Home // November.6.2019 // Jon Maniscalco

Face to Face with Tipu’s Tiger: an interview with Matthew Carey Salyer

A soldier, scholar, poet and teacher, Matthew Carey Salyer will see his first full-length collection debut this December. Our interviewer Jonathan Maniscalco reached him by email to look under the hood of his personal history, to learn a bit about his outlook on writing, and to establish the truth about those tattoos.


Above: the author’s debut collection. Below: Matthew Carey Salyer, in New York.

Jon Maniscalco: Can you tell me a little about your early life and how that might have impacted your work or drew you towards poetry?

Matthew Carey Salyer: My father was a big man, bigger than me, with thick, jagged scars that ran all across his face like a topographic map. I don’t think he’d have ever been pegged for a poet, but he was a fine one, a far better one than I am. We used to drive around in his car and he’d play Bob Dylan albums from the Blonde on Blonde high Modernist heyday when he wasn’t playing Toots and the Maytals. He could explain all the allusions and contexts—Keats, Poe, Eliot, Dante, and so on—just as well as Christopher Ricks even though he’d never heard of Ricks and wouldn’t have paid him much mind even if he had.

I’m from bridge-and-tunnel land, beginning where the refineries start on the Jersey Turnpike and ending, at its most remote, where Kerouac described his childhood Lowell. Everything in those arteries of this country is terribly poetic, perhaps because it died before I was born and nothing of equal merit replaced it. It’s almost Arthurian in that sense. Since my grandfather died, I’ve spent most of my life looking for fire escapes where I can await the Return of the King.

JM: I was hoping to ask about a poem of yours that was published in The Adirondack Review back in 2015, “I Regret One of Nine Tattoos Below the Elbow that Violate the Proper Appearance and Wear of My Uniform in Accordance with AR 670-1.” The poem contains a lot of hard violent verbs like strangled, broke, shot, and bled. Was this language used to express your feelings around the tattoo in the first place or your feelings around having it now? Or am I completely off?

MCS: That’s a great question. I hadn’t really thought about the poem as feelings about a tattoo, oddly enough. It had more to do with feelings about a kind of life, and the poem was a quite literal description of the tattoos. The occasion of the poem was sitting on the New Haven line of the MetroNorth where the train-cars are new and clean and have red, matte, squeaky seats for Greenwich commuters, like the Disney World version of New York trains. Somewhere near Bridgeport, you switch to the old tin-can, Taking of Pelham One Two Three, piss-smelling trains if you’re going to Waterbury, the dead, old factory city where my mother lives. I used to take the train from New York to New Haven for work. I usually fall asleep at some point on MetroNorth trains, slumped on my forearm with my head banging on the window and my knees in the chairback, curled up like the ball-turret gunner in the Randall Jarrell poem. On the New Haven line, though, you overhear these awful, banal, NPR-style conversations and that makes it hard to sleep.

One day riding the line, some Yalies were going on loudly about constructing identities, so I gave up on sleeping and started watching the landscape near Bridgeport—all the freight yards and tenements and brick buildings with smashed windows. Now, as a piece of necessary backstory, I have my old neighborhood tattooed around my left wrist, a sort of factory and fire-escape landscape, a Thomas Hart Benton, woodcut-looking thing. I’d spent much of my life working in places like that, a lot of rough jobs, some pretty ugly (and, I suppose, dangerous) ones. Then I’d chosen this quiet sort of life that I didn’t fit into very well, someone else’s vision of what “making it” or respectability looked like, and I hated it. I was bad at it. And it mostly hated me, too. I don’t really have a seat on that train, so to speak. But there I was, looking at all those places that sort of bled into my tattoo visually, and I regretted getting the tattoo, not because I was ashamed of it, but because it signified something I’d left and lost. I just wanted to jump out the window of that fucking train and go home, but it doesn’t work like that. That’s the end of the poem, really. Nostalgia, sure. But also contempt, defiance. There’s the myth in this country that you ought to rise above where you’re from—the places, the people, and their lives. You’re supposed to be grateful that you end up on a nice train with red, matte, squeaky seats. I’ve always been a bad liar.

Beyond the immediate occasion of the poem, the broader context was a particularly silly moment in military administrative bureaucracy when tattoos below short-sleeve shirt-sleeves were banned. Those of us who have them were “grandfathered” in, but we had to write a formal memoranda describing our tattoos for our official Army records. I decided to write a long memorandum, about forty pages, describing each one in minute detail. By the time I got around to submitting it, the regulations had been changed again!

JM: Okay, let me know more about these other eight tattoos below the elbow.

MCS: They’re a hodgepodge. There’s an Audubon bird for my father, whose name was Jay; the signature of the girl I married... Some have been unfinished for years. Pretty soon, they’ll overlap and that’s fine. There used to be eleven. One was a botch-job with a prison-style gun I’d made from an electric razor. It still peeks out from under this Book of Kells thing on my left arm, the dragon-and-swan design from the poem. I used to have one on my hand, a small cross on the third finger near the knuckle. When I went in the military, I was told I had to remove it. You can’t have anything below the cuff. This is probably more strictly enforced with officers, and I ended up being one. I certainly couldn’t afford surgery, so I sat on the stoop one night with a bottle of whiskey and burned the whole thing off with a cigarette. When I went for the commissioning physical, the doctor (who was maybe seventy and half-blind but knew better) looked down at this third-degree burn and said “you got a burn,” and I said “oh, how bout that, it’s fine” and now I’m a captain.

The first one I got, I did with a sewing needle and India ink. It said “Pogue Mahone,” which is phonetic Irish for “kiss my ass.” It ought to be “Pog Mo Thóin” but we American Irish don’t know any better. My grandfather, who was from the Kerry Gaeltacht near Ballinskelligs, used to say that with some frequency and punk-rock teenaged me thought it was quite a lark. I ought to get it done again in a more formal fashion. Maybe in my own handwriting, but that would make it illegible.

JM: You’re an academic professional these days. What was your school history like?

MCS: The last year of high school I completed was sophomore year. I had been expelled from a few schools, mostly for fighting and not keeping my mouth shut. The one I disliked the most was one of those second-tier private schools in the Northeast that still uses “Saint” in the name. It attracted ambitious lace-curtain Catholic types on scholarship and WASPs who weren’t bright or connected enough to get into places like Choate or Horace Mann. The fact that I was a bright, bookish kid in addition to one who didn’t have any money made things worse. I think I was supposed to be grateful for being there, and I wasn’t. When I was turning seventeen, I moved out on my own. I got on a bus and ended up in South Boston. From there, points elsewhere. After a while, I decided to get a GED and a college degree because I wanted to be a prosecutor. I was very idealistic and figured that if I was both bookish and someone with a stubborn willingness to fight, I ought to do that on behalf of the common good, help people. College for me meant working full-time and dragging myself, dog-tired, to night school at one of those programs for low-level hospital administrators who need an Associate’s for a raise. I figured out pretty quickly that college on those terms was largely a hustle.

One of my English professors convinced me to apply to graduate school, so I put law school on hold. For a long time, I regretted that decision. You have to understand, I’d had no real “normal” experience of formal education after sophomore year of high school, so I just assumed that college students sat around reading the Harvard Classics “Five-Foot Shelf of Books” or something like that. After all, I’d done that, and I loaded boxes on trucks for a living. Going to graduate school was a sort of bewildered, curious, frustrated, last-ditch attempt to prove that this happened somewhere. I learned a great deal in graduate school about archival research, mostly because I sought out opportunities to do it and learn how to do it right. It’s like detective work.

JM: That kind of experience has to be useful for your creative work?

MCS: Honestly, having a graduate degree in the humanities didn’t really do anything in terms of improving my work. If anything, it made me less impressed by the social capital that writers and academics often traffic in. It made me care about very little that has to do with writing other than the work of writing, so that’s a good thing. In that sense, I think it also made me a better reader, if an altogether less “current” one.

JM: Can you tell me about your teaching career—how it got started, what you enjoy about it?

MCS: Right now, I’m an Associate Professor at West Point. By the time I’d scheduled my dissertation defense, I’d become thoroughly disenchanted with teaching and academia in general. The familiar model of an academic career in the humanities is a dead one, and no amount of protest or indignation can change this. I’d published four or five articles and held lectureships by then in order to be competitive with graduates from the Ivies. I came to the conclusion, though, that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice what I saw as the moral sphere of adulthood— things like having a family, raising children, helping my mother, or even being able to make the choice to do or not do so in the first place— so that I could keep up the low-paying pretense of teaching college. I decided that I was going to defend the dissertation and take the NYPD exam. My wife, though, who was my girlfriend at the time, would have none of that, insisting that I apply for at least one job. After a good deal of protest on my part, she sent me an ad for West Point. I defended my dissertation a few weeks before Christmas and, a few days after the New Year, I showed up to work at the United States Military Academy.

I’m very fortunate to have the position I do. Most days, I come home disappointed in my own teaching, thinking about one thing or another that I could have done or articulated better. That’s a good position to be in. So many jobs are compromised or compromising. It’s good to be in a position where you feel the burden of living up to your work.

JM: Your first full-length collection goes on sale next month, Ravage & Snare. Not that writers want their work to be over-determined by explanation, but do you say anything about what you hope readers take from it after reading it?

MCS: Doubt. This is an era of great false certainties and particular contempt for the intelligence of what used to be called “the common man.” Doubt them all to the core. Doubt the side of history you’re on. Doubt history. Doubt yourself. Fall down a well or into a pile of brambles and thorns. Doubt any explanation of how that happened. See what you have left.

JM: How did you choose that title?

MCS: It comes from a line in one of the poems: “suppose we could parse the ravage from the snare.” I often debate with my wife about the value of “likeable” speakers, “accessible” speakers. Likeable to whom? Accessible to whom? As a demographic, I don’t think that the majority of contemporary poetry readers would necessarily find the speakers in many of these poems likeable, otherwise they’d be willing to live on Staten Island instead of in Park Slope. Of course, that’s a broad generalization, and likely an unfair one. I do think, however, that one of the problems in contemporary poetic rhetoric is how remarkably non-democratic it is. People are often unlikeable and unsympathetic. Even people-like-us, whatever that means, are often unsympathetic, wretched bastards at turns. There needs to be room in the landscape of poetry for being genuinely implicated, for being at risk, wrong, half-wrong, unsure, contradictory. For being human.

I think that if there’s a through-line between the lyric I’s of these poems, it’s that they’re equally willing to tell readers to fuck off and admit that they might be wrong in doing so. I’d thought for a while about naming the book Lambkin, after the wicked, wronged mason who built Lord Wearie’s Castle in the old ballad, with a rejoinder to Robert Lowell in that, as well. Lambkin makes his appearance throughout the book, as do Lord Wearie and all sorts of other petty lords of the Cross-Bronx Expressway I’ve paired him with. But Ravage & Snare is a fair encapsulation of what’s at stake for all the speakers remembering and blustering and doubting and watching throughout the book.

The title Lambkin didn’t stay on the cutting-room floor, though—it’s the name of the chapbook I just published in the Komma Series.

JM: What authors do you look to as poetic models or influences?

MCS: It’s funny, I feel like I have major poetic influences, but I don’t think I write like them and don’t know if they’d be immediately apparent to anyone in my work. The first name that comes to mind is Geoffrey Hill. There’s always a moment in Hill’s books that breaks my heart in two like a twig. When I was younger, I was taken with Allen Tate’s work because of its paranoiac equipoise between violence and formal control. Who else? Berryman; Jarrell; Walcott, sometimes for the opposite reasons; James Wright over Franz Wright.

For sure, Melissa Green. Everything she writes astounds me, but she has a book called Fifty-Two that’s something I’d want to aspire to because I don’t know how she did it. That’s the book I’d want to write someday. I’d want to be able to give myself that license with lines, have that power and confidence and be that self-exposed and not have the poems collapse.

As a poet, a lot of reading is imagining who your friends might be in a room where the lights go out and all you hear are voices. In that sense, I’d fill the room with those who, for lack of a better word, you might call “Commonwealth poets”— Les Murray, A.S. Hope, Ishion Hutchinson. I’ve also gotten to know the poet, Richard Howard, a bit on a personal level the past few years. He’s increasingly an influence in terms of thinking about writing in syllabics, as well as in terms of thinking about how a poem can address ideas, history, personae. And there’s a joy in Richard’s poems that a lot of people don’t pick up on, a kind of childlike apperception and mischievousness.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention my wife, Meghan Maguire Dahn, who won the Discovery Award a few years back. Her poems walk this fine line, using intellectual abstractions as an aesthetic and then pinning them down to moments of particular experience and observation, drawing their apparent certitudes into doubt.

JM: I know that you have a cultural history of the British Empire in the works too. Has the British Empire always been an interest to you?

MCS: Like most academic first books, it’s more of a collection of articles with a through-line. I like the some of the essays in it a great deal, but I’m not particularly taken with the book. I would say that some of the features of living a certain kind of life in the British Empire have always been of interest to me. Sharp contrasts, particularly ones that coalesce into real paradoxes, have always been of interest to me. At the beginning, more or less, of what we typically think of as Imperial Britain, and toward the end, you’d get these strange moments of encounter— often violent or asymmetrical encounter, to be sure— that involved relatively trivial Britons putting on performances of great political power from actual positions of great real-world vulnerability.

In the 1790s, for example, you might be some poor bastard whose family had never been more than a mile from your birthplace in a thousand years, but you’d take the King’s shilling and find yourself in strange places that were often far more culturally sophisticated and technologically superior than anything you’d ever seen or imagined back home. Tipu Sultan, for example, who fought the British and their allies for decades in India, hired French clockmakers to build a large mechanical effigy of a British East India Company soldier being eaten by a tiger. He’d had a vision of himself as the “Tiger of God,” one that he recorded meticulously in his dream journals—all of his political performances and statecraft assumed the tiger motif thereafter.

When the British finally defeat him in the late 1790s, you get these guys Lord Wellington called “the scum of the earth,” bit-player Dickensian types, coming face to face with Tipu’s Tiger, this strange robotic reflection of themselves: whole thing roared by means of organ bellows; the clockwork soldier squirmed beneath; the clockwork tiger mauled clockwork-mauled him. It’s no wonder Edmund Burke’s idea of “the Sublime” came about in the late eighteenth century, right when Britain was first facing its own inescapable imperialness—the idea of great scope and great smallness at once, the idea of not being able to see the edges of things and their meanings, of being too close to the subject.

I have a variation of Tipu’s Tiger tattooed on my right forearm. I’ve adapted it to a different context, of course. I’m thoroughly modern scum-of-the-earth, after all.

Matthew Carey Salyer is a two-time finalist for the Iowa Review Prize in Poetry, a Pushcart nominee, and a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. His writing has appeared in journals including Narrative, Massachusetts Review, Hunger Mountain, Clarion, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Modern War Institute, Mississippi Quarterly, and many others. At present, he is an Associate Professor at West Point. He lives in New York City and is the father of Rory, Vivian, and Éamon. His chapbook Lambkin was published this year by Pen & Anvil. He is on Twitter as @CareySalyer.

Banner graphic: An 1886 painting (cropped) by Samuel Colman (1832–1920), showing watercraft and a view on Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. In the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

See also: [NERObooks homepage] [tag:interviews]