Clay Matthews
REVIEW
Frank Matagrano. I Can Only Go as Fast as the Guy in Front of Me. Black Lawrence Press.
Imagine if you will that when we are born we are placed at the center of a planet-sized compass, with acre-size grids covering the entire plane. Eventually, each child loosens from the center (the center cannot hold) and goes bouncing across the plane much like a pinball, encountering people, places, and ideas before ultimately settling in some spot which for charity’s sake I’ll call the self. Welcome. Meet Frank Matagrano, author of I Can Only Go as Fast as the Guy in Front of Me, the debut collection from both Matagrano and Black Lawrence Press.
In these poems, Matagrano resurrects the first person speaker in a way that addresses contemporary concepts of the self. The I in this text is located not only geographically or physically but most importantly by the distance the speaker finds himself in relation to other people, other memories, and other places of past and present. The title speaks volumes about the collection as a whole: contextually the speaker is spatially behind someone else and held up, but grammatically the I still sits at the head of the table and is the vehicle through which the movement starts—and so begins the complex understanding of the individual in this collection.
The book itself is divided into four sections, which in some respects I like to think of as the four points of the aforementioned compass. Matagrano seems less concerned with the separation between interior/exterior and more concerned with a larger system, one with more referents but still based as a tangent off western metaphysics. He opens the second poem with “I have seen at least two suns,” and then later “and I have heard miserable tales / about a third one above Alaska that disappears for months at a time…” In Plato’s famous Allegory/Myth of the Cave, the sun was that symbol which represented truth. And here Matagrano doesn’t necessarily fragment (Postmodernism 101) that truth, but creates a plural sun—one that exists differently in different places for different people, and even for the same person depending on how they understand it. In Levis’s famous poem, “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage,” he writes of the saturation of stories “When you can believe in all of them, & so believe in none…” Matagrano, however, seems to stake out a belief in each story and maintain that belief, and thus, rightly or wrongly, embraces the pluralization the speaker in Levis’s poem momentarily bemoaned.
Even the speaker’s self for Matagrano becomes a separate narrative at times, as in “The Wind’s Odd Needlepoint,” where “It is January 23rd and the image of me doesn’t care / that four to six more inches are expected to fall late / tonight.” The image of the self is enwrapped in its own story in this poem, while the speaker is watching that image, trying to work out some movement towards understanding: “I am feeling out loud. I don’t know / a better way tow work through this stuff…”
The speaker of these poems is caught in a Barthes-like web: of signifiers, of texts, but most importantly of humans. He comes to identify himself (as most of us do) by his various tastes in wines, by his shortcomings, by the cities and restaurants he has been to and who he has been there with. Matagrano also utilizes historical figures throughout—from E.B. White to Woodrow Wilson to Albert Goldbarth, subject of the poem “Putting Together a Bookshelf with Albert Goldbarth,” which becomes an especially successful poem in my opinion as it does much to relate, without seeming whiney or trite, what it is like to be a poet, or someone in any occupation, who lives in the shadows of those who always seem to know more than us, or make better connections than we do, and intentionally or not bring out what we feel are our inadequacies:
Al is up to his neck in red wine and I am trying like hell to follow
the instructions. He’s going on and on about furniture as an ellipses
in the paragraph we call home, there’s crap everywhere, and I’m ready
to knock this guy flat on his ass if he doesn’t shut up about the history
of the Burgundy Canal and how it would not have been finished
if it wasn’t for a loan of 25 million francs…
Throughout this collection, what is consistently impressive is Matagrano’s range of subjects and allusions. He utilizes both high culture and pop culture references to reflect the speaker’s delight and trauma of living day to day. In the last lines of “Reading a Trashy Novel” we find this sentence: “I scanned / a list of wines as if combing a long row of gravestones for my name.” Matagrano’s speaker exists in a constant state of simultaneity—through his language, through his experience, but also in his reflection in each billboard he passes on New Jersey’s Route 80 or in a high C from Pavarotti.
There is a searching in these poems, a reaching out for answers in spite of a contemporary culture that at often times seems to say Give it up. The compass is vast, and even though the speaker seems to know he’ll never find his absolute home in some acreage slightly southwest of northeast, he’s plodding along. In many ways, this collection feels like a contemporary search for divinity or truth or whatever you want to call it. In fact, perhaps the best thing I can say about Matagrano is what he writes about God in “About the Letter I Never had the Courage to Send,” which closes with these lines: “He has / yet to understand, which is to say, He was made like me.”
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