. So content-wise, I feel I'm never hard up for it because I'm just living this really unfortunate life constantly, but I'm also kind of mad that I have to do that. I'm only a quarter into my twenties, and I've spent so much time thinking about the ramifications of what's going to happen in my thirties, and so few people my age have to deal with that. So, I think that I'm constantly afraid and I'm trying to explain to people through writing why I'm so afraid. I want the next book to be happier. I want it to be more joyful because I think that I'm in a place in my life where I'm happier and I feel better.
Hanif: You do write about failure. It's so interesting that you kind of organically said the thing about masculinity in writing, kind of shying away from failure. Because I do think you actually write about failure in a way that's so thoughtful and careful, that actually doesn't really beat yourself. That's not punishing, which I think is a very... I say this even to myself, it feels very masculine, straight cisgender male, specifically like me and some of my peers, to write about failure through a punishing lens.
Matt: Well, I can't let myself be punished by failure because there are going to be continuous examples of things that might come off as a failure, immediately to me, like not having kids. That will immediately feel like a failure, but then it's not because there are ways around it. And so with this book specifically, though, the failure at first felt like it was rooted in "I am not the same as other men." That felt like I was missing something. I felt like a failure, because I had spent so long thinking that I was this one thing, and then to find out I'm not. I felt like I failed for not realizing it sooner. As I was writing the book, from the first poem to the last poem, in terms of the editing process, I think I learned how to be comfortable, and being comfortable kind of reverses the failure for me personally. So, I'm continuously searching for how to become more comfortable. After finishing this book, I went back to therapy, which was a big help. I'm just in a constant head-on collision with myself in the book. When we talk about the characters, sure, it's a character, but it's me also as the character. It's a little bit of an exaggerated version of myself. I think that the cowboy in the book is probably a bit more attractive. I imagine that he's a super hunk in the book.
Hanif: I want to ask about community broadly because I think I'm someone now who I mostly just read poems and try to read as widely as possible and keep my eye out for new poetry stuff. But, I've never really been one to kind of be in the mix of the things going on like capital P, poetry world, because I'm just hardened by institutions too often. I think that the real joy I've always gotten is in the people who are writing poems and the wonder I feel and the awe I feel towards people writing poems. If I read a poem I love, my first instinct is to kind of seek out the author and be like, ‘I love this poem’ Maybe I was never this way, but I think especially as I've gotten older and read more widely and more eagerly, [I’ve found] this community of people who are poets who I'm around and we've got to teach each other. We've got to kind of keep each other on our toes. Success is very arbitrary. It doesn't really make sense to mark any kind of knowledge, to align knowledge and success with me, because, one, success is arbitrary and I don't know shit about anything. Or I know some shit about very few things, you know what I mean? Most of them are not useful or practical. I was talking to a homie who's up in Northern Ohio and I was talking about how I feel like what's happening in Northeastern Ohio right now is what was kind of happening in Columbus when I was coming up as a poet where it's like... it feels like in Cleveland and Akron, NEO in general, there's just a lot of great poets doing a lot of different kinds of writing. All folks who I feel like I learned from, like J. David and Kevin Latimer and Brandon and DT, all folks with who I just feel really strongly about being in an Ohio poetry community with. I don't use the word writing community broadly because I think that just can't be real. Anyone who writes cannot be in the community with me because a lotta motherfuckers have books. Can you talk a bit about your investment in a community? I think writing community-wise is expansive because of the internet, but also made a bit more treacherous because of the internet.
Matt: One of my biggest regrets while writing the book is I didn't really open up my process to a lot of people. You and I worked on a lot of the poems together in the book and I worked with Gabbie Hogan on a lot of the poems, but other than that, I found myself shut off from community when I was writing the book. I regret that because, when I pivoted away from editing to doing the design and promotion, I've come into contact with a lot of people who have taken an investment in, not just my writing, but me as a person. In my opinion, it's the biggest definition of community, where it's like, sure, you read my writing, but can we just have a cool conversation about non-writing shit? I'm not done meeting people who will greatly impact my writing. I'll meet a new person tomorrow and they will inspire me somehow. I'm kind of done searching for a greater community online because it's been nice and it's helped me learn about a lot of new writing from people I'd never heard of. That's the part I'm going to try and pull close, but I find that it's so easy to be thrown out of those circles. I feel like the community that people speak of is very much surrounded by the writing, and not by the personhood. I haven't been able to read nearly as much [lately]. I'm excited to be done with the book, have some months off, and really sit with the work of others, because that's what helps me continue writing is absorbing other stuff. I'm glad that you mentioned the people from Cleveland because they've always kind of held me up, which is great.
Matt Mitchell’s The Neon Hollywood Cowboy - Available on Big Lucks Press
Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America - Available on Penguin Random House