Lazy Montaignes
A conversation between Alice Allan and Matthew Buckley Smith
Alice Allan, Matthew Buckley Smith
SLEERICKETS is a weekly podcast about poetry and other intractable problems, produced by Alice Allan, Cameron Clark, Brian Platzer, and Matthew Buckley Smith. Alice also makes the podcast Advice from an Unknown Poet with frequent SLEERICKETS guest Jonathan Farmer.
Alice Allan: I had an experience recently where I published a poem that included a fairly personal detail taken from someone else’s life—a good friend. I would have gotten away with it, but one night I got drunk and ended up showing him the poem. He didn’t recognize the detail at first, but then a month or so later he texted me because he had realized that it was him in the poem. He wasn’t angry, but I know I made him feel exposed. And in that moment, I felt like a thief and a vampire. I thought about how little consolation the poem would have been, if the relationship had ended up being damaged because of my use of that detail, which I didn’t have to use. So, how do you weigh up that kind of risk? Using the details of other people’s lives and the potential for that to have a negative impact on your relationship with them?
Matthew Buckley Smith: It is a concern that crosses my mind. The usual defence is, putting it in a poem is as good as putting it in a locked box.
AA: Unless you get wasted and say, “Hey, look at my poem!” but yes.
MBS: Right, yeah. That was bad op-sec.
AA: Definitely.
MBS: But there are poems I have hesitated to send out for that reason. My rule is: I will never refrain from writing something, but I will sometimes refrain… I mean, I try to refrain from sending out almost everything, so as to send out as little garbage as possible. And in many cases, I will write something, sit on it, come back to it, and realize, Oh well, I don’t need to have the moral dilemma because this isn’t good enough to send out anyway. But there are people I probably am more cautious about than… There are some people I’m more cautious about than others.
For what it’s worth, one of my earlier writerly memories is when I was maybe double digits in age—definitely not older than my daughter now, who’s 12, but I want to say maybe 9 or 10—my dad, who at that point had decided I was a writer, said, “I’d never want you to abstain from writing something because you’re worried it will hurt the family.”
AA: Wow, he said that to you?
MBS: Yeah. He was very insistent on that.
AA: Man, I love you, Matthew’s dad. You’re so cool.
MBS: Yeah, it was a strange thought. I remembered it, but it didn’t really make a ton of sense to me at the time. It’s funny, because, like, Elizabeth Bishop has the famous letter, where she’s giving Robert Lowell hell for doing some pretty shady things with his ex-wife’s biographical details, and his daughter’s as well. I think the line she says is, “art just isn’t worth that much.” And my dad was closing off that argument before it had even occurred to me. Basically, he was saying, art is always worth more.
AA: Wow.
MBS: I don’t know if that’s right, and I don’t know if he would sign off on that today, but before I realized it was a phrase that set a lot of people’s heads on fire, he taught me that art exists for art’s sake. He’s a pretty pure aesthete.
AA: Yeah, your dad is the best. I have probably had to figure this out on my own. I didn’t have any parental advice along those lines. Where I’ve landed now, is that the poem will never be worth more than the relationship. It wouldn’t actually matter how good the poem was, if I was going to do harm to a living person who I cared about, I wouldn’t publish it. I just don’t think my poetry is worth that much.
Now, in saying that, I have gained so much from other poets who have taken the opposite stance. I think that if everybody acted the way that I do, we wouldn’t have most of what I love. Either it’s a lack of courage, an overcautiousness, or a need not to have people be angry with me, but it’s just not something I feel willing to risk at this point in my life.
MBS: I think that’s probably correct, that strategy. I mean, it’s funny, because I play very fast and loose with poetry and fiction when it comes to other people’s lives and my own life. But I do feel a little differently about memoir, and I confess that if I have a schoolmarmish, moralistic instinct in the arts, it probably concerns memoir. Because I tend to think that memoir- the chief effect of which is produced through the sharing of salacious personal details and stories from one’s social circle and intimate relationships- I tend to have a pretty low opinion of that as a practice. Which is not fair, but it is true.
AA: See, that’s the stuff I depend on to feel normal and okay in the world. I recently read Michael Nott’s Thom Gunn biography, A Cool Queer Life, which is full of salacious details like Donald Hall propositioning Tom Gunn, and all kinds of fun things along those lines. And similarly, reading the Gwen Harwood biography written by Ann-Marie Priest, My Tongue is My Own—that is my Bible. That is my map to what it is to navigate life as a poet. I wouldn’t want to replicate Harwood’s life—she got up to a lot of things that would be difficult for me to metabolize—but she’s like my poetic grandmother. So, I need to see those details on the page, and I do depend on people being braver than I am.
MBS: I should admit that I do love Poets in Their Youth, the Eileen Simpson memoir, mostly about being married to John Berryman, but it is… Maybe this is her own distortion, but it feels fair to me, and I don’t get the impression that there would be strong objections from the people she writes about. Although that could be inaccurate.
I was vindicated recently, because I dedicated The Soft Black Stars to Joanna, my wife, and it wasn’t until somebody raised an eyebrow at some point that I thought, oh, could this be a problem? I usually wait till the book is published before showing her the dedication, but I showed it to her ahead of time, because my instinct was that she would think it was funny, and she did! She thought it was funny, and I thought, okay, alright, good. So the dedication is, for Joanna, first reader, favorite wife. I think we share enough of a sense of humour that she… with her writing especially, because we do share work together, we work on things, we have a certain vocabulary between us when it comes to writing, and I think we’re both pretty enthusiastic about not being prudish. I think we both have a fairly amoral attitude toward art. Which is not to say that she couldn’t write something in a story that would bother me, or vice versa, but I think we’re both pretty dedicated to the art part of it.
AA: Whereas in my case, I don’t live with a writer—
MBS: Much saner choice to make, just in terms of lifestyle. In terms of probably health and longevity.
AA: But look, there have been moments where I have shown work to my partner, and he has expressed some pretty serious hesitation about my putting it out. Even when, from my perspective, I’ve thought, “Well, this is fairly benign.” So, I think the advantage of living with another writer is you’re both looking at the same goal, which is: Make the art as good as it can be, and get it out there. As a couple, my partner and I have a different goal, that has nothing to do with my success or failure as a writer.
Podcasting is in some ways, kind of the opposite of writing poetry. We do edit ourselves, but there is only so much you can do with a GarageBand file. I made a podcast called Poetry Says for nine years, and for the past four, I’ve been a co-host on Sleerickets with you. And Sleerickets is—I feel I can say this because I was originally and I still am a fan—one of the only truly guilty pleasures in poetry.
MBS: That’s the goal! That has been the goal from the very beginning.
AA: It’s an intentionally uncareful place. I think it’s fair to say that feelings do get hurt sometimes, because what we’re aiming to do is replicate the openness and honesty of private conversations about poetry in a public place. They do say that the only truly private space left online is in the last 10 minutes of a long podcast episode, and the name of the show itself is based on your daughter’s early pronunciation of the word “secrets”, but it still seems like our core audience listens intently to everything we say. So, what I want to know from you is, since the show started in 2021, have you had to become more careful? Or do you feel like you are still able to replicate the level of honesty that you wanted, when you started making the show in lockdown?
MBS: I think I have become less careful. I’ve become more careful about some things, but in terms of frankness, I think it is difficult to overstate how cautious public conversation about poetry tends to be. And certainly, some other podcasts have come around. I’ve become aware of podcasts that I didn’t know about before, but listening to The Poetry Gods—which is a delight, and they broke a lot of new wood, as Pound would say—they’re still so easy on other poets. I haven’t listened to every episode, but when I go back to those, and they were very irreverent, it felt like real human beings having a fun time talking shop, which nothing sounded like, especially back when that was running, but I don’t know that I can think of examples of them truly bad-mouthing any poets, really putting pressure on, even asking one difficult question of a guest. And that was by far the most wild and freewheeling poetry podcast out there, until pretty recently. So, I think at the beginning, I was incautious compared with that baseline. Now, it’s compared with the baseline of what we’ve been doing to this point.
I have been surprised by the ways that I have bothered people. What I actually don’t want to do is hurt people’s feelings. The possibility that I could hurt people’s feelings will seldom be enough to stop me from saying something if I think it’s worth saying otherwise, but it has rarely been my opinion about a particular work of art, or a particular person, that has really bothered people. It tends to be something careless I say about religion. I’m happy to speak very frankly about religion, it’s become one of the other subjects that the show addresses not infrequently, but again it’s a little bit like the memoir effect. I’m not interested in blasphemy. I don’t get off the way Satanic Temple people do on saying things just because they’re against Christianity. And I think I’ve made jokes that rubbed people the wrong way, in a way that didn’t… I try not to compromise any of my beliefs for the sake of good manners, but I am more aware of what good manners might mean to some people.
What tends to most offend people is— a) it’s almost never the thing I was most worried would offend people. It’s almost always some other thing that didn’t even cross my mind. And b) it’s the thing that you and I have talked about when reading screeds and manifestos about poetry. It’s the feeling of being dismissed at a distance in a drive-by manner. People will read something I say as applying to their own work, and they’ll read it as a condemnation or a dismissal, which is never my goal, really.
I had an exchange with a listener recently who… I try to be pretty careful about revealing anything in a personal way. I do talk a little bit about my life and our lives with the other co-hosts. Cameron is… What is the pornographic equivalent of an autobiography? I don’t know, maybe it’s just an autobiography. Cameron is very unguarded about his personal life. I try to be respectful about the people in my personal life. The place I was surprised to get a little bit of resistance recently was—I did an episode, and I purposely did it solo because I didn’t want to fuck up anybody else over it. But I did an episode about a scandal in American poetry and some bad behaviour, mostly from one person, but also from a number of other people in the surrounding scene, and I got a response that said, “For a podcast that claims to be about celebrating great poetry, I don’t know why you would waste a whole episode on talking about bad poetry.”
AA: Oh, that’s right! I forgot that we were celebrating great poetry on Sleerickets!
MBS: I mean, I do love talking about poems that I really admire on the show, but that’s definitely not been the mission. I mean, the mission was largely… I think Elijah Perseus Blumov of Versecraft nailed it, when he said it’s companionship and catharsis. And I was thinking about why I bothered to do an episode on bad behaviour and bad poetry in this particularly juicy scandal, and there’s several reasons. One is that I thought it would be fun to listen to. I thought it was good gossip. Two, I thought I did have a slightly different interpretation of it than I had seen represented publicly elsewhere. And three, I think of it as an act of compassion, of mercy, of friendship, not to the people involved in the story, but to ordinary readers and poets, to speak frankly about bad behaviour and bad poetry. Especially when it is celebrated. I try not to dunk on anybody who’s not prominent. It just seems like there would be no point in doing that. But my hope is not to, on balance, hurt people’s feelings, but rather to give them a sense of not being alone, not being crazy, not feeling alienated, by acknowledging that, no, a lot of the stuff winning these prizes is dogshit.
AA: One of the things I want to talk about here, is the intimacy of the medium. That’s the reason I love podcasts, and love making podcasts, is because it’s such an intimate exchange. It is a one-way thing, but it doesn’t feel like that when you’re listening to a podcast, like that silly meme of the guy sitting next to the billboard. I felt that way from very early on, when I started listening to podcasts myself back in 2011, and it’s the reason I wanted to make a show. I wanted the intimacy of that connection. I listened to The Poetry Gods, and I was wildly envious of their rapport with each other, and the way that they were able to connect with me as a listener. When I came into contact with Sleerickets, I was very close to giving up on Poetry Says, because I wasn’t achieving that intimacy. Part of the reason for that, was that I had fallen into the same rut that every other poetry podcast falls into. I was an interview show. I was a promotional vehicle, mostly. I was pretty much always saying positive things. And I listened to your show—I very vividly remember this moment—and I felt so envious. And I came home to my partner, and I said, “How come this guy is allowed to say whatever he wants? I don’t understand!” Of course, skipping over the part where I was also allowed to do that.
So, I decided to put a lot more of myself into my show. I started to talk more honestly about where I was at, about my life, about difficulties that I had, and I started to get that intimate connection with the listeners. I even had this beautiful experience just last night, where a young man came up to me at an event and said, “Excuse me, is your name Alice? I started listening to your show when I was doing undergrad, and I heard your episode about John Forbes, and it changed everything for me.” And I was so moved, because the show has been retired for over a year now.
I say all of that, to say that the intimacy cuts both ways. You can be the person that gives the listener connection and catharsis, but when you say something that feels like a drive-by attack, even completely accidentally, you will hurt that listener’s feelings. This is the whole nature of the quote-unquote “parasocial relationship”, right? We walk that line, we play with that, and I think that even though people have been hurt, and people do sometimes get hurt, people stay with the show because they understand that we’re running that risk for them. We’re running that risk to create something that is actually meaningful, not just another episode of the Poetry Foundation podcast.
MBS: God, they’re the worst. I mean, the Poetry Foundation does some good, but man their podcast game is trash.
AA: Step it up, guys.
MBS: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I think one of the advantages of putting out a show like ours, is that it to some extent self-selects certain kinds of listeners. And I think most people, who listen to more than an episode or two, understand that we’re not always going to be agreeable. We might say something that rubs them the wrong way, that they think is outright wrong. That’s something I try to make a refrain, is that I am frequently wrong, and I welcome criticism. I welcome trash talk. Fine, it’s fair. What goes around comes around. You’re welcome to start a podcast talking trash about us. I would love that. That would be so fun. But yeah, I think most of them seem to have a pretty good understanding of the way in which it is worth listening to us. If it’s worth listening to us, it’s worth listening with a certain attitude, that, with luck, insulates you from the worst sort of hurt feelings.
AA: Yeah, I think that’s important. We would never try to make the case that what we’re doing is important and necessary.
MBS: Not important, not necessary, not good. I mean, I don’t think it’s morally good. We want it to be good to listen to. I want it to be, like good junk food, you know?
AA: That’s the last thing I wanted to ask you, actually. Is there anywhere else that you go to get an honest opinion, that’s public, about poetry?
MBS: One of the things I do like about Versecraft—which is a radically different podcast, has a totally different agenda, does aim to be respectable, and does aim, for example, to be played in classrooms. Elijah’s just got—I mean, I love him, I respect him a great deal—but he’s just got a completely different agenda. But he annoys and angers and offends me often enough that I know that, even if he is more cautious than I am in some respects, he will certainly state his opinion about things in a way that will get under my skin. And the advantage is, like, I’ll just text him. Like, fuck you! But I think that there’s a certain kind of honesty you can definitely find there. Matt Wall, whether he’s doing one project or another, it’s often completely insane and about some kind of poetry I’m not interested in, and he is a booster, but I think he’s sort of like an honest-to-God booster, in that he really sincerely believes that he’s doing God’s work: by encouraging everybody to write every poem they could ever want to write, and publish it, and encourage everybody then to go do more of that. That seems to be his mission, and he seems to sincerely believe that that’s to the good. But he also will talk shit with the best of them.
I don’t know if there are a lot of other places. I mean, there is some of that happening on Substack, although it’s so difficult to navigate all of that. There doesn’t seem to be any publication that takes that as a serious mission. Except, actually, you know what? The Little Review. I know Tristram Fane Saunders, the editor, one of his big passions is reviews that are fun to read and honest. And whether you agree with his opinions or not, he has strong feelings about the quality of the work they publish, and that seems to be at least partly a goal there: to speak truth. It’s very stylized and very hip in a way that I sometimes feel too old for, but I do think he’s a pretty honest broker, and he seems to look for that in the people he publishes.
The great advantage I have, is I am able to just have regular conversations with you and Cameron and Brian and Elijah and all these other people—Jonathan. And if there is somebody who seems to be speaking really honestly and engrossingly about poetry, I will try to get them on the podcast. I will try to have a conversation with them directly, because I love doing that. It’s so much fun. And in some cases, people have reached out to me, and I’ve been excited to get to know them.
AA: Just making a little constellation of ratbags.
MBS: I’m curious—what is this particular form we’re involved with right now? An interview conversation for print. What is that? Can that be good? Is there a better or worse version? The two main versions are written-out, emailed, interview questions, sometimes sent all at once, more often now sent piecemeal back and forth, or a transcript of a conversation. Both of those are pretty common now, especially since podcasts have blown up the way they have. I think the latter tends to be a lot more readable.
AA: What it makes me think of, is the fact that this is actually a mode of tracking a historical conversation. It’s very much pre-internet. In the past, you could have a conversation like this on the radio and it might get recorded. But it’s the kind of thing that was created to try to get two poets talking to each other, and get it down in a way that other people could access. We actually don’t need this anymore, because we have podcasts. But then, of course, not everybody wants to get into GarageBand and make a podcast that’s listenable.
MBS: This is how Kaveh Akbar made his bones, right? Doing this sort of thing. Though he was mostly just fluffing.
AA: I mean, I love to go back and look at old conversations between like, Jack Spicer and Robert Creeley, for example, and find out what the hell they were saying to each other. We can never have that podcast. In a way, this is a hangover format.
MBS: Yeah, I mean, we’re not going to have letters in the same way that they did.
AA: No, but we will have recordings, as long as they manage to continue to float around digitally. We will have each other’s voices, and each other’s emphasis, and hesitations, and the way that we sounded.
MBS: Which is what Montaigne said his goal was in writing his essays. When he was dead, he wanted his friends to feel like they were having a conversation with him.
AA: So, we’re just taking the easy way to get there.
MBS: Yeah. We’re lazy Montaignes.
Alice Allan is the author of The Empty Show (Rabbit Poets, 2019) and the chapbook Blanks (Slow Loris, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Literary Matters, Australian Book Review, and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, among others. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, where for nine years she produced the podcast Poetry Says.
Matthew Buckley Smith is the author of Midlife (Measure, 2024), Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012), and the chapbook The Soft Black Stars (Rattle, 2026). His poems have been featured in American Life in Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry Daily. He is the prose editor of Tar River Poetry.
