Matt Longabucco’s The Hummingbird flits and flutters through the entangled spaces of New York City and beyond: dive bars, deserted libraries, the liminal bus route. This is a book which trembles with life, navigating the tenuous relationship between alienation, transformation, and unexpected intimacies.
In this interview, Matt and I discuss his inability to keep still, the reader as one of the book’s strangers, and the political work of observation. In the end, Matt tells me what his book might sound like if it were transcribed into a pop song. These poems really do sing, a syncopated rhythm of modern life whose sounds linger in your ear like a favorite tune.
—Willow Randall
Willow Randall: Throughout The Hummingbird, you often reference the practice of reading. What books and writers were you carrying with you as you wrote this book?
Matt Longabucco: It’s a compulsion for sure. Recently I’ve been writing poems that consist of lines of my commentary interspersed between quoted lines from other people’s poems. And have been fantasizing about creating a catalog of my library consisting entirely of notes about my idiosyncratic relation to each volume.
I’m always interested in collapsing the gap between reading and writing, and do actually carry many books with me when working (I’m restless and usually on the move). Those books are often by poets who represent a kind of zero degree of the form, something stripped to its essence, the better to be absorbed at the touch. They might be as different as Fernando Pessoa and Eileen Myles, but what they share is starting each poem from materials close at hand, and treating each utterance as a potentially definitive gesture while at the same time adding the finest layer of tissue to a lifelong corpus. I’m also drawn to books that act like sacred texts, anything from Roberto Calasso’s tomes to Hervé Guibert’s journals: I open them anywhere, the page is at the same time surprising and vaguely familiar, and a phrase or image leaps into my own poem to remind it of what it hadn’t thought to name or include.
Willow Randall: The language in this book moves back, forth, then sidelong through time and space, resisting stagnancy. It felt to me reminiscent of the flight of a hummingbird—the only bird that can fly in all directions. How did you arrive at this concept of “The Hummingbird”?
Matt Longabucco: I’d escaped the city, when the lockdowns eased, to a friend’s house in the Hudson Valley. She is a real birder, and from her beautiful sunroom I watched hummingbirds visit the feeders she hangs near the windows. My favorite thing—the sociality of New York—had evaporated, so no wonder I was feeling like a hermit consigned to a mountain exile, and decided to play up the role. The birds kept reappearing in the poems, and as you suggest, I came to consider them a mirror for my own inability to keep still, addiction to heart-quickening sweet things, and affinity for abrupt and odd-angled movement in thought.
Willow Randall: This book is filled with strangers: the woman burping bags of pizza dough, the shopper asking for Q-tips, the ten-year-old on the platform throwing a handful of rose petals in the air, mice, flowers that speak. In the opening sequence, you write, “Possibility resides in strangers.” What feels possible to you about the stranger?
Matt Longabucco: I love this question, and try to meditate on it in my work. The book filled itself up with strangers, visitors, doubles, shadows—figures whose gravitational pull either helps or forces us to evacuate the ego, which is the discipline of the lyric poem (and what its haters always manage to miss). The reader, too, is an unknowable other, free to approach the language they’re receiving in any way they choose. Staging these encounters, I want the poems to overhear themselves through strangers that cross their path to distract, laugh at, warn, seduce, or harmonize with the voice that speaks, or believes itself to be the one speaking. The quality of interpersonal attention on a subway car will stagger me forever.
Willow Randall: These poems feel rooted in the contradictions of survival in a large city. The mundanity of everyday life sits against a backdrop of the larger transformations of gentrification and capitalism. How were you grappling with this tension as you wrote The Hummingbird?
Matt Longabucco: The political work of these poems often lies in simply observing the city as it changes. And even in the five years recorded in this book, the city feels like it changed several times over. It’s fascinating to now be the person who has lived here for a couple of decades, raised a kid here, seen institutions of all sizes fold or persist or evolve. But again, the first poems in the book did begin at a moment that was anything but mundane: the pandemic, the BLM protests, spray paint on statues of blindfolded justice and chain stores with plywood over their windows. I sat and drank a bottle of beer with two masked comrades on a stoop on deserted Mott Street. It seemed like it took that combination of world-shaking events to even call into momentary question the business of the city as usual. In the midst of so much loss, it was powerful to glimpse the possibility of disrupting what tells us every day that it is inevitable. At the same time, the hegemony of money and power has only accelerated since, along with the acquiescence to an impoverished reality of the street by those who arrive here apparently happy to find themselves strolling around a glorified mall stuffing their faces as though poverty, exploitation, and state violence were occurring on another planet. But amazing poets keep coming here, too.
Willow Randall: One of my favorite lines is “Let’s spoon / marking each micro-chronic shift / with a note, thereby accidentally / composing all human songs.” There was such a rhythm to the shifts between images. If this book were a song, what would it sound like?
Matt Longabucco: Thank you for pulling out this little ars poetica. It’s followed by another stanza that extends it, in a way: “like William IX / I’ll send you the poem / you send me back its key.” I was vibing my way along, as usual, but I see now that both formulations require an intimacy (or conspiracy) to fulfill their promise of making. Intimacy is dense, laden, and we lighten or aerate it with rhythm; we sing a little song about doing the dishes or getting ready for bed. This book might sound like one of those private improvisations whose points of contact we necessarily discover together. It might also be a pop song in your ear, so new it captured your interest even before you untangled the lyrics, punctuated by the train braking at the stops, the counterinsurgency of others’ audible playlists, and the kinetic flash of images coming through your screen or unfolding around you to sharpen your appetite, or turn your stomach, or remind you of some fortune you almost forgot.