Chapter 1 - Matthew James Babcock

Matthew James Babcock, poet extraordinaire, shares why he writes along with some of his delightful pieces. 

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Matthew: My name is Matthew James Babcock. I am an English professor at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg. I've been on the English faculty there for 25 years, and I write because I can't help it.

Emma: That's a good answer. Have you have you tried to help it?

Matthew: I've tried, and I have unsuccessfully tried to help it. So I just continue to write, yeah.

Emma: What kind of things do you write?

Matthew: You know, I've experimented. Mostly poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, mostly literary genres for adults. I have tried some kids' books, screenplays, but mostly poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary fiction for adult readers.

Emma: Could you please tell us about the piece that you're going to read today?

Matthew: Yeah. These poetry selections are in my latest book of poetry. It's called Hidden Motion, and it was published in 2022 by Finishing Line Press in Georgetown, Kentucky. And um, just my latest collection, it features really cool watercolor cover, original watercolor cover of some pelicans and... by Scott Samuelson, who's an Eastern Idaho artist, and he's been painting landscapes in Eastern Idaho for the last couple decades. And that's my collection. It just came out a couple years ago.

Emma: What is your piece called?

Matthew: Piece is called... This one is "In All the Novels." Title is "In All the Novels," and this—most of these pieces were written here in Eastern Idaho.

Emma: Without further ado, we present "In All the Novels," by Matthew James Babcock.

Matthew:

In all the novels I've written in my head,
cars barrel down icy highways on bald tires.
Each rescued part comes from another car,
so people race toward trouble in the colorful wrecks of other people's mistakes.
Much is mismatched and patched together.
Diners always fold.
An ex-marine with a mustache and shaggy brown hair
stands below a twisted fire escape in his blue and gold Arlington Honkers varsity jacket
and gazes at an arched window that burns like a portrait of yellow in a dark office building after midnight.
The heroine clutches a black and white dance hall photo of her grandmother and weeps.
Her brass suitcase latch breaks, and all the fan letters she wrote to herself scatter in the hot Nebraska windstorm.
Comedy douses sadness, the way the moon melts into winter mountains.
A bozo billionaire and religious cult in strawberry togas provide the escape.
An abandoned barn of field mice and exhumed boot,
the brooding interludes.
For 30 years,
I add and delete the passage in which I grow older,
a minor character goading the author's streamlined dreams.
In this scene,
I drive my last two children down a straight highway,
November,
a still life of ferocious white as colorless as prose.
I am painting over the salvage jobs of love.
Breath makes windows opaque.
Snow erases the black seams of railroad tracks.
Our silence like the pleasure of tension mounting.
So many swans cover a lake.
We stop counting.

Emma: That was amazing. Can I ask for an encore?

Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. An encore. What kind of encore? Just any encore?

Emma: Any encore. That was— I really loved the imagery in that poem.

Matthew: This is also an Eastern Idaho setting poem from the same collection, Hidden Motion, published in 2022 by Finishing Line Press, available anywhere.

This is called, "Poem That Will Never Be Turned Into a Summer Blockbuster," because as poets it's important that we don't sell out, you know.

Insert.
American kestrels fluttering like small kachinas of sky diving into roadside seas of green wheat.
They rise and hover,
crucified on air,
flashy auburn flares afloat in folklore sun.

Man drives van.
Teenage daughter's not speaking to him.
Reckless moods make him surrender his Saturday to take his oldest girl,
riding shotgun,
and her friends to summer camp in the hills of Swan Valley.
Background noise,
gossip and boys,
mundane music of machines,
cackles and moans,
man eavesdropping.

Man feels silly,
catching himself spying on love
as they swoop down the paved spine of the raw landscape.

The serene and unsteady wheels of turkey vultures
as supple as ash,
miles above the gorge,
awakening in him the vision that the world will end in bonfires of birds.

Zoom.

The coarse yellow green of bitter brush,
the monotone of the service berry.
The feeling that they are escapees of some secret season.

Daughter plucks out a white earbud,
tells her friends she could marry a veterinarian and live in a place like this.

Blank highway
Slopes of dead grass studded with milky stones.
Peaks overgrown with scruffs of black pine.

She inhales and angles her sleepy face to say to nobody
but maybe to him.
Summer's half gone.
Man thinks,
I thought the same thing when I held you 17 years ago in a hospital thousands of miles from here.

Close-up.

Claws clench
talons drip the red of utterance.

Montage.

The point of convergence,
the late departure,
rocky gulches running with rivers like brilliant ore.

Voice over.

Long live long drives in silence.
Long live this hot-blooded American sun.
Traveler, drape me in my mystical shawl of bronze feathers.
Release me into the swell of thermals.
Sharpen my sight.

Streak the scent of the kill on my tongue.
Set my toes at the cliff
and spread the myth of my scream over the lives of the young.

Emma: Wow. I liked how you had, like, the longer sentences and then just the single words. Kind of made me think of, like, stage directions or, like, movie... You know, if you see, like, a movie script, they have, like, "pan out over the..." you know?

Matthew: Yeah.

Emma: Does that have to do with the title?

Matthew: Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking there, but I just know nowadays, you know, it seems like what happens to books is they ultimately get turned into movies. And so I think I decided to try to write a poem that would never get turned into a movie, but then use those kinds of movie stage directions. So that's how it came out.

Emma: That is super cool. Thank you so much for sharing.

Matthew: Yeah. Thanks for letting me read. Go poetry.

Thank you for traveling with us. Next stop, your work of art. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, you name it.

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