By all appearances, Matt Mason’s secluded Florence home is an ideal writer’s retreat.
The hum of vowels under familiar lamplight at dusk; in the morning, the crush of consonants and coffee grounds.
Poplars, pines, and unpaved roads.
The support and critical eye of wife Sarah, herself a distinguished poet. Two daughters, Sophia and Lucia—the sisters a repartee of qualities inherited and new—their parents’ most challenging, rewarding couplet of all.
Tornadoes swing through like a kid/playing hopscotch, rip one house to splinters […] And that my daughter, is how teenage boys/approach love
A kitchen stocked with snacks, sips, and assorted smiles; alliterations of domestic life.
Taken altogether, the setting is…in practice, actually a little distracting.
“I’m kind of better in weird places. When I had my daughters, you know, having my kids around, it’s hard to find any peace in the house,” Mason chuckled. “Writing a poem, you need a little pocket of solitude. So, I would write a lot in fast food restaurants because I’d be there by myself and have 20 minutes. Yeah, I can write almost anywhere.”
With an additional 77,000 square miles of “home” to inspire and draw inspiration from, that skill has served Mason well during his time as Nebraska’s State Poet. Town libraries, little red schoolhouses, and diner fare by the greasy spoonful convert miles of unremitting skyline into verse and stanza between meetups.
Mason leads the Nebraska Poetry Pen Pal program, an initiative supported by the Academy of American Poets and Humanities Nebraska designed to “start conversations between poets from different parts of the state with varied backgrounds.” His goal is straightforward enough: to organize at least one poetry event in each of Nebraska’s 93 contiguous counties.
“The green ones I’ve been to, the white ones I have nothing,” Mason explained, opening his laptop to a Nebraska county map veranda with progress. “And then the stripes mean I’m talking to somebody [in that county] but don’t have any dates set.”
Selected to serve as State Poet in 2019, Mason was eager to gather distant Nebraskans around his life’s passion. By March the following year, however, such plans had not only been complicated, they’d withered away.
In a drought year, corn stubble bends/into headlines: “Farmers pray for rain.”/Tumbleweeds take time to harmonize/ and choreograph, somewhere between”
“I was doing great, and then everything shut down for two-and-a-half years. But I have a pretty good shot to finish it,” Mason reflected. “I’ve got 13 counties left by the end of this year. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but these are counties I have no contacts for. It’s close…I think I’ll get it done, but we’ll see…”
Whether the final tally hits 80, 93, or somewhere in between, Mason’s tenure has been far from idle. Between publishing two books of poetry—“I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon” in 2020, and “At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros” in 2022—the Pushcart Prize-winning poet rarely declines an invitation to teach, learn, and workshop.
“Alliance, Nebraska, has brought me out like five times, I just love it. It’s such a good drive,” Mason said. “Going out to Western Nebraska, there are many really wonderful writers. Folks like Deb Carpenter-Nolting, and her husband Tim Nolting, are amazing writers who have done a lot with cowboy poetry over the years.
“And a lot of times, I meet these students who are fantastic. I was up in Gordon with two other poets doing a kind of tour of Northern Nebraska. And there’s a poet there, Aliyah American Horse, who was kind of quiet, but when we started talking poetry, everyone goes, ‘Oh, that’s her!’ She’s like, the poet up there. And now, she’s the Youth Poet Laureate of Nebraska. It’s just so much fun.”
Inexperience and raw talent make for volatile creative fuel, and a young Mason was as combustible as any schoolyard poet; lines of verse ablaze with epiphany one day, ash heaps of self-doubt the next. Great teachers and idols—a college instructor “very much like Robin Williams from ‘Dead Poets Society,’” a kind gesture from Pulitzer Prize-winner Galway Kinnell at an event, among others—saw him through this pivotal phase, steering Mason toward something of a mantra:
“Some people will say that poetry is writing without rules, and I go the opposite,” he affirmed. “I say poetry has all the same rules as every other kind of writing, but that one additional it has is: Break the rules. Because that way, you know what the rules are, and you know what effect you get when you break them.”
start searching, at the popcorn cart and in your life,/for something more/than everything/you’ve been settling/for
It’s a lesson—the intentionality of breaking with convention and canon—that Mason has advocated during workshops in Belarus, Romania, Nepal, the Nebraska panhandle, and most frequently, Omaha.
It’s also one Jen Schneider, Ph.D., a high-ability learner facilitator with Papillion La Vista school district, believes demystifies poetry for her middle schoolers.
“I really love it, because that is a big takeaway that a lot of my students have after the poetry workshop,” Schneider said. “I love that we get to learn about some of the things that have to do with poetry—but then we get to break the rules. You can’t do that as much with an essay, but you can do that with poetry […] The stuff they come up with just from his prompting is just incredible.”
As reflected in his works, Mason isn’t one for the vagaries of the self-serious and doctrinaire. Nor is he blasé about expression. Inspiration doesn’t ‘flow’ during his workshops, but settles into a clear pool; ideas aren’t swept away, but visibly ripple from each pen.
After all, Mason is searching, too.
“I went to the Nebraska Gifted Conference, a whole bunch of high-ability learner teachers, and he had a class there and was reading a poem that he wrote,” Schneider recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, this little stanza here, I wrote this poem when I was with Jen’s class.’ And I think it’s just really cool that he takes a lot of what the kids bring to the workshops and creates from that and shares that […] it really gets the kids involved, and their voices are very important.”
Even if the intrepid poet doesn’t fill every corner of the map, it’s impossible to deny Mason’s positive impact on aspiring and established writers statewide. Besides, enjambment—that continuation of a sentence without a pause at the end of a line—is often half the story.
“It’s so much fun to have an idea in your head about what the feeling of a poem is and do that in words,” Mason said. “And also do it in shape, which is one of the real advantages poetry has as a form of writing where you can play with that much more.”
And in Nebraska, there’s no shortage of open space to play with.
“My advice? Reinvent poetry. Write poems in your own image,” Mason said. “Write the poems you want to see out there in the world.”
For books, news, and selected poems, visit midverse.com. Support Mason at patreon.com/MattMason.
Standing At The Highest Point
It’s a subtle rise
of farmland and cities,
cows, bison, rivers and hills,
and, here,
if the whole state, if everyone
turned this way on the clearest day,
they would all see your face
like a new
Nebraska moon; you
bumped along interstate, boulevard, gravel, dirt road
to the top of your state,
you, now, stand higher
than that stone marker
set on the precise pivot of a survey point, you
luminary,
you look out at the old, tin windmill,
face like a lion’s,
alone in a field to one side,
a row of smooth, white turbines
lined up
to the other;
and it’s upright smooth
how it’s hard to decipher the way
this state slopes up to you:
green field, pasture, no crags or high rises,
only one bluff
like the horizon has a chip in it,
and, still,
not as high up
as you;
as if Nebraska was made like a quilt
shaken out in the wind
and set here
across sage
and bright winter wheat;
you lay back, think about work left to do,
but,
for now,
take in a book, line by line,
the sun
making your face
shine.
Matt Mason, “I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon”
(Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2020).
Reproduced with permission by Matt Mason.
For more information, visit tamupress.com, Matt.MidVerse.com,
PoetryMenu.com, and patreon.com/MattMason.
This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
